J.D. Vance approached the podium on Wednesday night to accept his party’s vice-presidential nomination with the benefit of minimal expectations. He was not chosen to reach out to swing voters; there’s no particular reason to believe he has much potential appeal to them. His ticket isn’t trailing in the polls; nobody expects the “Vance” in “Trump-Vance” to carry the burden of either persuading or mobilizing voters. Some have suggested he may fulfill the traditional “attack dog” role of a running mate uninhibited by the niceties imposed on the presidential nominee. But Trump has never exhibited such inhibitions, and the 2024 Republican National Convention has quickly and thoroughly made a mockery of talk that Trump’s near-brush with death last weekend would lead to a calm and civil “national unity” message. No, J.D. Vance is on the ticket for what he may bring to a second Trump administration (if there is one) and the Republican Party down the road. If he handles himself well, he’s the future of the MAGA movement and a guarantor that it will continue to control the GOP with no backsliding into pre-Trump conservatism.
So Vance didn’t have much to prove at the RNC, and he cleared the lowest of bars. He alluded to his up-from-nothing-and-nowhere rise to wealth and power, which many are familiar with from his best-selling memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, but didn’t really tell it. He rambled through his poorly organized speech with a voice that sounded like a somewhat livelier Ron DeSantis, stopping frequently for applause as speech coaches tell you not to do. (Surf the applause, don’t let it kill your rhythm!) His shout-outs to his running mate were no more or less sycophantic than those we’ve heard him make for years.
The closest thing to a core message and edgy content was his effort to make Old Joe Biden the villain in the great public-policy calamities that marked the years of his Appalachian childhood: NAFTA, Permanent Normal Trade Relations with China, the Iraq War, and the ensuing financial crisis. I’m sure some of the older delegates in the hall were acutely aware that more Republicans than Democrats were complicit in all these policy mistakes. And indeed Vance referred to the “ruling class” and “elites” as his targets, adding to this convention’s weird sense that history began in 2016 when Trump rose to power. So he did give his listeners a sense of his America First/right-wing populist ideology but didn’t resolve the many contradictions in that ideology or in his own record and background.
Is the hillbilly-turned-venture-capitalist-turned-politician truly a faithful son of the working class, or a puppet of tech bros like his former boss Peter Thiel? Is he a genuine “populist” or just a barefoot boy from Wall Street and Silicon Valley who sells the folks a bill of goods? Is he the modest and loving husband and father who will “never forget where he’s from,” or the darling of some of the the scariest people in MAGA-land: Don Jr., Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson, and Charlie Kirk?
By the time Vance chugged to the end of his speech 23 minutes after prime time ended and the convention band incongruously played the Bill Clinton anthem “Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow,” we hadn’t learned that much more about this newly powerful man than we knew before. But it’s probably just as well. Henceforth he will be laboring very much in the shadow of the man with the largest ego in American politics. We probably won’t get to know the real J.D. Vance until he’s literally a heartbeat from the presidency, God help us.
