Down-to-Earth, Unscrupulous and Eloquent

With J.D. Vance, Donald Trump is bringing on board a working class version of himself. Vance is supposed to advance Trumpism — but it is also an opportunity for the Democrats.

Now it’s J.D. Vance. The 39-year-old who entered politics in 2022 with his election as a senator from Ohio is set to become vice president of the United States — at least if Donald Trump gets his way. The fact that Trump has chosen Vance as his running mate over more experienced Republican politicians who were on the short list says one thing above all: Trump is certain that he no longer has to make any compromises within the Republican Party. The never-Trump wing of the party is dead — and Trump is probably right.

Moreover, other than being young, Vance doesn’t bring anything to the Republican presidential ticket that Trump doesn’t already have. Vance appeals to exactly the same groups of voters that elected Trump in 2016 in the deteriorated Rust Belt states. Voters once staunchly part of the Democratic camp are now part of the core MAGA movement, Trump’s Make America Great Again base that has taken over the old Republican Party.

Unlike Trump, Vance speaks truth to these voters. In his widely acclaimed 2016 memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” he eloquently explained how he came from exactly the same circumstances. On stage, Vance talks about his mother’s drug addiction and about his robust grandmother who enabled him to be the first person in his working class family to go to college. While billionaire Trump only claims to stand for these very people, Vance can convincingly say, “I am one of you, I know your situation, your worries, your needs.”

The Republicans Are Betting Everything on MAGA-Red

Normally the choice of a running mate is meant to compensate for the presidential candidate’s weaknesses. Take Joe Biden, for example: a much younger Black woman was chosen to compensate for an older white man. Or in Trump’s 2016 campaign, a traditional evangelical Republican Mike Pence compensated for the unorthodox New York outsider.

However, Trump doesn’t need Vance to win the election. There are other reasons to have selected Vance. The undisputed leading candidate is adding a protégé to the ticket who has boosted his own political career with 200% loyalty to Trump.

Trump only has one obvious vulnerability: voters who are angry about the repeal of abortion rights. But there were no female Republican vice presidential candidates to make up for that. Well-known Republicans such as Liz Cheney and Lisa Murkowski oppose Trump; Nikki Haley, who swore loyalty to Trump after her primary defeat, remains suspect and is even more conservative on abortion than Trump. Also, the completely crazy conspiracy theorist Marjorie Taylor Greene would be a toxic running mate even for Trump.

And so the selection of Vance is actually about something else, as most of the American press rightly surmise. It’s about the next torchbearer of the MAGA movement, when Trump can no longer run in 2028, at which time he’ll 82.

Vance Is a Thorny Opportunity for the Democrats

Vance is a threat to the Democrats if they are counting on winning states like Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and want to bring back the working class. Vance is biographically and rhetorically strong in this respect — and the fact that he set up a fake charity in Ohio in 2016-2017 that claimed to help drug addicts but didn’t spend a cent on that cause but rather polished his image instead, didn’t work as an argument in the Senate election. Vance also has this in common with Trump: unpunished unscrupulousness, albeit at a higher intellectual level.

Nevertheless, Vance is a gift for the Democrats. If they concentrate their election campaign on the message that the authoritarian advance of anti-democratic forces must be stopped. Vance is a product of Trumpism, and he has said that if he had been vice president in 2021, he would have done what Mike Pence refused to do: ratify Trump’s election fraud in Congress. If the Democrats pound this danger into people’s heads, then they have a chance. Vance’s nomination could even help.