It’s not exactly a secret that the Republican Party has been going through a seismic realignment of its core beliefs. And it is no secret that those are less and less the Ronald Reagan, limited government, free market, tax-cutting, deregulation, global policeman tenets.
But what the new alignment is going to be has been less clear until now. President Trump had the instincts to understand that the Everyman had been left behind in the sprint to globalism, and that the left’s arrogant, dismissive response of “learn to code” was pitch perfect elitism. He wanted to put America first after what felt like decades of elitists putting America — Americans, you know, the ones you can smell the Walmart on — last.
Trump knew that bad trade deals and open borders and endless wars all hurt the American Everyman far more than the elites making the decisions.
The question has been: what does that look like in principles and policies and can it be sustained after Trump. Well no less than Trump himself answered that Monday when he announced J.D. Vance as his Vice Presidential running mate.
J.D. Vance is Everyman. He grew up in the flyover country of the American heartlands, in Middletown, Ohio. It was a rough upbringing, with parents divorced when he was a toddler. He lived in poverty and abuse as his mother fought drug addiction. He and his sister were raised mostly by their grandparents.
But Vance had something most do not. He’s super smart and an empathetic human being.
After enlisting in the U.S. Marine Corps, he graduated summa cum laude from Ohio State University and then graduated from Yale Law School after working three jobs to pay his way. After graduation, he worked for Sen. John Cornyn and clerked for a District judge and then at a law firm before moving to San Francisco to work as a tech venture capitalist with Peter Thiel. In 2016, Harper published his book, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, which became a New York Times Best Seller list in 2016 and 2017 and was made into a movie, vaulting him onto the national scene. Moving back to Ohio, he began his own investment firm with investors such as Thiel, Eric Schmidt and Marc Andreessen. He was an early investor in the Rumble video platform.
This very brief recap of Vance’s story, and his empathy for and actions on behalf of those left behind by globalism — which greatly inform his worldview — is what makes him such a disruptive choice. All the things Trump has been fighting against swirled around his upbringing and community. He becomes the obvious standard-bearer for America First going forward.
But his ascendancy will mean some real transition pain in the Republican Party. He is not a proponent of free markets, supports all of the government lawsuits against big and small American companies by Lina Khan, chair of the Federal Trade Commission. He’s pretty comfortable with labor unions and government involvement in industrial policy. And while his words are right, he’s probably in action a social moderate.
The GOP will be more populist, nationalist and isolationist under a Trump-Vance reshaping. But don’t let the media define those terms. Populist can mean simply listening to Everyman and pursuing policies that benefit that giant part of America. Nationalist is clearly America First. And isolationist is ending America’s role as the world’s policeman. For those of us that go back a few years, it will look a lot like a vindication of Pat Buchanan.
Some people will criticize Vance because he used to be a Democrat and that he became a Republican because the Democratic Party went bat-crap crazy. But that’s true of Ronald Reagan. And Donald Trump. So maybe not the demerit that some suppose.
The other VP options were mostly going to operate within the confines of the traditional Republican conservatism — a lot of which should not be jettisoned because it does work for all Americans when actually implemented and not just blabbed about during election season.
Vance will be a principled advocate for the America First agenda, a strong defender of Trump in the media, and a smart adviser in ways most of the other candidates for VP would not be. And in one short-term note, he is a reasonable choice for those blue collar states Trump needs to pick off — Pennsylvania and Michigan, which border Ohio, and Wisconsin (and not for nothing, he would have eviscerated the cackling current word salad Vice President in a debate.)
The reality of this pick is that Trump has only four years. The clock is ticking down from the moment he is inaugurated, if he wins. And J.D. Vance will have the starring role in permanently redefining the Republican Party.
Rod Thomson is a former daily newspaper reporter and columnist, Salem radio host and ABC TV commentator, and current Founder of The Thomson Group, a Florida-based political consulting firm. He has eight children and seven grandchildren and a rapacious hunger to fight for America for them. Follow him on Twitter at @Rod_Thomson. Email him at [email protected].
