On JD Vance and His Critics

I wasn’t surprised to see Donald Trump choose Ohio’s junior senator JD Vance as his running mate Monday.

You almost assuredly already know Vance’s biography. It’s classic rags-to-riches, American Dream stuff. That’s very much on-brand for Trump. And there is clearly rapport between the two, even though Vance started as a Trump critic. (READ MORE: The Democrats’ Panic Reveals Vance’s Strength)

Vance represents a segment — a large segment — of the center-right sphere that was not on board with Donald Trump during the GOP primaries. And I can understand why.

Because I was part of that group.

Call me a disaffected conservative. I’ve moved on from that and I call myself a revivalist, rather than a conservative at all.

Because after 16 years of Barack Obama being the most consequential figure in American politics, there is almost nothing left to conserve.

Remember 2016? Conservatives Weren’t Hopeful.

And here’s what was true in 2016: The people in charge of the “conservative” movement had so completely debauched and corrupted themselves that nothing was left either of conservatism or of the Republican Party which was supposed to be its political receptacle.

At that point more than a generation had gone by since a conservative of any credibility had represented the GOP as its presidential nominee. Following Ronald Reagan’s exit from the stage in 1989, the Republican nominees were:

• George H.W. Bush — who did what he could to repudiate all of Reagan’s core governing principles;
• Bob Dole;
• George W. Bush — who insulted us by calling himself a “compassionate” conservative, as though conservatism wasn’t compassionate;
• John McCain — one of the most corrupt, unprincipled, and petty politicians in modern American history; and
• Mitt Romney — who called himself a “severe” conservative while running the weakest, most incompetent campaign of the bunch.

The GOP lost four of those seven elections to Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, a pair of middling political talents who became untouchable due to abject incompetence at the top of the opposition party. This despite massive popular uprisings against both Clinton (the Newt Gingrich-led 1994 Contract With America midterm wave election) and Obama (the Tea Party movement in 2009-2010 leading to another midterm wave election). Both times the Bush Republican party establishment suppressed populist elements within the party and insisted on running weak opponents in Dole and Romney who excited no one. (READ MORE from Scott McKay: Advice To Trump: Fire The Secret Service)

I mention all of this history because by 2016 you couldn’t be a conservative voter and have any faith in the GOP’s old guard. But more than that, it was even more difficult to have faith in the promises of others without pedigrees. Conservative voters had been lied to so many times since Reagan that faith in politicians was akin to stupidity.

Trump Was Responsible for Revitalizing Conservativism

For me, that meant great skepticism about Trump. I was with Ted Cruz for the simple reason that Cruz had at least shown the stones to challenge Mitch McConnell and the elders of the GOP by demanding a budget war and a government shutdown if that’s what it took to stonewall Obama’s efforts at “fundamental transformation.”

To me, Trump looked like a grifter and an egomaniac running for president after years in the donor class. He’s not in this to make real change, I thought. He’s doing it as an ego trip.

I did appreciate Trump’s takedown of McCain, which probably ended up costing him in Arizona in 2020. McCain deserved every word.

Trump outlasted Cruz. It was acrimonious. What he said about Cruz’s father was hard to forgive. And Trump’s relationship with conservative voters was transactional. Trump was never a conservative. He was more of a radical centrist.

Remember, the people who had been in charge of conservatism had held that “free trade,” meaning unrestricted trading relations with a communist China leveraging slave labor, intellectual property theft, industrial espionage to undercut American markets, and open borders were conservative positions. They’d exchanged capitalism for corporatism, while then losing Corporate America to Obama’s woke cultural Marxism as they shilled for Big Corp on Capitol Hill. (READ MORE: Did Newsom Save Biden’s Candidacy?)

Not to mention they turned Peace Through Strength into a succession of wars having little relationship to American national interest and in so doing producing an exhausted military and a dangerously empty treasury.

So what was conservatism in 2016? No one really knew.

Trump came along and redefined it in ways that were both old and new, and in doing so he transformed the party.

I didn’t see any of that coming until late in 2016. Vance might have missed it until later.

A Trump-Vance Ticket Makes the Old Guard Irrelevant. They Don’t Like That.

But while Trump might have had a transactional relationship with conservative voters, amazingly he fulfilled his end of the transaction. He didn’t have a pro-life pedigree, but he gave us the Supreme Court justices who obliterated Roe v. Wade. He pulled America back from endless wars and didn’t start any new ones while still robustly projecting power and influence around the globe. He fulfilled the conservative economic impulse and passed tax cuts that sparked great economic growth. He made progress in re-charging American industry. He was fabulous on energy. And lots of other things.

Trump made me a believer, and he made Vance a believer. By 2022, when he was elected to the Senate, JD Vance was one of the most passionate, spirited advocates for Donald Trump on the political scene.

But in the 24 hours after Vance was nominated, he’s been savaged. By whom? Not so much the Democrats, though they’ve been nasty as always. Instead, it’s been the old Bush Republicans.

It’s been the people making demands on Trump that Nikki Haley, pathetically repudiated in the primaries, be given the VP nod.

They don’t hate Vance. They don’t give a damn about him. They certainly never gave a damn about the people Vance comes from.

What they hate is irrelevance. And a Trump-Vance ticket, should it win, makes them utterly irrelevant.

These are the people who have resisted, despite well more than eight years of evidence that Bush Republicanism is far less successful than what Trump has brought, modifying their political stances and recognizing that a middle-class and working-class populist approach, which gives no ground on culture, economics, and politics to an anti-American, tyrannical and utterly corrupt Left, is the only way forward.

They’re dinosaurs. They allowed “conservatism” to be corrupted and made irrelevant. They fought all the wrong fights, and badly, and ignored the other side’s sapping of our national spirit until it was too late and Obama was nearly a king.

And now they’re angry that they don’t control the Republican Party?

Give me J.D. Vance. If he’s the next generation and he’s the face of the party in 2028, so be it. We’ll be better off without the globalists, warmongers, China-kissers, and faux libertarians who created the need for Donald Trump in the first place.

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