Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance has a moving story of overcoming difficulties, starting with his troubled childhood as a poor boy with a drug-addicted mother and an absent father. When he was born in 1984, Ronald Reagan was president, and George H. W. Bush succeeded him. Of his first 25 years of life, 17 were spent under Republican presidents. Even so, the candidate devoted to Trumpism blamed the current president, Joe Biden, then a senator, for his childhood problems in his acceptance speech. Before the Republican convention in Milwaukee, Vance gave a populist, nationalist and anti-globalization speech in which he endorsed Trump’s slogan of America First.
Despite appealing to his personal history, it was a cold, low-key speech lacking rhythm, with frequent interruptions, no passion, and not connecting much with the audience. Vance’s first major appearance before a national audience is not a night to remember.
“I was born in Middletown, Ohio, a small town where people loved their God, their family, their community, and their country with all their hearts. But it was also a place that had been pushed aside and forgotten by America’s ruling class in Washington,” the vice presidential candidate said. “When I was in fourth grade, a career politician named Joe Biden supported the North American Free Trade Agreement, a bad trade deal that took countless good jobs to Mexico. When I was a sophomore in high school, that same career politician named Joe Biden gave China a favorable trade deal and destroyed even more good middle-class American manufacturing jobs. When I was a senior in high school, that same Joe Biden supported the disastrous invasion of Iraq, and every step of the way, in small towns like mine in Ohio, or next door in Pennsylvania and Michigan and in states across the country, jobs were being shipped overseas and children were being sent to war.”
What Vance did not say is that the president who signed the North American Free Trade Agreement was George H.W. Bush. It was ratified in the Senate with a majority of Republican votes, as was the agreement with China. Bush was also the president who sent troops to Iraq in the Gulf War. At the time, Biden was a senator and his role was not key in any of those decisions.
Yet, distorting Trump’s original position on the matter, he said: “Somehow, a New York real estate developer named Donald J. Trump was right on all these issues, while Biden was wrong. Joe Biden screwed up, and my community paid the price.”
This thesis is the opposite of the one he maintained in his memoirs. Hillbilly. A rural elegy, published in 2016, which launched him to fame and was considered key to understanding the anger of the white working class who felt they had lost out in globalisation and saw in Trump an opportunity to get even. In that book he said that blaming their own problems on explanations such as Barack Obama closing the mines or China stealing jobs were lies with which they were deluding themselves.
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Vance plays the resentment card that worked so well for Donald Trump in the 2016 elections in that segment of the uneducated white electorate, the blue-collar workers, also called hillbilliesor, contemptuously, rednecksThe vice presidential candidate wants to help Trump win votes in the decisive Midwestern states of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan. He repeatedly appealed to the workers in these three states of the so-called Rust Belt, where the Republican beat Hillary Clinton but lost to Joe Biden, and which the Democrats now call the Blue Wall, since it is where they have the most hope of stopping the Trumpist offensive.
With its tax incentives and infrastructure plans, Joe Biden’s government has managed to boost multi-million dollar investments in these states. The president has not hesitated to also apply protectionist measures. During Biden’s term, job creation records have been broken, and many of them have been industrial jobs. In addition, his closed support for unions has helped improve working conditions in sectors such as the automobile industry.
“We will not sacrifice our supply chains to unlimited global trade. We will stamp every product with the stamp ‘Made in the USA,’” he said. “We will build factories again, we will put people to work making real products for American families, made by the hands of American workers.” That is, in fact, what Biden is achieving.
Vance has also not hesitated to attack Wall Street, a traditional ally of the Republicans. “The Wall Street barons sank the economy,” he said. “We will not cater to Wall Street. We will commit ourselves to the worker.” This is also another policy that seems to be more in keeping with the current president.
The protectionism and isolationism advocated by Vance also extends to defense, although his foreign policy references have been minimal. “Together, we will ensure that our allies share the burden of ensuring world peace. No more gifts to nations that betray the generosity of the American taxpayer,” he warned.
The senator, 39 years old, half Trump’s age, also played the card of his youth: “Biden [de 81 años] “He’s been a politician in Washington longer than I’ve been alive,” he said. Vance added that Vice President Harris, 59, “isn’t far behind.”
Convert to Trumpism
Vance was a harsh critic of Trump when he was first elected, referring to him in interviews as “noxious” and someone who “is taking the white working class into a very dark place.” He even once referred to him as “America’s Hitler.” On Wednesday, however, he was all about Trumpism.
She again suggested that the attempted assassination of Trump was related to Democratic criticism of the former president and praised his response. “They said he was a tyrant. They said he had to be stopped at all costs. But how did he respond? He called for national unity right after a killer nearly took his life,” she said. “And then President Trump flew to Milwaukee and went back to work. That’s the man I’ve gotten to know personally over the last few years. He’s tough, and he is tough, but he cares about people. He can be defiant against a killer one moment and call for national healing the next.”
In his speech, he appealed to his roots, rekindling the sports rivalry between the universities of Ohio and Michigan, evoked the figure of his grandmother, to whom he attributes his success in life, and introduced the audience to his mother, who has been clean and drug-free for 10 years, he said. He said that when his grandmother died, they saw that she had 19 loaded pistols spread throughout the house, so that she would always have one on hand in case she had to defend her family. “That is the American spirit,” he said.
The vice presidential candidate, who has formally accepted the nomination, was introduced by his wife, attorney Usha Chilukuri Vance, and Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr. Usha Vance, 38, left her office on Monday when it was announced that her husband was running for vice president. The two met at Yale and have two children. In her introduction to the masses, she portrayed her husband. “It’s hard to imagine a more powerful example of the American dream, a boy from Middletown, Ohio,” she said. “When JD met me, he met our differences with curiosity and enthusiasm. He wanted to know everything about me, where I came from, what my life had been like,” she added, leaving another message about his personality: “Even though he is a meat and potatoes guy, he adapted to my vegetarian diet and learned to cook food for my mother, Indian food,” she said.
Trump’s son, meanwhile, has a close relationship with the vice presidential candidate. “No matter who you are, you can be part of this movement to Make America Great Again. Look at me and my friend JD Vance, a boy from Appalachia and a boy from Trump Tower in Manhattan. We grew up in separate worlds, and yet now we both fight side by side to save the country we love,” said Donald Trump Jr. “And by the way, JD Vance is going to be an incredible vice president,” he added.
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