There are plenty of negative reactions from certain Republicans to former President Donald Trump’s selection of Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) as his vice presidential candidate. And it is true that it is hard to think of a voter who was on the fence without Vance on the ticket who is suddenly now voting for Trump-Vance 2024.
But while other candidates may or may not have significantly increased Trump’s chances of winning this November, that is not why Trump picked him. Trump picked Vance because the two have an instinctual disdain for the finance and policy elites of New York City and Washington, D.C., and they share a common understanding of how to weaken these elites by empowering American workers.
If you want to understand who Vance is today, you might want to start with this interview with Ross Douthat, where Vance explains why he is not the same man who wrote Hillbilly Elegy:
“There was one really good thing about Hillbilly Elegy, meaning the response to it: People were actually genuinely trying to understand something about a part of the country they didn’t understand. But there was something that wasn’t so good, which is that people were looking for some interpretive lens for Trump’s voters that never really asked them to challenge their priors or to rethink what they felt about those people. And I realized that I was being used as this whisperer of a phenomenon that some people really did want to understand but some people didn’t. And the more that I felt like, not an explainer and a defender, but part of what I thought was wrong about the liberal establishment, the more that I felt this need to go very strongly away from it.
Let me give you one story: In 2018, I was invited to an event hosted by the Business Roundtable, an organization of CEOs. Many people there I like and admire. … I was seated next to the CEO of one of the largest hotel chains in the world at dinner. He was almost a caricature of a business executive, complaining about how he was forced to pay his workers higher wages.
“He said: ‘The labor market is super tight. What Trump has done at the border has completely forced me to change the way that I interact with my employees.’ And then he pivoted to me: ‘Well, you understand this as well as anybody. These people just need to get off their asses, come to work, and do their job. And now, because we can’t hire immigrants, or as many immigrants, we’ve got to hire these people at higher wages.’
“The fact that this guy saw me as sympathetic to his problem, and not the problem of the workers, made me realize that I’m on a train that has its own momentum and I have to get off this train, or I’m going to wake up in 10 years and really hate everything that I’ve become. And so I decided to get off that train, and I felt like the only way that I could do that was, in some ways, alienating and offending people who liked my book.”
Now you may or may not believe that Vance genuinely feels like an outsider among Business Roundtable CEOs, but Trump does. And Trump feels that same sense of rejection from America’s business elite. He also feels that same instinct to stand up for average people that Vance does.
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Trump and Vance share a vision of a revitalized middle class buoyed by secure borders, tight labor markets, strategic trade, and a deregulation agenda that makes it easier for America to build again.
No other vice presidential candidate shared this Trumpian vision for the future of the nation and the future of the party than Vance. That is why he will be Trump’s vice president.