The Scene
MILWAUKEE – In 2016, JD Vance introduced book buyers to his tough-loving “mamaw,” the grandmother who helped raise him. Four years later, Glenn Close played mamaw in the film of “Hillbilly Elegy” and nearly won an Oscar.
On Thursday night, as Vance accepted the GOP nomination for vice president, the Republican National Convention turned his life into a chant: “Ma-maw! Ma-maw! Ma-maw!”
Vance’s acceptance speech blended his memoir — a story of working-class striving against free trade’s failures — into the Trump campaign’s platform. He didn’t mention modern GOP priorities like tax cuts or limits on abortion, or more recent priorities like ending military aid to Ukraine.
He mentioned “addiction” four times, and prompted another chant — “JD’s Mom! JD’s Mom!” — when he pointed to his mother in the president’s box, praising her for nearly 10 years sober.
“If President Trump’s okay with it, let’s have a celebration in the White House,” said Vance, a line that wasn’t in his prepared remarks.
For the second time, Trump had picked a running mate from the Midwest, from a small city that had never produced a vice president before. Mike Pence, self-exiled from Trump’s party this year, had connected Trump with the party’s evangelical and Reaganite peace-through-strength wings.
Pence had voted for the Iraq War. Vance, who served in that war, condemned it, and condemned President Biden for supporting it. This is the first Republican ticket since that war to contain no one who had supported it as a politician; Vance took the stage to Merle Haggard’s “America First,” an anti-war song that wouldn’t have made the playlist at a Bush-era RNC.
“From Iraq to Afghanistan, from the Financial Crisis to the Great Recession, from open borders to stagnating wages, the people who govern this country have failed and failed again,” said Vance.
As in his 2022 campaign for US Senate, Vance blamed the elites who hated Trump for a hollowed-out rust belt, and the drug overdoses that burned through it. He had an example of the people who’d suffered: His own family.
“America’s ruling class wrote the checks; communities like mine paid the price,” said Vance. “We won’t cater to Wall Street. We’ll commit to the working man. We won’t import foreign labor. We’ll fight for American citizens.”
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David’s view
When Republicans are out of power, they usually portray America as a country in crisis where middle class success has become unaffordable. In 2012, Paul Ryan blamed Barack Obama’s stimulus spending and the growing national debt; in 2016, Pence blamed Democratic addiction to “more taxes, more regulation and more government.”
Vance, in perfect harmony with Trump, blamed neoliberalism and rapacious bankers for American decline. He promised to protect the wages of “union and non-union” workers in a zero-sum contest with the Chinese Communist Party. Government intervention wasn’t the problem; policymakers who exported jobs and opened the borders were.
Democrats have a response to this, made in paid messaging all year: Biden delivered the manufacturing and wage gains that Trump never did. Trump is still promising to cut corporate taxes and extend high-end income tax cuts; Vance just didn’t talk about that. If the Democrats ever pull out of their polycrisis, they will make that argument again, contrasting Vance’s rhetoric with a record that clashes completely with the AFL-CIO.
The new VP nominee also avoided one of the last divisive issues inside the Fiserv Forum: Support for Ukraine’s war with Russia. Signs promising that Trump would “end the Ukraine War” were placed on chairs for attendees, who waved them, but Vance only touched on the topic by promising to “make our allies share in the burden of securing world peace.”
He also spoke carefully about race, a theme of “Hillbilly Elegy” and the discussion around it. Vance launched his memoir at a moment when Democrats were condemning “systemic racism” and academics crusaded against “white privilege.” One of his Senate ads began with him jarringly asking viewers “Are you a racist?” while suggesting talk of border security was unfairly shut down with similar accusations.
On Thursday, after praise for his wife’s immigrant family — “incredible people, people who genuinely have enriched the country in so many ways” — Vance said that “the media” called Appalachians “privileged.” He made the point with maximum subtlety, on his biggest-ever stage.
The View From Democrats
They treated the speech as a ruse, to cover up an unpopular Republican agenda.
“Donald Trump and JD Vance don’t work for you, they work for the billionaires bankrolling their campaign,” said DNC spokesperson Abhi Rahman. “Trump’s extreme Project 2025 platform means higher taxes on working families, higher costs for health care and prescription drugs, hollowed-out Social Security, and punishments for the women who seek abortion care and the doctors who provide it.”
Notable
In the New York Times, Campbell Robertson and Kevin Williams went to Vance’s hometown of Middletown, Ohio to see what locals thought of the nomination. “Mr. Vance speaks differently now, blaming the ills of his community on immigration and elites, a far more populist tone.”