"Shift spouses like they change their underwear": J.D. Vance decried divorce — but now loves Trump

MILWAUKEE — As recently as 2021, the newly announced Republican candidate for vice president, Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio, had harsh words for Americans who divorce, including those who did so to leave abusive marriages. Divorcees, Vance argued, are quitters who ruin their children's lives. 

"This is one of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace, which is the idea that like, 'Well, OK, these marriages were fundamentally, you know, they were maybe even violent, but certainly they were unhappy. And so getting rid of them and making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear, that's going to make people happier in the long term," Vance told the audience at Pacifica Christian High School in Southern California. 

The 39-year-old Vance went on to argue that kids "who grew up in my generation" ended up with "family dysfunction" because couples are no longer "doggedly determined to stick it out." The "Hillbilly Elegy" author held up his grandparents as role models, because they "were together to the end," despite "an incredibly chaotic marriage."

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But while Vance may sneer at women who prefer safety rather than "’til death do us part," he conveniently has no quarrel with Donald Trump, who has been divorced twice, has children with three women and a lengthy history of chronic adultery. Vance glowed with excitement at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee Monday evening as delegates chanted his name. The freshman senator's months of bowing and scraping had paid off, when the thrice-married Trump, famous for bragging about sexual assault, named Vance his running mate. 

In 2021, Vance lamented the supposed loss of the "recognition that marriage was sacred." In 2024, when Trump received 34 felony convictions for paying hush money to one of the many women he's committed adultery with, Vance whined, "it’s a disgrace to our judicial system." It appears that the holy nature of marriage couldn't compete with the opportunity to spend another four years of his life kissing the feet of a man he once said he "can't stomach." 

On a surface level, this pairing of Trump's open disregard for basic marital morality with Vance's sanctimony is just an extension of the larger incoherence that characterizes this year's Republican National Convention. It's certainly whiplash-inducing to be here, where attendees swing wildly between showy displays of Christian piety and vulgar and even threatening language toward fellow Americans who disagree with them politically. The shame that usually accompanies hypocrisy was abandoned years ago by this crowd. 

But perhaps that's because it's not really hypocrisy that drives the MAGA movement. It's an attachment to traditional hierarchies that allow such appalling double standards to flourish. Violence from Republicans, such as on January 6, is acceptable because it's enforcing the social order they support. But the attempted murder of Trump is beyond the pale because it's an assault on the only leader they accept as legitimate. 

In that light, it's not hard to see what holds Vance's seemingly disparate views together. It's not a faith in marriage, but an allegiance to male domination.

While he was carefully gender-neutral in his 2021 comments, the larger context suggests Vance's grievance is with women. No-fault divorce is the result of years of feminist organizing. Women initiate 70% of divorces. And while there are certainly male victims of domestic abuse, the vast majority of people who need to escape violent marriages are women. Vance can play all the word games he likes, but when he's deriding "people" for not having good enough reasons for ending marriages, there's little doubt it's women he's mostly thinking of. It's usually women who are being chastised in these right-wing laments about divorce. Women have always been the ones expected to suffer adultery, abuse, or just plain unhappiness to hold a marriage together. Divorced men like Trump don't get rebuked, especially by the Christian right, even when it's their adulteries and abuses that caused the divorce. Ultimately, the blame is placed on the wives for not working harder to save the marriage. 

This sexist double standard explains why Trump's biggest base of support is divorced men, as pollster Daniel Cox demonstrated last week. 

In his slightly jokey response to this report, Jonathan Last of The Bulwark wrote, "There is a particular type of mental break," which he calls "Divorced Dude Energy," which he feels explains "the way some middle-aged men went cuckoo for Trump." Many, even most divorced men are not like this, he hastens to add. Still, we've all seen these cases where "a seemingly normal guy’s marriage breaks up and suddenly he’s a different person. Angry. Resentful. Superior. Kind of agro."

Cox tries to bothsides the issue, writing, "Men and women who have ever been hurt or mistreated by the opposite sex more readily make their pain public, and their personal grievances become politicized." But this explanation makes no sense, as divorced women are more likely to make sensible political choices. It's mostly men lining up behind a violent fascist who brags about sexual assault. Divorced women aren't voting to take away men's rights. The majority of divorced men are backing a man who successfully ended abortion rights, and whose new running mate wants to force all pregnant women to give birth. 

The appeal of Trumpism to men with Divorced Dude Energy isn't that mysterious: They like the Christian right worldview that Vance is peddling, where a woman is expected to hold a marriage together, no matter how great the cost to her. The phenomenon Last describes makes sense if one assumes, correctly, that sexist societies like ours produce men who have an easily bruised sense of entitlement. For a man who is bitter over a divorce, there's a sense of validation in joining forces with other men who are also angry at women. 

Divorced Dudes of the sort Last describes will not hear Vance's lament about divorce and feel insulted. They will take it in the spirit intended: As an attack on their ex-wives for leaving them. That's also why Trump likely doesn't care. He knows that when Vance criticizes divorced people, he means divorced women.