JD Vance once worried Trump was ‘America’s Hitler’. Now his own authoritarian leanings come into view

JD Vance once feared Donald Trump might be "America's Hitler". Last Saturday, the Ohio senator claimed Democrats calling Trump "an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs" caused the assassination attempt the former president survived.

But on Monday, after Trump made Vance his vice-presidential pick, worries about Vance's own authoritarian leanings came straight to the fore.

"Trump picked JD Vance as his running mate because Vance will do what Mike Pence wouldn't on January 6: bend over backwards to enable Trump and his extreme Maga agenda, even if it means breaking the law and no matter the harm to the American people," Jen O'Malley Dillon, Joe Biden's re-election campaign chair, told reporters.

Vance has indeed said that if he had been vice-president on 6 January 2021, he would have done as Trump and his supporters demanded and blocked certification of results in key states won by Biden during the election weeks earlier.

Elsewhere on Monday, a profile of Vance was widely shared. Zack Beauchamp of Vox, author of new book The Reactionary Spirit: How America's Most Insidious Political Tradition Swept the World, outlined political views "fundamentally incompatible with the basic principles of American democracy".

Beauchamp described how Vance has repeated Trump's stolen election lie; has called for a criminal investigation of a journalist he did not like; advocates politicising the federal bureaucracy; and believes presidents can simply ignore the law.

"JD Vance," Beauchamp wrote, "is a man who believes that the current government is so corrupt that radical, even authoritarian steps are justified in response.