JD Vance's sad book tour shows why his 2028 hopes are fading

JD Vance’s sad book tour shows why his 2028 hopes are fading
In "Communion," the vice president assumes people still care about Charlie Kirk

By Amanda Marcotte
Senior Writer
Published June 15, 2026 6:45AM (EDT)


(Salon) JD Vance is famously addicted to social media, to a degree that one wonders if he has any job duties as vice president at all. It’s almost certain that he’s well aware that the late Charlie Kirk has not become the movement martyr MAGA hoped for. On the contrary, the memory of the Turning Point USA founder has become a joke on social media. The cringeworthy efforts to deify Kirk are irresistible bait for online jokesters, who spent months turning his image and even an AI-generated song about him into fuel for irony-drenched memes mocking the deceased right-wing leader. Trying to shove Kirk on the public backfired for MAGA, causing most people to rebel with mockery.

But even though most Republicans have quietly moved on, Vance is still hoping to get enough juice out Kirk’s death to sell books. In early June, the Wall Street Journal published an excerpt from Vance’s latest memoir, “Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith,” which is officially released tomorrow. In it, Vance credits Kirk’s widow, Erika Kirk — who is even more hated than her dead husband — for convincing his wife, Usha Vance, to have a fourth child. No, it’s not as a response to the embarrassingly intimate hug Erika Kirk and JD Vance shared at a TPUSA event last November, despite online gossip speculating otherwise. Instead, the vice president claims “Erika told Usha between sobs that she regretted having only two kids with Charlie,” and that’s what changed his wife’s mind.

It’s hard to oversell how nauseating the entire excerpt is, especially since it’s replete with Vance’s overbearing efforts to inject religious language into every beat of his story about his allegedly great friendship with Kirk. It’s hard to read sentences like, “Charlie taught me to love all parts of our Christian communion,” while imagining Vance’s voice, especially as his only gear as a public speaker is to use a snide tone, even when talking about his supposed higher aspirations. But these are granular annoyances. The real question is why did Vance choose a passage about Kirk, who is beyond old news, as a represenation of a book people are supposed to want to buy now?

....(snip)....

Vance’s religious conversion and book about it only serve as further evidence that the man cares for little else but his own striving for power and status. He picked Catholicism in 2019, in the midst of a lot of online chatter that created the illusion that “trad” Catholics were the next big political trend. That never really amounted to much, despite Vance’s longtime benefactor, billionaire Peter Thiel, pouring an unholy amount of money in trying to manifest the trad-Cath trend. ..............................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2026/06/15/jd-vances-sad-book-tour-shows-why-his-2028-hopes-are-fading/