Asked about his shifting rhetoric on race, the Vance campaign replied, "The establishment media loves to inject race into every conversation, but voters aren't dumb, and that's exactly why trust in the media is at a record low."
Trump's candidacy is music to their ears. He criticizes the factories shipping jobs overseas. His apocalyptic tone matches their lived experiences on the ground. He seems to love to annoy the elites, which is something a lot of people wish they could do but can't because they lack a platform.
The president of the AFL-CIO said in a statement that "Sen. JD Vance likes to play union supporter on the picket line, but his record proves that to be a sham. He has introduced legislation to allow bosses to bypass their workers' unions with phony corporate-run unions, disparaged striking UAW members while collecting hefty donations from one of the major auto companies, and opposed the landmark Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, which would end union-busting 'right to work' laws and make it easier for workers to form unions and win strong contracts."
Vance indicated that America needs more people working to finance the longevity of social security: "You get more revenue from more people being in the labor force, from higher productivity growth, from higher wages, from transitioning young people who are not working into the work force," he pointed out.
Asked if [he supported] raising taxes to support social security, Vance said he was not against the idea but questioned whether that would solve the challenge long-term "with demographics that are getting worse and worse [we can't[ solve the problem by taxing rich people. You have to fix the underlying issue."
In November of 2023, after Ohio approved the abortion rights amendment by 57%, he says we must accept that people don't want blanket abortion bans, and he says that the Republican party has lost the voters' trust.
If he's doing this because he did learn from the vote that he's not in line with Ohio, then I would give credit to him. Is he doing the right thing by absorbing the sentiment of Ohio, who he represents and saying, "okay, I better represent my state because that's what they want." Or is he a rank opportunist that's just sucking up to Trump?
The future of Vance's company, meanwhile, may be threatened by his decision to run for the Senate. Only a year after launching Narya, Vance took a leave of absence from the firm to pursue his political ambitions. Now the firm, based in Cincinnati, is being run by one of his partners from Darien, Connecticut -- a bastion of the kind of wealthy coastal elites that Vance frequently scorns as a full-throated ally of Donald Trump.
A: Stop pretending that every problem is a structural problem, something imposed on the poor from the outside. I see a significant failure on the Left to understand how these problems develop. They see rising divorce rates as the natural consequence of economic stress. Undoubtedly, that's partially true. Some of these family problems run far deeper. They see school problems as the consequence of too little money (despite the fact that the per pupil spend in many districts is quite high), and ignore that, as a teacher once told me, "They want us to be shepherds to these kids, but they ignore that many of them are raised by wolves." Again, they're not all wrong: certainly some schools are unfairly funded. But there's this weird refusal to deal with the poor as moral agents in their own right. In some cases, the best public policy can do is help people make better choices, or expose them to better influences through better family policy.
But he recently [said] that if some local companies support certain Inflation Reduction Act provisions, lawmakers might want to keep them instead of repealing the entire law: "The Inflation Reduction Act is mostly a lot of green energy stuff. It's also added a lot of costs out there and a lot of federal spending that's forced the inflation prices," said Vance. "And I also think that it's sort of hastening a transition away from things like the gas driven cars that most Americans don't want. So I think there's a lot of bad policy in there. And I'd like to see a lot of it gotten rid of."
GLAAD wrote in its post about Vance's record: "There is no evidence that discussing LGBTQ people 'sexualizes' anyone. Experts say false rhetoric about grooming diminishes understanding about actual abuse."
Vance also spoke about bills that would censor discussions of LGBTQ issues on Fox News' "Tucker Carlson Tonight" in April 2022, arguing that teachers were also hiding their efforts to teach children about sexual orientation or gender identity. "So, one of the things we're learning, Tucker, is that this is being forced by some of these really radical teachers, and they're hiding it from the parents," he said. "'That's maybe the most pernicious part."
He's a lead sponsor of the "Railway Safety Act," S. 576, a bipartisan bill that would mandate a set of new safety standards and fines for the freight rail sector, especially trains carrying hazardous materials.
At a March 2023 hearing on the bill, Vance argued that some in the GOP "seem to think any public safety enhancements for the rail industry is somehow a violation of the free market." The legislation has the support of Senate Democrats and some Republicans but has faced opposition from GOP leadership. It remains stalled.
J.D. Vance (R - OH) Holds office U.S. Senate
The reason Europe has become weaker is because they've deindustrialized. And why have they deindustrialized? Because they've pursued a green energy agenda, following the lead of the Biden administration, and that necessarily empowers China and Russia. We need to acknowledge that it's our decisions that are making these countries stronger. We need to fix that, not whine at countries that have 10 million people.
A: there are two big problems with what the Biden administration is doing. First of all, it's a fundamentally incoherent policy. On the one hand, they're saying too many Palestinian civilians have been killed. With the other hand, they're depriving the Israelis of the precision-guided weapons that actually cut down on civilian casualties. So, if you're worried about Palestinian casualties, the stated policy here actually doesn't make a ton of sense. And I think the bigger problem here if we zoom out is, look, and I hate to say this, but America is not good at micromanaging wars in the Middle East. The Israelis are our allies. Let them prosecute this war the way they see fit.
Vance in an interview on NBC's Meet the Press [this week] is softening his former anti -abortion stance in the wake of that proposed GOP platform that doesn't call for a national abortion ban. On Meet the Press, he said he supported the Supreme Court decision to allow Mifepristone access. This is one of the abortion drugs and he says it should be legally accessible.
He says, "Donald Trump supports it and so do I." But Donald Trump didn't use to support it, and back in 2022, when Vance was running for Senate, he was an abortion hardliner. Vance said he was 100% pro -life. He wanted to end abortion once and for all.
Vance, who last year described himself "as pro life as anyone," didn't mention, or allude to, abortion in his [GOP Convention] address.
Some social conservatives were hopeful that Vance, who has in the past equated abortion to murder, would nudge Trump to the right on the issue. Instead, Vance has alarmed anti-abortion advocates by voicing support for mifepristone, the widely used abortion pill. They fear that Vance's brand of "New Right'' conservatism, which they hoped would give them a seat again at the GOP table, is falling prey to electoral calculations.
"The State Department is wasting its time and your tax dollars pushing far-left gender ideology," Vance said. "There are only two genders--passports issued by the US government should recognize that simple fact. I am proud to introduce this bill to restore some sanity in our federal bureaucracy."
[Investopedia.com definition: "ESG investing is used to screen investments based on corporate policies and to encourage companies to act responsibly. ESG investing refers to how companies score on responsibility metrics and standards for potential investments. Environmental criteria gauge how a company safeguards the environment. Social criteria examine how it manages relationships with employees, suppliers, customers, and communities. Governance measures a company’s leadership, executive pay, audits, internal controls, and shareholder rights.
Vance has co-sponsored Texas Republican Sen. John Cornyn's Back the Blue Act of 2023, which would increase minimum and maximum sentences, up to life imprisonment or death, for assaulting or killing law enforcement officers. Vance has also introduced resolutions expressing support for law enforcement and condemning the District of Columbia's Comprehensive Policing and Justice Reform Amendment Act of 2022.
In his remarks, Vance blasted the D.C. policing reform for making officers less safe by restricting the use of riot gear and the ability to chase violent offenders, and for "these ridiculous exhaustion requirements before they can use lethal force to protect themselves and people around them."
Folks back home speak of heroin like an apocalyptic invader, something that assailed the town mysteriously and without warning. Yet the truth is that heroin crept slowly into Middletown's families and communities--not by invasion but by invitation.
Very few Americans are strangers to addiction. Shortly before I graduated from law school, I learned that my own mother lay comatose in a hospital, the consequence of an apparent heroin overdose. Yet heroin was only her latest drug of choice. Prescription opioids--"hillbilly heroin" some call it, to highlight its special appeal among white working-class folks like us--had already landed Mom in the hospital. In our community, there has long been a large appetite to dull the pain; heroin is just the newest vehicle.
Plenty of politicians seek to bolster their image by pointing to their philanthropic efforts. In reality, though, it's not clear what, if anything, Vance has achieved through his charity. A review by Insider of Our Ohio Renewal's tax filings showed that in its first year, the nonprofit spent more on "management services" provided by its executive director -- who also serves as Vance's top political advisor -- than it did on programs to fight opioid abuse. The group, which has shut down its website and abandoned its Twitter account after publishing only two tweets, says it commissioned a survey to gauge the needs and welfare of Ohioans, but Vance's campaign declined to provide any documentation. A spokeswoman for Ohio's largest anti-opioid coalition told Insider that she hadn't heard of Vance's organization.
He's co-sponsored Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee's Restoring the First Amendment and Right to Peaceful Civil Disobedience Act of 2023, which would repeal a 1994 law that buffers patients from harassment by protesters outside clinics. Vance's Consequences for Climate Vandals Act would double the maximum penalty for property damage from protests at the National Gallery of Art from five to 10 years in prison.
He has sought to put significant blame on China for greenhouse gas emissions. In a 2023 hearing, Vance dismissed carbon offsets in aviation as "climate reparations": "Why are we effectively penalizing the American aviation while we don't require, or even attempt, to force the Chinese to do the same to their aviation industry?"
Vance last year introduced the "Drive American Act," S. 2962, which would repeal the federal tax credit for electric vehicles and instead offer tax credits for U.S.-made vehicles powered only by gasoline or diesel.
The "childless cat lady" comments sparked a widespread backlash against Vance when they resurfaced on social media following his nomination to the Republican presidential ticket.
Vance later tried to clean up his comments on Megyn Kelly's podcast last week. "Obviously, it was a sarcastic comment. I've got nothing against cats," said Vance, adding that his remarks were not about criticizing people without children, but rather focused on policy and claimed the Democratic Party has become "anti-family" and "anti-child."
"I care about declining fertility because I've seen the role of fatherhood, the positive role that it can play in the lives of my friends and in my community," he said. "I've seen young men who were relatively driftless but became rooted and grounded when they had children."
"I've seen people who become more attached to their communities, to their families, to their country because they have children," he added. "And in my own life, I felt the demons that come from a traumatic childhood melt away in the laughter and the love of my own son. So, I would say that we should care about declining fertility, not just because it's bad for our economy, but because we think babies are good."
Though he generally didn't specify the gender of the childless people he was criticizing, the context of his remarks made it seem he was primarily speaking to women. Citing a conversation that had recently unfolded on Twitter, Vance described a "ridiculous effort by millennial feminist writers" to talk about why there are good reasons not to have children and how some of them were glad they didn't have kids and even to encourage "people who had had children to talk about why they regretted having children."
Vance went on to say that people who have had children "have actually built something more meaningful with their lives," and that is why "we have to go to war against that ideology and the people behind it."
Of the threat of Russian expansion into other European countries, Vance said: "We have to analyze these things in their own historical context. And Vladimir Putin might be a bad guy, and in fact I think he is, but he's not nearly as powerful in relative terms as Hitler‘s Germany was in the late 1930s. So the idea that he poses a risk to the broader European continent is just absurd to me."
"I've been trying to make sure we don't take an escalatory posture," Vance said. The best role for the United States, he said, is to help facilitate a peaceful resolution to the Russian-Ukraine conflict--which Trump claims he could do as president--and "prevent this thing from escalating into World War III."
"People will not fight for abstractions, but they will fight for their home. And if this movement of ours is going to succeed, and if this country is going to thrive, our leaders have to remember that America is a nation, and its citizens deserve leaders who put its interests first," he said, as he accepted the GOP nomination for vice president.
Vance has said in the past that the U.S. lacks the military industrial base to defend Ukraine against Russia, and that countering the rise of China should be the priority. The Vance nomination swings the Trump ticket toward Republicans who call their approach "realism and restraint."
"Hillbilly Elegy" describes the impact of globalization on Cincinnati, where many of the once-plentiful steel and other factory jobs had moved offshore and left a community struggling economically and with substance abuse issues. "I think the most important lesson is that America is like a house, and the foundation of that house is our own people and our own manufacturing base; we've allowed that industrial base to atrophy," Vance said. "Until that foundation is repaired, I don't want to hear about us being the policeman of the world."
That means "putting more people to work, rebuilding our industrial base, building more stuff, producing more of the things we can rely on--is a better use of American dollars."
My best guess is that he's campaigning hard to be the vice presidential pick for Trump. He was among several Republicans that attended Trump's hush money trial in New York City yesterday as Michael Cohen took the stand and Vance made several tweets on X. He says the trial is psychological torture.
He dissed key witness and former Trump fixer, Michael Cohen. And then he says that district attorney Alvin Bragg is keeping supporters away from outside of the courthouse. [Vance said], "We started in Trump Tower with a beautiful view of Central Park and then came to a dingy courthouse with people like Alvin Bragg. And he says Trump is expected to sit for six weeks and listen to the Michael Cohens of the world."
A common thread among Trump's faithful, even among those whose individual circumstances remain unspoiled, is that they hail from broken communities. These are places where good jobs are impossible to come by. Where people have lost their faith and abandoned the churches. Where too many young people spend their days stoned instead of working and learning. [These are,] in the aggregate, a social crisis of historic proportions. There is no group of people hurtling more quickly to social decay. No group of people fears the future more, and exposes its children to such significant domestic chaos.
Trump's promises are the needle in America's collective vein. What Trump offers is an easy escape from the pain. Trump is cultural heroin. He makes some feel better for a bit. But he cannot fix what ails them, and one day they'll realize it.
In 2019, he set up his own venture capital operation, Narya Capital, with backing from PayPal founder Peter Thiel, a sometime libertarian and rare Republican in Silicon Valley.
In early 2021, Mr Thiel gave $10m to a committee seeking to recruit Mr Vance as a Senate candidate to succeed Rob Portman, who had announced he would not be seeking a third term in 2022. In July 2021, Mr Vance officially entered the race.
The announcement came with an abrupt change in tone regarding former President Trump, with Mr Vance apologising for previously calling him "reprehensible" and repeating Mr Trump's claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election. In April, Mr Vance secured a much-coveted endorsement from Mr Trump.
A: Well, I think the speech itself was a perfect microcosm of why I love and am terrified of Donald Trump. On the one hand, he criticized the elites and actually acknowledge the hurt of so many working class voters. After so many years of Republican politicians refusing to even talk about factory closures, Trump's message is an oasis in the desert. But of course he spent way too much time appealing to people's fears, and he offered zero substance for how to improve their lives. It was Trump at his best and worst. My biggest fear with Trump is that, because of the failures of the Republican and Democratic elites, the bar for the white working class is too low. They're willing to listen to Trump about rapist immigrants and banning all Muslims because other parts of his message are clearly legitimate.
Two years ago, the HuffPost suggested that Vance may have in the past supported social security cuts citing an old blog post where he noted that entitlement programs were widening the federal budget deficits. Vance, though, said that was not his view. "I don't support cuts to social security or Medicare and think privatizing social security is a bad idea," HuffPost quoted him saying to the publication.
During that campaign, Vance also said that Americans needed more workers to help finance social security. "We've got to, frankly, stop spending so much on welfare benefits and start having a lot more workers who are paying into the system," he was quoted as saying by AARP.
That was apparent when Vance said that if mainland China attacked Taiwan, the US would lose a lot of chips and new technologies "that are necessary to power the modern economy". "We can't let the Chinese walk into Taiwan," Vance said.
Beijing sees Taiwan as part of China to be reunited by force if necessary, and most countries do not recognise Taiwan as an independent state. These include the United States, though it is opposed to any forcible change to the status quo and is bound by law to provide arms to Taiwan for its defence. The US started to limit exports of semiconductors to China during the Trump administration to curb Beijing's hi-tech development, which Washington saw as a threat to its defence.
"Like any self-respecting hillbilly," he had wanted to go to the Middle East to kill terrorists in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York City, Vance wrote in his 2016 bestselling memoir "Hillbilly Elegy." He now sees unsettling similarities between the run-up to the Iraq War and current calls for more U.S. support to Ukraine.
He essentially accused his colleagues of getting fooled, just like he was when he believed in the Iraq War. "My excuse is that I was a high school senior. What is the excuse of many people who were in this chamber or in the House of Representatives at the time and are now singing the exact same song when it comes to Ukraine? Have we learned nothing?" he said.
When asked in 2022 whether he thought it would be better for couples in violent relationships to stay married for the sake of their children, Vance said through a spokesperson that he rejected the premise of the "bogus question."
Vance said his reference to "one of the great tricks" of the sexual revolution was the contention that "domestic violence would somehow go down if progressives got what they want, when in fact modern society's war on families has made our domestic violence situation much worse. Any fair person would recognize I was criticizing the progressive frame on this issue, not embracing it."
The reported rate of domestic violence in the U.S. has declined over Vance's lifetime.
His grandfather, whom he called Papaw, was "a violent drunk," Vance wrote in the book, and his grandmother, whom he called Mamaw, was a "violent nondrunk." One night, he said, Mamaw threatened to kill Papaw if he came home drunk again. A week later, Papaw came home drunk and fell asleep on the couch.
"Mamaw, never one to tell a lie, calmly retrieved a gasoline canister from the garage, poured it all over her husband, lit a match, and dropped it on his chest," Vance wrote. He said his grandfather burst into flames that were extinguished by his 11-year-old daughter.
Vance's grandparents were separated for many years, but did not divorce, he wrote. They were "together until the end, 'til death do us part," Vance said [recently]. "That was a really important thing to my grandmother and my grandfather. That was clearly not true by the '70s or '80s."
Asked what can be done to stop school shootings, he said further restricting access to guns, as many Democrats advocate, won't end them, noting they happen in states with both lax and strict gun laws. He touted efforts in Congress to give schools more money for security.
"I don't like that this is a fact of life," Vance said. "But if you are a psycho and you want to make headlines, you realize that our schools are soft targets. And we have got to bolster security at our schools."
He called the shooting in Georgia an "awful tragedy," and said the families need prayers and sympathy.
A: Well, I think that he's clearly an adversary. He is a competitor. But I think that we also have to be smart about diplomacy, too. Just because we don't like somebody doesn't mean that we can't occasionally engage in conversations with them. And I think it's important if we're ever going to end the war in Ukraine, we're going to have to engage in some sort of negotiation between Ukraine, Russia, our NATO allies in Europe.
A: When you say that he's an adversary, you're not willing to call him an enemy?
Q: I don't want to be in a war with Vladimir Putin's Russia. I think that we should try to pursue avenues of peace. I'd also call China a competitor, but we're not in a war with China either. I do think, though, that China constitutes the biggest threat that we have for the United States of America. And I think that we have to be serious about it. But I think we have to be careful about the language that we use in international diplomacy.
I think a lot of countries are going to try to manipulate our voters. They're going to try to manipulate our elections. That's what they do. I think the bigger question is, what is in our best interest vis-a-vis Russia, not what price Russia should pay for putting out social media videos.
I don't think that we should set American foreign policy based on a foreign country spreading videos on social media. I think we should set American foreign policy based on what's in our best interest.
The entire point that I'm making about Trump's foreign policy is, this is a guy who wants to use American troops sparingly. He wants peace through strength. It's why his foreign policy was so successful during his first term. It's all the same people who were wrong about Iraq. They were wrong about the quagmire in Afghanistan. They were wrong about Syria. They were wrong about everything. And now they're coming after Donald Trump, because he actually has a realistic and cautious foreign policy.
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The above quotations are from Vice Presidential possibilities for 2024.
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