Vance Proved Why He’s Trump’s Greatest Wingman
While Vice President Kamala Harris dodges the media entirely, and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz grapples with the fallout of decades of him lying about his service record, Ohio Sen. JD Vance went into the lion’s den on Sunday and emerged victorious.
Pundits have debated ad nauseam whether former President Donald Trump made the correct choice when he picked Vance as his running mate in 2024. Hopefully, that ended after Vance appeared on regime media’s Sunday shows. A hostile press is never going to be kind to a Republican ticket unless, of course, they align with their globalist agenda that sells out Americans. Vance knew that going in. But unlike Walz, who only pretends to be a warrior, Vance is one.
On Sunday, Vance went on CNN with host Dana Bash and ABC with host Jon Karl. Bash and Karl expected to throw several minutes of gotcha-style questions at him, seemingly hoping they’d have several viral soundbites to bury the Trump campaign. Instead of this happening for them, Vance was able to reach left-wing audiences, constantly being fed a steady serving of Democrat propaganda and expertly combated their narratives. (As Media Defends Marxist Mr. Magoo, Trump Ground Game Quietly Explodes)
Let’s talk about his ABC conversation with Karl first because, arguably, this was the most important discussion between the two. In the 16 minutes Karl interviewed Vance, he never once talked about Walz repeatedly lying about his service record, which has been a viral discussion over the last week after several reports exposed Walz for stolen valor by falsely claiming he deployed to Iraq during the Global War on Terror (GWOT). Walz used these claims to benefit several campaigns and even used a rank he never earned on his Congressional Challenge coin.
Karl completely ignored this glaring problem and decided to focus his last question on Trump’s comments during a recent Montana rally about Walz’s position on parental rights related to so-called “gender-affirming care” for minors, which is just a euphemism for state-sanctioned child sex changes.
“And finally, before you go, we commit to this race to kind of sticking to the facts? I mean, I heard Donald Trump give this speech in Montana he just gave, and he said that Tim Walz has signed a letter letting the state kidnap children to change their gender, that- allowing pedophiles to claim, you know, I mean, to be exempt from crimes. This is not true. It’s not remotely true,” Karl said to Vance.
A typical weak-kneed Republican, the ones Americans have been used to for decades, would have likely denounced Trump’s comments or claimed that he misspoke. But Vance didn’t give the expected response. He went on the offensive.
“What President Trump said, Jon, is that Tim Walz has supported taking children from their parents if the parents don’t consent to gender reassignment. That is crazy. And, by the way, Tim Walz gets on his high horse about “mind your own damn business.” One way of minding your own damn business, Jon, is to not try to take my children away from me if I have different moral views than you,” Vance responded. (ROOKE: Police Association In Blue State Is Finally Fed Up With Mayor)
Karl became visibly frustrated. He was then forced to attempt to defend Walz’s insane position, which backfired. Not only was Vance able to support Trump’s claims that Walz did, in fact, support a bill that would allow children to go through sex change surgeries without parental consent, but he also got Karl to admit that while ABC is hell-bent on defending Harris’s VP pick from questions about his record, Harris has refused to sit down for any media interviews to discuss her policies on crime, immigration, or the economy.
Vance did all of this to an audience who would have otherwise never heard this point of view because, again, regime media only give them cooked-up leftist propaganda.
Similarly, Vance took on Bash, who, unlike Karl, brought up the stolen valor attacks against Walz. Bash wanted to defend the Harris camp from the allegations, but Vance refused.
In the interview, Bash initially argues that Walz filed to retire from the National Guard in February 2005, two months before it was announced that his unit would deploy to Iraq. However, Vance pointed out that this claim was debunked on CNN the night before when one of the people in charge of Walz came on their network saying that Walz knew that his unit would deploy in the fall of 2004, months before he filed for retirement.
“Dana, I’m not interested in the ad hominem. I’ve heard from a lot of veterans’ groups who criticize Tim Walz. The question is: he said he served in war and he didn’t. That is a dishonesty. I really- I couldn’t care less what one or the other person says about it. I care about what the truth is. The truth is that Tim Walz didn’t tell the truth, and importantly, Dana, this is about Kamala Harris’s judgment. And I think that when you ask, ‘Why has Kamala Harris allowed the border to be wide open? Why has Kamala Harris supported policies that have promoted the increase in inflation?’ I think it goes to the heart of her judgment, and I think that that’s what we should be talking about,” Vance said.
Once again, Vance was able to turn regime media (this time CNN) into a valuable mouthpiece that exposes Harris, not Trump. It’s Harris who has failed the American people in terms of the economy, open borders, and bad judgment calls. She picked a man who abandoned his troops as they were set to deploy for war. Despite the attempts regime media make to defend her and prop her up, she’s a disaster.
On Sunday, Vance proved he could combat the lies and hold his own against hostile hosts. He defended Trump’s positions and made them relatable to viewers who likely would have never heard them. He was the perfect pick at the right time.
https://dailycaller.com/2024/08/12/rooke-vance-trump-sunday-shows/
*************************************************Win or lose, Vance has sparked a revolution across conservatism
A Leftist perspective with some truth in it below by Timothy J. Lynch, professor of American politics at the University of Melbourne.
Donald Trump has already made three decisions that will determine how history remembers him. First, he agreed to debate Joe Biden. This revealed a president in such a state of cognitive decline that his party forced him to step aside; beating his replacement, Kamala Harris, will be much harder. He’s thus far proving not very good at it. Was this the Democratic plan all along?
Second, Trump chose to turn his head at just the right moment to miss, by centimetres, a would-be assassin’s bullet; he suddenly (and prematurely, see decision 1) became the inevitable winner in November.
Third, he chose JD Vance as his running mate. He needed a centrist, ideally a governor, to win over the swinging independent voters who hold the key to the White House. Kamala Harris gets this electoral logic. She picked Tim Walz, the Minnesota governor, a progressive who has won over red parts of his state. Instead, Trump went for a bearded 39-year-old, with a thin executive CV, who leftists will demonise as a woman-hating (and cat-hating) far-right “weirdo”. (Vance has insisted he has nothing against cats.)
Sky News host Danica De Giorgio says Donald Trump’s vice-presidential pick JD Vance has “mocked” Vice President Kamala Harris in front of Air Force Two.
I think this third decision, assuming he sticks with it, in the short term, will cost Trump the election. But it will reframe the nature of conservative politics for a generation. And it is for that legacy we will remember Donald Trump, whether he wins or loses on November 5. His remaking of the Republican Party will be how he is written about in 100 years.
No Republican since Ronald Reagan and no Democrat since Franklin Roosevelt has had a deeper and almost certainly lasting impact on their party. Picking Vance, regardless of the electoral outcome, shows us how, in at least three crucial ways, the right has been transformed.
First, on the economy. Economics was what conservatives thought they had got right. They won the cold war with a superior economic system, obviously? Adapt it for the era of peace to come, right? This meant decades of free trade and the deification of globalisation. But, as George Will, the godfather of a now displaced conservatism, bemoaned “the winds of globalisation have casualties, and the Republicans did not address it”. Now they have.
Decades of free trade built up China’s industrial base and defenestrated America’s. Vance’s terrifically readable Hillbilly Elegy has become the most important book about that suicidal decline; Barack Obama’s books are snore-fests by comparison. They tell us about progressive elites and how to entrench them. Vance documents a revolution against those elites, and how to replace them.
Trump-Vance have a focus on trade protectionism and workers’ rights that was the preserve of left-wing populism. Remarkably, Vance has found allies for his war on banks from liberal Democrats such as Elizabeth Warren. Trump may have dismissed her as Pocahontas (nuance on race is not his strong suit); he has picked a running mate who agrees with her on corporate tax cuts and the minimum wage. Vance and his allies have even been chided as “pro-life socialists”.
The Vance nomination is the most enduring political legacy of the global financial crisis of 2007-08. The mortgage-stressed working class has moved into this new, larger GOP tent. According to Vance: “The old conservative movement argued if you just got government out of the way, natural forces would resolve problems. We are no longer in this situation and must take a different approach … It’s fine to take a laissez-faire approach when you are in the safety of the sunshine. But when the twilight descends and you hear the wolves, you’ve got to circle the wagons and load the muskets.”
Second, on culture. Vance’s military metaphor makes clear the second transformation he presages: the embrace of culture war. Left-wing commentators have dismissed Vance as an anti-woman, “superconservative Catholic”. The aversion to him is less that he believes in the rights of unborn children. Rather, Vance is prepared to fight the left on a cultural battlefield – reproductive rights – they assumed they had captured in perpetuity.
The Republican establishment fought shy on abortion. Ronald Reagan, for example, was agnostic on the issue. The new counter-establishment Vance represents has changed this. Daniel Patrick Moynihan was the Democrats’ greatest intellectual politician. Like Vance, he came from a broken, working-class home. And, like Vance, he acknowledged “the central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself”.
I’ve assessed in these pages how Christopher Rufo’s new manifesto was a conservative call to arms: fight the left in their own backyard. March back through the institutions stolen by progressives. Reclaim the language. Defy the woke. Vance is those prescriptions made flesh.
Democrats may win in November. But the next several elections will be fought on cultural terrain that Vance’s conservative movement will be much more adept at fighting on.
This will, in turn, alter the nature of the American left. This evolution in American politics is no bad thing and certainly long overdue. It won’t come via the Democratic ticket – despite its unique identity politics dynamics.
Kamala Harris represents a dreary, shopworn progressive consensus. Its failure is evident on the streets of San Francisco. Instead, systemic change will come via conservative forces. There is irony in that.
The more Vance and his compadres speak in the language of the working class left, the more Democrats will have to re-evaluate their capture by educated, middle class elites. The Democratic establishment’s greatest fear is a revitalised Republicanism (a New Right) that combines cultural conservatism with economic security.
The challenge facing the new GOP is the development of a technocratic class – men and women who can run government, rather than simply denounce it – capable of policy design and implementation. Comfortable with Big Tech, Vance sees Silicon Valley as an arena in which to devise New Right policy and foster conservative technocrats. He certainly won’t look for it in the universities. “They are the enemy,” he says.
Third, abroad. Vance will speed up America’s withdrawal from global leadership. American foreign policy has already become minimalist and squeamish. Biden ran away from Afghanistan. He is giving Ukraine enough support to not lose but not enough to win. He is making an Israeli victory over Hamas harder. This trend would almost certainly continue under any new conservative dispensation. If the GFC was the domestic sea in which Vance learned to swim, the botched occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, contemporaneous with it, were his lens on foreign policy.
Because Vance won’t win Trump the centrist voters he needs, the Ohioan looks an electoral liability or at least a nullity. But in picking JD Vance, three decades his junior, Trump has, possibly inadvertently, guaranteed that the transformation of his party, and of American politics, will continue long after Trump leaves the stage.
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
http://jonjayray.com/ozarc.html (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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