J.D. Vance: The Populist Choice

Fewer than 48 hours after being shot and nearly killed, Donald Trump has chosen Ohio Senator J.D. Vance to join him on the 2024 ticket as Vice President. Vance reportedly beat out North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum, Florida Senator Marco Rubio, and South Carolina Senator Tim Scott, to name a few, who were under serious consideration. Of all the possible choices, Vance stands out as the pick of a candidate who is deeply serious about enacting a lasting populist vision for America. Trump gave up the comfort he seems to feel around Burgum and the demographic points he might have scored with Scott and Rubio, which some believed could increase Trump’s already astonishing gains among Black men and Hispanic voters. Vance is the pick of a confident Trump who instead chose a pro-worker, anti-war partner in policy in the 39-year-old former Marine, a man to carry his vision onto the next generation.

Vance grew up poor in Appalachia—an experience he chronicled in his bestselling book-turned-Netflix-movie Hillbilly Elegy. Not content to embody the American Dream, Vance has been a warrior for working-class Americans and the American family, staking out positions that have made him unpopular with the pre-Trump libertarian faction of the GOP, much as Trump himself has done.

Vance was front-and-center in standing up for the people of East Palestine after a disastrous train derailment contaminated their water and community, and Vance crossed party lines to support efforts to regulate rail companies as a result. He also walked the UAW picket line in support of striking autoworkers, promoted a $12,000 tax credit for American families, and has aggressively advocated for the reshoring of domestic manufacturing. He’s a vocal critic of the free trade deals that sold out Rust Belt communities like the one he grew up in, and has been scathingly critical of mass immigration and its impact on the working class. And he has consistently talked about the opioid crisis, tying it to government-backed economic devastation and calling it a political problem that must have political solutions.

In all these ways, Vance is a standard bearer for the new, Trumpian version of the GOP, the one that threw away the country club, Chamber of Commerce, free trade, and foreign wars party embodied by the likes of Mitch McConnell and Nikki Haley to embrace economic protectionism, tariffs, vastly limited immigration, and a commitment to American workers over elite consumers. These are policy items that enrage the libertarian Right and the distributionist Left, yet they have huge support across the American working class. Trump’s MAGA agenda, embodied by Vance, is the consensus platform among working-class Americans, despite what the partisan media may claim.

Vance’s America First populism extends to foreign policy, too. He is the Senate’s most vocal critic of the $150 billion we’ve sent to Ukraine and has advocated instead for a peaceful resolution to the conflict. This view is not popular in Washington, but it reflects that of the many working-class Americans—of both parties—I interviewed for my book, Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America’s Working Men and Women, who for the life of them couldn’t understand why that fight is our fight when we have so many problems here at home. Yet Vance has not allowed his skepticism of support for Ukraine to descend into isolationism: Unlike some far-right media personalities, Vance has been supportive of Israel’s defensive war against Hamas in Gaza, articulating a pro-Israel vision that sees Israel as a strategic asset to the United States in a way that Ukraine is not. It’s a view that not only comports with Trump’s but with that of the American working class, and one that took courage and intelligence to advance.

In choosing Vance, Trump has officially signed off on the next generation of Republican leadership, giving America a view of what the changing of the guard will look like in four years.

Some will raise as weaknesses the fact that Vance doesn’t expand the map much for Trump. He is also pro-life, and abortion access has been seen recently as a winning issue for Democrats. But Trump has been expanding the map on his own—with the very policies that Vance has championed. It’s Trump’s outrage that the American Dream has been stolen from hardworking Americans—and the way that outrage translated into Trump-era policy, and then into money in the pockets of working men and women—that’s making Black men, Hispanic voters, and even young Americans defect from the Democratic Party. Meanwhile, Trump mitigated the abortion issue by removing any pro-life language from the RNC’s 2024 GOP platform.

Perhaps most important is what Trump’s pick of Vance says about Trump these days. The assassination attempt may have finally removed the stigma people have felt for a decade in admitting they like Trump or his policies. And it has transformed Trump. The post-shooting Trump is a man who, for the first time, is receiving the kind of bipartisan admiration his agenda deserves—at least from voters. His courage under fire—literally—is simply undeniable, and it’s metastasizing into a reconsideration of Trump more broadly.

Throughout his campaign, Trump has been talking about unifying the country around the success his platform will bring. But in the days since the assassination attempt, he seems focused on unity, reportedly tearing up his RNC speech to focus on bringing the country together.

It’s that version of Trump who picked J.D. Vance: the unity candidate. Trump is now a man who, for the first time, is able to look past his own battles toward his legacy—the future of this great nation that he has inexorably altered for the better.