After decades of having Republican party officials bow and scrape before his media empire, he now can’t even blackball a vice-presidential candidate. Witness the fact that J.D. Vance, President Trump’s current vice-presidential candidate, was someone who Murdoch is publicly known to have lobbied against mercilessly, and for obvious reasons: because Vance represents a wing of the Republican party which no longer buys into the Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney school of Republicanism, which treats learned helplessness in the face of woke capital as a principled defense of the free market.
But we’ll give this to Murdoch: he’s persistent. Even now that Vance has been chosen, his media empire is ever vigilant for any vulnerability on the part of the Ohio senator, just so they can send the Trump campaign the equivalent of angry drunk texts about him. As a prime example, witness last week’s editorial by the Wall Street Journal, titled “J.D. Vance’s Basket of Deplorables,” an ironic title, seeing as the WSJ clearly sees Vance as someone who belongs in the same basket.
The editorial itself is vintage concern trolling. According to the Journal, Vance, who was “supposed to present the GOP ticket as modern and looking to the future,” instead embroiled the GOP in controversy due to Vance’s “censorious views about women who don’t have children.” The idea, which the editorial explicitly states later on, is that Vance’s now viral three-year-old comments about America being run by “childless single women” are somehow a “Basket of Deplorables” level gaffe showing contempt for a huge chunk of the American populace. Whatever you think of Vance’s original words, such an idea is a gigantic overstatement.
Moreover, even for someone who agrees with the criticism, one has to wonder why the Journal felt the need to devote an editorial to this. They are, by their own admission, not exactly on virgin soil when it comes to criticizing Vance. TMZ has mocked Vance over his words, for heaven’s sake. Even if you think his words were cringey or ill-considered, what’s the point of the WSJ jumping in with more handwringing? Vance did, after all, reframe his argument in a more positive manner and step back rhetorically from any perceived excess. Why, you might wonder, is this still something the WSJ felt the need to talk about?
The answer to that, unfortunately, is simple: because for the WSJ, this isn’t actually about whether Vance’s comments help or hurt the Trump campaign. That’s the ostensible reason for their editorial, but the actual thrust of it can be found much deeper in when they respond to Vance’s most popular position – his desire to expand the child tax credit:
“It’s bad policy to use the tax code for social policy because it creates complications that add distortions. Pro-natalist tax policies haven’t worked where they’ve been tried.
It’s also bad politics. Conservatives used to believe in a neutral tax code that didn’t play favorites, but Mr. Vance is suggesting the code should be used as a political and cultural weapon against people who don’t share his values. ‘Raise taxes on the childless’ isn’t a winning campaign slogan.”
It is at this point that we have to say, on behalf of everyone who liked the Vance pick because it was a break with past mainstream Republican orthodoxy and its persistent determination to sacrifice relatability on the altar of donor-driven, fake “principles,” thank you for proving our point, Wall Street Journal.
Where to even begin with these two paragraphs of disingenuous, smarmy hogwash? Well, the most absurd point is at the end, so let’s start there and work our way backwards: firstly, no one is suggesting that we raise taxes on the childless, merely that we cut them for those with children. The WSJ, and everyone with a pulse, knows that cutting taxes for one group doesn’t necessarily imply raising them for another. After all, did the WSJ complain when President Trump cut corporate tax rates, on the theory that he’d be raising taxes on people who weren’t CEOs? Of course not.
Secondly, the tax code is already – and some would argue inevitably – a political and cultural weapon. Even inveterate #NeverTrump organizations like National Review admit that the way the tax system is enforced, for example, is politicized. Moreover, the child tax credit already exists. Is the WSJ calling for an end to that? It seems so, since they want a tax credit that “doesn’t play favorites” (one presumes, in favor of parents as much as anyone else). In which case, we have to ask, how popular is “raise taxes on parents” as a political proposal? The WSJ needs to put down the stones and move out of the glass house.
Thirdly, they allege that using the tax code to encourage childrearing “creates complications that add distortions.” What does this mean? That’s not a rhetorical question. What does this sentence – possibly the zenith of facile redundancy -- mean? That people having more kids is a “distortion?” A distortion of what? Moreover, they say pro-natalist policies haven’t worked. We’d argue this is a misstatement of the evidence, at best, but okay, say for the sake of argument they’ve had underwhelming results. Are those results better than what we have now? Are they better than, for example, an America where young people increasingly refuse to have children because they can’t afford it? Where both Right and Left have been concerned about a fertility crisis since 2017? Is that the WSJ’s idea of policy that “works?”
Oh, who are we kidding, you know the answer, which is exactly why Donald J. Trump needed someone like J.D. Vance – in other words, someone who makes the Wall Street Journal angry – far more than he needed a couple fewer weeks of bad headlines from the Leftist media machine and the #NeverTrumpers who do their homework in exchange for not getting beat up. Because here’s some blunt political reality for the Journal: we don’t need them. We do need guys like J.D. Vance.
Do you think the white working-class voters whose votes swing states like Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania give a damn what the Wall Street Journal thinks? Here’s a hint: if they do, it’s only so that they can vote against whoever sounds like the Wall Street Journal. Why? Because every one of those people knows that if the kinds of people who read the Wall Street Journal had their way, their jobs would’ve been outsourced and they’d have been told to learn to code. And then, even if they did learn to code, the Journal would call for an increase in visas for “high-skilled” workers in order to drive down the cost of software engineers. They know that in the eyes of the Journal, people like them aren’t just deplorables; they’re worse. They’re distortions. Just like the children who result from pro-natalist policies, their lives are just “complications that add distortions.” Complications to the offshoring big business agenda, and distortions to their anti-American business model, that is.
But you know who they will vote for? The hometown boy made good. The boy who didn’t run from his background, but instead wrote an entire memoir owning it and calling for empathy for them. The boy who wants to onshore jobs (more “complications” and “distortions” no doubt), and serve under a man whose mission is to create a new, pro-American industrial policy which will once more turn the United States into the envy of the world not just for what it does, or what it believes, but what it makes. In a word, they’ll vote for J.D. Vance because he’s one of them. As Human Events contributor Rod Thomson put it, J.D. Vance is Everyman.
And you know what? Even the Journal seems to know it won’t win this argument, because they concede at the end that if Vance doesn’t want to apologize (and he won’t), then he should “start showing up onstage with his wife, Usha.” And yeah, on that point, they’re right: Usha Vance is an underused asset. But so are the forgotten men and women who J.D. Vance speaks to, who he embodies, and who will vote for the ticket that gave one of them a chance this November. The Wall Street Journal might not see that, but President Donald J. Trump does.
