Vance plays Saruman to Trump’s Sauron

“I’m a big Lord of the Rings guy,” JD Vance once told a podcaster. The running mate of former and perhaps future president Donald Trump went on to explain that “a lot of my conservative worldview was influenced by Tolkien.”

It’s always a good idea to re-read the classics, and JRR Tolkien’s trilogy is certainly among them. One mark of great literature is that you discover new things with every reading, and at any stage of life. This time, though, I’m finding that experience harrowing. This is 2024, after all, one month before a history-bending American presidential election.

Tolkien, in case you haven’t noticed, is a very contemporary writer precisely because his subjects are ancient and timeless. His stories are all around us, for good, but also for ill. Tolkien’s world, Middle-earth, is the stuff of fantasy not just for mythology buffs like me but also for false prophets, especially on the political right. People like Vance.

Like other Tolkien cultists, Vance likes to hide “Easter eggs” to be found by the initiated. He started a venture-capital fund named Narya after one of the 20 rings of power (this one originally made, if you must know, for the Elves but later worn by the wizard Gandalf). Vance also invested in a military-technology company named after Anduril, the sword of King Aragorn.

With these nods and winks, he keeps company with far-right Tolkien devotees in other countries. Italy’s neo-fascists, for example, have since the 1970s gathered in “Hobbit camps,” where they rally to the “horn of Boromir.” Among them was Giorgia Meloni, nowadays prime minister and still paying homage to Tolkien at every turn.

What do conservatives like Vance or Meloni see in Tolkien that the rest of us don’t? And are they right to see it in the text?

One possibility is that they share a spiritual worldview with the author. (Vance and Meloni are, as Tolkien was, Catholic.) Even though faith denominations play no role in his primeval storyline, Tolkien once described his trilogy as a “fundamentally religious and Catholic work.”

The narrative is certainly apocalyptic, about the struggle between good and evil, which is sometimes visible and sometimes occult. That could be Catholic, I guess. But the focus on invisible evil also lends itself to conspiracy theories — for example, about that alleged “deep state” that MAGA types love to hate.

In a more straightforward reading, Tolkien’s vision of evil looks more like the industrialized totalitarianism he witnessed in his lifetime (he fought in World War I and wrote the trilogy, published in 1954, before, during and just after World War II). His tale is not so much Catholic as anti-modern. It drips with yearning for a world of idyllic shires and sacred kingdoms, for a pristine and primordial innocence and order.

That orderly Middle-earth, as conservatives can’t fail to notice, is hierarchical, traditional and, within each of its races, homogenous. There are High Men and Middle Men, noble Elves, proud Dwarves, monstrous Trolls, ancient Ents, and of course the arch-conservative but doughty Hobbits. Theirs are not exactly cultures that emphasize migration and assimilation, individual mobility either upward or downward, DEI training or social experimentation in any form.

If you squint at the map (Tolkien loves maps of his imaginary world, and you can’t read him without recourse to them) you can also see a broadly free and good west struggling against an oppressive and wicked east. The good guys tend to be fair. (Elves are light creatures in the Germanic mythology in which Tolkien, a preeminent scholar of Beowulf, was so immersed.) The bad guys, such as the Orcs, are darker. All of this is hard to miss if you watch Peter Jackson’s epic movie version. No need for Vance or Meloni to dwell on it, it’s simply there.

Much of that, however, could also be said about other literature and art in those pre-woke times of yore. This raises the question: Why don’t conservatives, and isolationists like Vance in particular, want to see other aspects of Tolkien’s world and plot, those extolling openness?

How can it have escaped Vance that the forces of good in the story can defeat evil only by forming an alliance? The Fellowship of the Ring that sets out on the noble quest comprises a Dwarf, a Wizard, an Elf, two Men and four Hobbits. Think of their nations as Middle-earth’s NATO, the league that Trump and Vance disparage and despise.

The story also recognizes that evil must be defeated wherever it manifests. Tolkien’s heroism is not about “Gondor first” or “Rohan first.” It’s about stopping tyranny in Mordor or, in our world, Ukraine under the Russian onslaught. The good guys don’t seek isolation from the world; they engage with it. (Meloni does support Ukraine; Vance does not.)

Then there is the biggest and most obvious problem in Tolkien’s text for Vance’s worldview. It’s right there in the title, in the very basis for the epic, beginning, middle and end. Hard to miss, you’d think.

The entire story is about the corrupting influence of power. It comes in the form of the “one ring to rule them all,” which makes all those who possess it almighty in Middle-earth even as it deforms and enslaves them. It’s as though Tolkien had taken his inspiration from that other Catholic Englishman, Lord Acton, who famously wrote to an Anglican bishop that “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Nobody in the story is immune to the ring’s temptation. The heroes and heroines are instead those with enough self-awareness and restraint to refuse the ring when offered, such as Gandalf or the Elf Lady Galadriel. Even the ostensible lead character, Frodo, comes under the ring’s spell. He and his quest are repeatedly saved only by his simple-minded gardener and loyal friend, Samwise Gamgee, or Sam.

What about Vance, though? In 2016 he wrote to an acquaintance that “I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler.” Let that sink in. And then think about which Tolkien character Vance would be.

Nobody in American public life today craves power for its own sake as ravenously as Trump does. And nobody has so little intellectual, philosophical or moral resistance to power’s corrupting force, should he ever grasp the ring again in the Oval Office.

In that way, Trump is Sauron in this tale. That would make Vance Saruman, a wizard who was once wise but fell prey to ambition and the lust for power, and allied himself with Sauron in the hope of eventually putting the ring on his own finger.

The lesson of the Lord of the Rings is that power is something that must be limited and ultimately renounced or destroyed for people anywhere to live free. Tolkien might have savored the irony that some of his closest readers could one day yearn to Make Mordor Great Again. If he were still around, he’d once again place his last thread of faith in Sam, the ordinary Hobbit who just wants to go home to the Shire, or the American voter who goes to the polls on Nov. 5.

Andreas Kluth is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering US diplomacy, national security and geopolitics. Previously, he was editor-in-chief of Handelsblatt Global and a writer for the Economist.