“Trump just made a big mistake!”
Leaning against a railing in the shade, in the sweltering July heat and humidity that has overwhelmed Milwaukee, Michigan Republican François Demonique was far from impressed by the choice of running mate announced earlier Monday by Donald Trump.
At the opening of the Republican National Convention in the Wisconsin metropolis, the populist finally put an end to the speculation and backroom chatter that had been brewing for months about his running mate for the November election. He ultimately chose JD Vance, a junior senator from Ohio, to the eclipse of Florida Senator Marco Rubio and North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum, who were still among the frontrunners yesterday.
“I didn’t expect that,” said Mr. Demonique, who proudly sports a T-shirt bearing the former president’s image. “What is he going to bring to the table? Ohio is already a Republican state. He’s not going to help make it even redder (the party color). Marco Rubio would have been a much better choice, to attract the Latino vote that largely eludes Republicans.”
At 39, James David Vance, his full name, was set on a new political trajectory Monday after just two years in Congress, in Washington, where he quickly made his mark. He could become the youngest vice president since Richard Nixon, who, starting in 1953, held the position under Dwight Eisenhower.
His rise remains spectacular. Brought to the media spotlight in 2016 with the publication of his memoirs entitled Hillbilly ElegyJD Vance was able to describe the cultural crisis of deep, working-class America that partly brought Donald Trump to power that same year, by recounting his roots in rural Kentucky and his life in a blue-collar environment in Ohio.
Praised by the progressive press, the man first revealed himself as a fervent critic of the billionaire. In an article published in July 2016 in the magazine The Atlantiche compared Trump to a “cultural heroine,” an “opioid of the masses,” a “new painkiller” who offers simple solutions to the growing social problems of suffering communities, but without being able to really eradicate “the source of their ills.”
“I think it’s harmful and it’s taking the white working class to a very dark place,” he told NPR at the time.
And then, it was the tipping point: in 2022, he became one of the greatest spokespersons for the movement led by Donald Trump, regularly defending the former president, his culture wars and his policies on immigration, foreign trade, the withdrawal of the United States from world conflicts…
With him as a running mate, the Republican candidate has thus chosen youth, but also the persistence of his program within the Republican Party, which he has taken, with his family, more control than ever. Placed on the Republican ticket in 2024, JD Vance could more easily become the favorite to carry the party’s colors in the next presidential election, in 2028, Trump not being able to run a third time under the current framework of the Constitution.
The Ohio senator also becomes a campaign companion who could help the ex-president, after two electoral defeats (in 2020 and 2022), to better understand the vote of the Rust Belt, this vast devitalized industrial region in the northeastern United States made up of several key states – Wisconsin is one of them – and which the Republican needs to return to the White House.
The happiness of some
“I couldn’t be happier,” the former president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., said Monday on local television following the nomination. “He’s done an incredible job in the Senate and he knows how to deliver our message well in the media.”
“He has a deep understanding of the anxieties of working families and has both the political experience and expertise to help President Trump build a government worthy of the people it is meant to serve,” said Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson.
“JD is the future of the Republican Party and the America First movement, which is pro-working class, tough on China and strong on the borders,” Indiana Republican Rep. Jim Banks said Monday, according to Axios.
On a Milwaukee street Monday afternoon, Robert, a Republican from Alabama, had a brisk pace heading back to the convention, but also expectations for his new vice presidential nominee. “There’s a lot of things he stands for that I like,” he said, briefly touching on his past statements about mass deportations of illegal immigrants and ending U.S. support for Ukraine. “And from now on, I’m going to want to know even more about him.”
The Democrats, for their part, quickly fired broadsides at the running mate, accusing him of embodying the Make America Great Again (MAGA) of Donald Trump and especially an “extreme and disconnected from reality” program, summarized the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Jaime Harrison, in a press release. “Vance has defended and favored the worst Trump policies in years: from the attack on abortion rights to the whitewashing (of the insurrection) of January 6, including the attacks on Social Security and Medicare,” he added.
A conspiracy theorist candidate
“JD Vance is nothing more than a younger Donald Trump,” François Demonique remarks, while searching for the faint coolness coming from the door of an air-conditioned store just behind him. “He doesn’t bring anything more. He’s too white. And on top of that, he’s too racist.”
In 2022, the new vice-presidential candidate campaigned on the conspiracy theory known as the “great replacement.” Formulated by the supremacist and identitarian far-right, it claims that a political plan is currently being fomented by liberal elites to make the white American population disappear under waves of immigration. Like other leading figures on the American right, he has accused Democrats of orchestrating this “invasion” of immigrants to replace the country’s voters with foreigners and thus ensure a constant electoral victory.
Assertions that are struggling to be supported by facts, taken from the margins and the depths of hatred of the other thanks to online social networks, and which now feed the conservative conspiracy sphere. And which, since Monday, have just taken a step closer to the seat of the number 2 of the American executive power.
This report was financed with the support of the Transat International Journalism Fund-
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