Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance is a jerk. The Ohio senator is a feckless liar and inveterate blowhard whose squinty-eyed smirk only flashes after he’s delivered a line that he thinks will cause someone pain. There’s a very good reason why Vance is the most disliked figure on either party’s ticket this election year: He’s an unmitigated asshole.
But there’s a group of white men who believe that he may be something more. They see Vance’s ugly attacks on women, immigrants, and others as points to be celebrated. And they see him as the leader they’ve been looking for, a kind of anti-diversity messiah—a “Christian Prince” for a white nationalist America.
As Mother Jones reports, these men pore over Vance’s words, searching for hidden signals with a kind of fervor usually reserved for “Bible code” numerologists. When Vance says America is “a group of people with a shared history and a common future” they don’t hear patriotic pablum. They hear a clear message that America was created for them and only them—and everyone else needs to go.
For this group of Christian nationalist pastors and their followers, Vance’s message is a signal that they have it right: America is reserved for the chosen few.
They see Vance as endorsing their central tenet—that America is for white Christians. Other people may be in America, but they live there only with the sufferance of the nation’s true owners.
For these evangelical leaders, it’s a no-brainer to support Vance’s racist attacks on legal Haitian immigrants and his declaration that he’s going to keep calling them illegal. As far as they’re concerned, there are no legal immigrants and especially no legal Black immigrants whose religious beliefs don’t fall in line with their own rigid views.
For many in the mainstream press, there’s a tendency to view Vance as Donald Trump 2.0—a Republican troll steeped in the hate speech and nastiness of online forums. And all of that is true.
But dismissing Vance as just the snarly new face of an even more aggressive Trumpism fails to capture the full threat that he represents. Vance’s most enthusiastic supporters don’t see him as Trump’s sidekick, or even as the guy waiting in the wings when dear old Donald finally tumbles from his chair.
They’re looking beyond, to a nation Trump barely hints at. For Trump supporters, he may be Orange Jesus, but for the “TheoBros” who thirst after Vance’s every word, Trump is more John the Baptist—the guy who made it possible for the real deal to take center stage.
Christian nationalists have been a threat to American democracy for decades, but as Mother Jones reports, these aren’t the dusty old evangelists who have crowded the AM radio airwaves and supported past Republican candidates.
They’re younger. And meaner.
For all their youthful modishness, this group is actually more conservative than their older counterparts. Many TheoBros, for example, don’t think women belong in the pulpit or the voting booth—and even want to repeal the 19th Amendment. For some, prison reform would involve replacing incarceration with public flogging. Unlike more mainstream Christian nationalists, like House Speaker Mike Johnson, who are obsessed with the US Constitution, many TheoBros believe that the Constitution is dead and that we should be governed by the Ten Commandments.
Public flogging is actually on the mild end of desired punishments for this group. In podcasts and online, executions are the usual demand: executions for treason, or executions for heresy against their view of an angry, violent Christianity.
The idea that the 19th Amendment should be repealed gives a good idea of what they think about Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris. As one of Vance’s biggest admirers writes, the idea of being governed by a woman is a “punishment from God.”
With her diverse ethnic background, her record of professional accomplishments, and her lack of biological children, Harris might as well be standing in a flaming red pentagram as far as these men are concerned. That her husband is Jewish is not a plus.
Vance—a conservative Catholic married to a Hindu—doesn’t seem like the obvious candidate to carry the message of angry, narrow-minded, Protestant purity. However, he’s found that as long as he regularly voices their ideas on the national stage, the TheoBros seem willing to overlook his little peccadilloes and provide him with rabid support. He knows how to blow their dog whistles, and he blows them regularly.
And those dog whistles signal the major themes of this election: hypermasculinity, declining birth rates, ethnonationalism—and no small measure of carefully curated misogyny. If you want to know some of the actors who red-pilled Vance, or at least those who flock to him, you need to meet the TheoBros.
This isn’t an official organization. It’s a conglomeration of men who believe that oppressing women and crushing diversity is the way to convert America into their white Christian paradise.
They pull their theological justification from writings that go back centuries, mix them with books from the past decade, and swirl in online postings from their respected leaders. They spice it all with Biblical quotes often removed from context or given a new interpretation.
Some of them have already established mini kingdoms in local areas, while others are more focused on crowning their Christian prince of America.
The TheoBros’ strategy is bottom-up: They aim to convert small American towns into Christian enclaves. But it is also top-down: Some are working to position themselves close to the locus of federal power.
Think of how Republicans have worked their way into control of local governments and state legislatures, combined with Project 2025’s lust to purge the federal government. Only in this case, the idea isn’t to repopulate those empty seats with Trump’s small army of sycophants, but to turn the government into an engine for men who view “The Handmaid’s Tale” as a handbook.
Then they can start rounding up the heretics.
The influence of this group is already being felt in the way Republicans have ramped up attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts and rolled “DEI” into their collection of condemned terms. It’s there in how many Republicans have been willing to defend the misogyny spewed against “childless cat ladies.” It’s there in the widespread embrace of the vile racism being spread about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio.
It’s there in all the things that are making Trump less a leader of his party than a figurehead being swept along by the flood.
Vance’s biggest supporters are men who see him as a potential prince. But there’s nothing charming about this story.
