- Analysis
- World
- North America
- US Votes 2024
Vance spells out his rags-to-riches tale as he vies to become America’s Millennial VP
Milwaukee: The theme for the night was Make America Strong Again. The speakers focused on presidential candidate Donald Trump’s pet policies: border security; the threat of China; foreign wars.
And the man of the moment was J.D. Vance, the one-time “Never Trump Guy” who morphed into his mini-me and is now on the path to being the next vice president of the United States.
Republican vice presidential candidate senator J.D. Vance.Credit: AP
Years after describing Trump as “America’s Hitler” – and days after Trump named Vance to be his 2024 running mate – the freshman senator from Rust Belt America introduced himself to the nation.
In a speech that combined grievance and hope, he told voters of his rags-to-riches tale about growing up poor in Kentucky and Ohio, with an absent father and a drug-addicted mother, and who later joined the military, graduated from Yale and eventually went on to the highest levels of politics.
But he also used that story to appeal to the “forgotten communities” of America, just as Trump did when he beat Hillary Clinton in 2016 by wresting back the so-called “blue wall states” that will also decide the election in November.
“It’s about the autoworker in Michigan, wondering why out-of-touch politicians are destroying your jobs,” the former venture capitalist said.
Usha and J.D. Vance during the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee on Wednesday.Credit: Bloomberg
“It’s about the factory worker in Wisconsin, who makes things with their hands and is proud of American craftsmanship.
“It’s about the energy worker in Pennsylvania and Ohio, who doesn’t understand why [President] Joe Biden is willing to buy energy from tinpot dictators but not hard-working Americans right here at home.”
If Trump wins the election, Vance, a 39-year-old Millennial, will be the third youngest US vice president.
There’s no doubt that Trump insiders see Vance as a way to expand their base. As one adviser put it, there would be few suburban women who wouldn’t be moved by watching the screen adaptation of his life story, which was immortalised in his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy.
The more optimistic members of Trump’s camp have even suggested that his past criticisms of the former president could convince some voters who may have previously disliked Trump to give him a go over Biden.
Whatever the case, his speech on Wednesday night laid out the Republican strategy for the next four months – which borrows heavily from the 2016 rule book that handed Trump the keys to the White House.
It also gave us a glimpse of who Vance is: a populist and isolationist whose upbringing defined his economic and foreign policy leanings.
Vance was introduced by his wife, Usha, an Indian American lawyer and former Democrat. The pair met while studying at Yale and are now a symbol of generational change and growing diversity within Republican ranks.
As Trump watched from his private box across the stadium, Vance talked up the former president’s achievements, attacked bad trade deals that killed American jobs, and went after Wall Street.
He also cast Biden as a symbol of “corrupt Washington insiders” who had made the nation weaker, lamenting that “as always, America’s ruling class wrote the cheques; communities like mine paid the price”.
“For decades that divide between the few with their power and comfort in Washington and the rest of us only widened,” he said.
“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.”
The speech capped off the third night of a Republican convention that has focused heavily on party unity in the shadow of last weekend’s attempted assassination of Trump.
Some delegates wore bandages on their ears in solidarity with the former president. Speakers included former Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro (who was released from prison on Wednesday morning, just in time to fly to Milwaukee and deliver a fiery address); military families who lost loved ones in battle (a nod to Trump’s disdain of “endless” wars); and his granddaughter Kai, the daughter of Donald Trump Jr (who spoke of almost losing her “grandpa”).
“It was heartbreaking that someone would do that to another person,” she said, before adding what has been a constant theme throughout the convention: “A lot of people have put my grandpa through hell, and he’s still standing.”
The Democrats, by contrast, are in disarray, led by an 81-year-old president hit by COVID and forced into isolation when he can least afford it.
Indeed, even before Vance walked on the stage, California congressman Adam Schiff, who is close to Democratic stalwart Nancy Pelosi, became the most senior Democrat to call on Biden to stand down.
Soon after, reports emerged that the two top Democrats in Congress, Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, had gone to Biden with the concerns of their members.
By the time Vance’s speech ended, another report suggested that Pelosi had confronted the president and told him that he could not win the White House – and would most likely lose the House and Senate, too.
Trump, meanwhile, is riding high, entering the convention to another hero’s welcome as the band played a version of James Brown’s It’s a Man’s Man’s World.
As former Speaker Kevin McCarthy put it, “No disrespect to J.D. Vance – he’s smart, he’s young, but he’s the vice president. And it doesn’t matter who president Trump would select to be his vice president because he’s in a stronger position than he’s ever been.”
Get a note directly from our foreign correspondents on what’s making headlines around the world. Sign up for the weekly What in the World newsletter here.