RNC 2024: Vance pledges to 'commit to the working man' in accepting VP nomination
Former President Donald Trump’s newly minted running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, made his national debut — as the families of fallen soldiers and Israeli hostages blast Biden’s foreign policy. This is Yahoo News' succinct wrap-up of day three of the RNC in Milwaukee. Here’s what you need to know:
🖼 Big picture
At just 39, Vance would be the youngest veep since Richard Nixon. Well-spoken and wonky, he is widely seen as a “next generation” leader of Trump’s MAGA movement. Wednesday’s populist, antiestablishment speech showed why.
“Thanks to [the] policies that Biden and the other out-of-touch politicians in Washington gave us, our country was flooded with cheap Chinese goods, cheap foreign labor and, in the decades to come, deadly Chinese fentanyl,” Vance said. “From Iraq to Afghanistan, from the financial crisis to the Great Recession, from open borders to stagnating wages, the people who govern this country have failed and failed again. That is, until President Donald J. Trump came along.”
Promising to “commit to the working man,” to “fight for American citizens” and to “stamp more and more products with that beautiful label 'Made in the USA,'” Vance articulated an ambitious vision for Trumpism beyond Trump. “Trump will, at most, serve four years in the White House,” he has said. “There is a big question about what comes after him.”
📌 Key takeaways
Vance introduces himself. A Yale Law grad turned Hillbilly Elegy author turned venture capitalist turned U.S. senator from Ohio, Vance filled his speech with personal details — no surprise for a politician whose life story has already been the stuff of a bestselling memoir and a big Ron Howard movie. His “hillbilly” mother who “struggled with addiction” — now there in the audience, “10 years clean and sober.” The grandmother who raised him, “Mamaw,” who “loved the Lord but also loved the F-word” — and left behind “19 loaded handguns” when she died. The “cemetery plot on a mountainside in eastern Kentucky” where one day his “children will lay [him] to rest.”
Rust Belt pitch. But Vance’s speech was, of course, deeply political as well. Vance has long leveraged his hardscrabble Appalachian roots to speak for and to the broader white working class — a demographic that could prove decisive in battlegrounds such as Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, three states Vance repeatedly mentioned onstage in Milwaukee. “The media call them ‘privileged’ and look down on them,” Vance said of “the people [he] grew up with.” “But they love this country [and] that is the source of America's greatness.” It’s no coincidence, then, that when Trump offered Vance a spot on the ticket, he told Vance it was because “you can help me win … some of these Midwestern states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, and so forth."
Trouble ahead? Democrats cite Vance’s positions on abortion (he opposes access even in cases of rape or incest), immigration (he has claimed that “Joe Biden’s open border is killing Ohioans”), the Russia-Ukraine war (“I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or the other”) and Jan. 6 (“I think the election was stolen from Trump”) as evidence of his extremism. How will voters respond?
The Don Jr. era. Vance’s friendship with Donald Trump Jr. also propelled him to the top of the VP list. “In the world of politics you make a lot of acquaintances, but there are very few actual friends,” Trump’s eldest son recently told the New York Times. “JD has become a close friend of mine.” Don Jr.’s primetime speaking slot Wednesday — shortly before his pal’s keynote address — symbolized the powerful position he now occupies in the MAGA-verse. Gone are Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, the power couple of Trump’s first term. Now Don Jr. has taken their place — an enforcer “making sure that we have an America First, a MAGA bench for the future,” as he told the Times. “It’s time to build something real, something tangible, something that will last,” Don Jr. said in his combative remarks. “The only thing [Democrats] are effective at is persecuting my father.”
Foreign policy in primetime. Republicans hit Wednesday’s “Make America Strong Once Again” theme hardest in primetime, when swing voters were most likely to be watching. It’s a sign that the Trump campaign sees foreign policy as a winning issue for the former president. With wars still raging in Gaza and Ukraine — and memories of America’s messy 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan still fresh — former soldiers claimed they’d “never seen the world falling apart like it is under President Biden,” and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich pitted “weakness and war with Biden” against “strength and peace with Trump.” The Gold Star families of fallen service members killed during the Afghanistan withdrawal accused the current president of lacking empathy; the parents of an Israeli-American held hostage by Hamas implied that he isn’t doing enough to bring their son home.
The Trump doctrine? Wednesday’s presentation was powerful, but it did little to clarify Trump’s actual views, which tend toward isolationism, except when they don’t. Would Trump intervene more strongly in Israel? Less strongly in Ukraine? And what different kind of strength would he have shown in Afghanistan, where Biden withdrew under the terms of an agreement Trump made with the Taliban during the last year of his presidency? Perhaps the best theory came from Ric Grenell — not in his speech Wednesday but earlier this week during a roundtable with reporters. “I can tell you, countries around the world, leaders, are absolutely uncomfortable with the unpredictability of Donald Trump," said Trump’s former ambassador to Germany and acting intelligence director. “And when I say uncomfortable, that means they don’t know exactly what he’s going to do next. And that’s a positive for us.”
“Send them back!” Picking up where Tuesday’s program left off, Wednesday’s pre-primetime speakers continued to blame Biden for an “invasion” of murderers, rapists and terrorists at the southern border. But aside from some chants of “build the wall,” few touched on Trump’s actual immigration plans. One exception was Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who said Trump “will arrest the criminal illegal immigrants and put them behind bars or send them back.” “Send them back! Send them back!” the crowd roared in response. Abbott was right in saying that Trump wants to increase deportations; he was wrong in limiting those deportation plans to violent criminals. According to the GOP’s newly adopted platform, Trump instead aims to “CARRY OUT THE LARGEST DEPORTATION OPERATION IN AMERICAN HISTORY” by detaining and expelling “millions of illegal Migrants.” His inspiration, he has said, is the “Eisenhower model” — a reference to President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 1954 campaign, known by the ethnic slur “Operation Wetback,” to round up and remove Mexican immigrants in what amounted to a nationwide “show me your papers” rule.
Fresh from prison. In what was surely a historical first — and one of the only indications this week of Trump’s ongoing legal troubles — Peter Navarro, former director of the U.S. Office of Trade & Manufacturing, addressed the delegates just hours after getting out of prison. (Navarro served a four-month sentence for defying a subpoena from the House Jan. 6 committee.) Greeted by more than a minute of sustained applause, Navarro ditched Tuesday night’s messages of unity and law and order, warning instead that if “Joe Biden and his Department of Injustice” can “come for me, if they can come for Donald Trump, careful: They will come for you.” Navarro’s zero-sum case for another Trump term: “If we don’t control our government, their government will control us.”
🗣️ Wednesday’s notable speakers
Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina
Rep. Ronny Jackson of Texas
Ric Grenell, former acting director of national intelligence
Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich
Peter Navarro, former director of U.S. Office of Trade & Manufacturing
Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas
Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota
Kellyanne Conway, former counselor to President Donald Trump
Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida
Kimberly Guilfoyle
Donald J. Trump Jr.
Usha Chilukuri Vance, wife of JD Vance
Vice Presidential nominee Sen. JD Vance of Ohio
🗓 What’s happening Thursday
The day’s theme will be "Make America Great Once Again." Trump will accept his party's nomination and deliver a primetime address on how he plans to "usher in a new golden age for America.” Campaign advisers have said that the former president — who started his presidency by warning of “American carnage” and ended it with the Jan. 6 insurrection — will call for unity in his remarks. “I had all prepared an extremely tough speech, really good, all about the corrupt, horrible [Biden] administration,” Trump told the New York Post after Saturday’s assassination attempt. “But I threw it away.”
📖 Political terms
➕ Read more
Trump's takeover: In a redefined GOP, populism and a new coalition. Goodbye, old guard. “Trump has forged his distinctive coalition with a message that is suspicious of elites, leery of foreign entanglements, energized by opposition to illegal immigration, willing to disrupt traditional norms.” [USA Today]
‘Our nation is not well’: Voters fear what could happen next. “In interviews from the West Coast to the Deep South, Americans across party lines say they are deeply apprehensive, and not just because of last weekend’s attempt on a presidential candidate’s life.” [New York Times]
Determined to push forward, Biden tightens his circle and grows combative. “[The president] has started to privately convey a new message to Democrats: The conversation about my future is over, and I’m getting irritated that you’re not realizing that.” [NBC News]
Trump is now a member of the mass shooting survivor’s club — will it change anything? “The thing that baffles me is that we can be in this cycle of rinse and repeat but we’re not tapping into a conversation about how we prevent the next shooting.” [The Guardian]
