Donald Trump’s Republican National Committee dedicated its 2024 platform to the “forgotten men and women.”
And he doubled down on that dedication with his vice-presidential pick.
JD Vance, who wears his “Kentucky coal country” roots on his sleeve, introduced himself to Americans nearly a decade ago with his unforgettable memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” a chronicle of economically driven dislocation, the awful alternation of plateaus and downward mobility and redemption.
In his tale of beating impossible odds, Vance drew the most support from his Mamaw — “a woman of contradictions” referenced prominently in his Wednesday night speech.
Though historically a New Deal Democrat, she soured on the party when she realized entitlement programs were allowing people who didn’t work to be better off than those who did.
And in turn, Vance internalized that paradox, which informs his politics.
He understands from personal experience that by giving the working class and those who don’t work crumbs, they maintain what passes for social order at the top, while treating those underneath like crabs in a bucket.
Those insights clearly informed Trump’s selection of Vance.
On Wednesday night, Vance validated that confidence — and then some. An AP poll showed roughly 60% of Americans didn’t know much about Vance going in. But now? A different matter.
In a speech that evoked true working-class roots like few convention speeches ever, Vance told his story, taking the stage to Merle Haggard’s “America First” — an audacious choice that in itself said he is not a “business as usual” corporate conservative.
The most powerful parts of the speech — and arguably the most resonant in terms of his policy vision — were those closest to his hard-won personal experience.
He zinged “career politician” Joe Biden for “decades of betrayals” that helped destroy his hometown of Middletown via support of NAFTA — the trade deal that gutted so many small industrial towns for the benefit of Mexico and multinational corporations — and a “sweetheart trade deal” for China, followed by the “disastrous invasion of Iraq.”
“Jobs were sent overseas, and our children were sent to war,” Vance said.
Ideas have consequences, and in the case of Vance’s hometown, they were mortal, including with “deadly Chinese fentanyl” and the addiction it wrought.
“Every now and then I will get a call from a relative back home who asks, ‘Did you know so and so?’ And I’ll remember a face from years ago. And then I’ll hear, ‘They died of an overdose.’ As always, America’s ruling class wrote the checks; communities like mine paid the price,” he said, recalling his bestselling memoir.
“That divide between the few with their power and comfort in Washington and us only widened,” he continued. “From Iraq to Afghanistan, from the financial crisis to the Great Recession, from open borders to stagnating wages, the people who governed this country have failed and failed again.”
Where’s the lie in saying, as Vance did, that Biden has been a “politician in Washington for longer than I’ve been alive?”
Or in calling the Democrat “the champion of every major policy initiative to make America weaker and poorer?”
It’s irrefutable.
Democrats are painting Vance with a predictable brush, saying he’s a Trojan horse for “Project 2025,” claiming he wants to end Social Security and Medicare and using so many other scare tactics that sidestep the fundamental truth of his argument and his persona, his understanding of people wracked by addiction and nontraditional families like his own.
It’s easier to make these stock arguments than respond to the complexity of the man. And it’s more comfortable to try to distort his positions than to understand that like no other politician of his generation, he is best suited to take Trump’s MAGA movement to the next level — and in the process sideline the current and future versions of those transactional, grinning gladhanders who laid waste to so many Middletowns.
This was made most obvious by his extolling of Trump throughout the speech as an antidote to the depredations of the political establishment. And in a sense, Vance necessarily is an adjunct of the presidential nominee.
But in another sense, he can take Trumpism and the America First movement to places it wouldn’t have been able to go with any other logical heir apparent — including the vindication of those working men and women in “forgotten communities,” hillbillies and otherwise, left behind by corporatists like the incumbent president.