“Trump just made a big mistake!”
Leaning against a railing in the shade, in the stifling heat and humidity of July in Milwaukee, Michigan Republican François Demonique was far from impressed by the choice of running mate announced earlier in the day 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 noise that has been going on 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 the frontrunners yesterday.
“I didn’t expect that,” Mr. Demonique said, proudly sporting a T-shirt bearing the former president’s image. “What’s he going to bring to the table? Ohio is already a Republican state. He’s not going to help make it even redder.” [la couleur du parti]Marco Rubio would have been a much better choice, to attract the Latino vote that largely eludes the Republicans.”
At 39, James David Vance, his real name, was placed on a new political trajectory Monday after barely two years in Congress in Washington where he quickly made his mark. He could thus become the youngest vice president since Richard Nixon, who, from 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 capture 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 then 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, 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 again, 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 industrial region in the north-east of the 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 experience and policy expertise to help President Trump build a government worthy of the people it is meant to serve,” said House Speaker Mike Johnson.
“JD is the future of the Republican Party and the America First movement that is pro-working class, tough on China and strong on the borders,” Indiana Republican Rep. Jim Banks told Axios on Monday.
On a Milwaukee street Monday afternoon, Robert, an Alabama Republican, was brisk as he headed back to the convention, but also with new 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.”
Democrats, for their part, quickly fired broadsides at the choice of the former president, accused of embodying Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again (MAGA) and especially a program that is “extreme and disconnected from reality,” summarized the president of the Democratic National Committee, Jaime Harrison, in a press release. “Vance has defended and favored the worst Trump policies in years: from attacking abortion rights to whitewashing [de l’insurrection] from January 6, through 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 points out, while searching for the little coolness coming from the door of an air-conditioned store just behind him. “He brings nothing more. He is too white and on top of that he is too racist.”
In 2022, the new vice-presidential candidate campaigned by promoting the conspiracy theory known as the “great replacement”. Invented 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 accused the 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 others by online socialization, now feeding the conservative conspiracy sphere, and which since Monday, have finally taken a step closer to the seat of the number 2 of the American executive power.
This report was funded with support from the Transat-Le Devoir International Journalism Fund.