Donald Trump’s Republican National Committee dedicated its 2024 campaign platform to “forgotten men and women.”
And he doubled down on that commitment to his running mate.
J.D. Vance, an avowed native of “the Kentucky coal country,” introduced himself to Americans nearly a decade ago with his unforgettable memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” a record of economic turmoil, terrible stagnation and decline, and redemption.
In a story of overcoming seemingly impossible odds, Vance garnered the most support from his Mamaw, the “contradictory woman” he referenced frequently in his speech Wednesday night.
Although she was historically a supporter of the New Deal Democrats, she developed a distaste for the party when she saw that the entitlement system made it better off for those who didn’t work than those who did.
And in turn, Vance internalized that contradiction, and it influenced his politics.
He understands from personal experience that by giving crumbs to the working class and non-working people, they maintain the social order at the top while treating those at the bottom like crabs in a bucket.
These insights clearly influenced Trump’s choice of Vance.
On Wednesday night, Vance proved that confidence and then some. AP The poll found that about 60% of Americans didn’t know much about Vance. But what about now? That’s another story.
In a speech that invoked his true working-class roots in a way that has been rare in previous convention speeches, Vance took the stage to the tune of Merle Haggard’s “America First” and told his story — a bold choice that showed he’s not just a “business as usual” corporate conservative.
The most powerful parts of the speech, and perhaps the parts that resonated most with his policy vision, were the ones that drew closest to his hard-won personal experience.
He scathingly criticized “career politician” Joe Biden for “decades of betrayal” that helped destroy his hometown of Middletown through his support for NAFTA, the trade agreement that destroyed many small industrial towns for the benefit of Mexico and multinational corporations, “sweet trade deals” with China, and the “disastrous invasion of Iraq.”
“Jobs were being shipped overseas and children were being sent to war,” Vance said.
Thoughts have consequences, and in Vance’s hometown, the consequences have been deadly, including “deadly Chinese fentanyl” and the addiction it causes.
“Every now and then I get phone calls from relatives back home and they ask, ‘Did you know so-and-so?’ I remember a face from years ago. And then I hear, ‘He died of a drug overdose.’ As always, the American ruling class wrote the cheque and communities like mine paid the price,” he said, recalling his best-selling autobiography.
“The gulf between us and the few who enjoy power and comfort in Washington is only widening,” he continued. “From Iraq to Afghanistan, from the financial crisis to the Great Recession, from open borders to stagnant wages, the people who have governed this country have repeatedly failed.”
What’s false about saying, as Vance put it, that Biden has “been a Washington politician for longer than I’ve been alive”?
Or how about calling Democrats “the promoters of every major policy that weakens and impoverishes America”?
That is irrefutable.
Democrats have used predictable brushstrokes to criticize Vance, describing him as a Trojan horse for “Project 2025,” claiming he wants to abolish Social Security and Medicare, and using a host of other scare tactics that avoid the fundamental truth of his claims and character, as well as his understanding of people who suffer from addiction and nontraditional families like his own.
It’s easier to deploy these boilerplate arguments than to cater to the complexity of this man, and to try to distort his position rather than understand that he’s the politician of his generation best suited to take Trump’s MAGA movement to the next level — and in the process, sideline current and future versions of the deal-making, smirking patsy that has destroyed so much of Middletown.
This was nowhere more evident than in his praise of Trump throughout the speech as an antidote to the plundering of the political system, and in some ways Vance is inevitably an aide to the presidential candidate.
But in other ways, Trump can take Trumpism and the America First movement into areas that no other logical successor could, including championing workers in rural areas and other “forgotten communities” left behind by a corporate boss like the current president.
