Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance has a moving story of overcoming difficulties, starting with his troubled childhood as a poor boy with a drug-addicted mother and an absent father. When he was born in 1984, Ronald Reagan was president, and George H. W. Bush succeeded him. Of his first 25 years of life, 17 were spent under Republican presidents. Even so, the candidate devoted to Trumpism has blamed the current president, Joe Biden, then a senator, for his childhood problems in his acceptance speech at the Republican convention in Milwaukee. Vance has given a nationalist and anti-globalization speech in which he has endorsed Trump’s slogan of America First.
“I was born in Middletown, Ohio, a small town where people loved their God, their family, their community, and their country with all their hearts. But it was also a place that had been pushed aside and forgotten by America’s ruling class in Washington. When I was in fourth grade, a career politician named Joe Biden supported the North American Free Trade Agreement, a bad trade deal that said countless good jobs to Mexico. When I was a sophomore in high school, that same career politician named Joe Biden gave China a favorable trade deal and destroyed even more good American middle-class manufacturing jobs. When I was a senior in high school, that same Joe Biden supported the disastrous invasion of Iraq and every step of the way, in small towns like mine in Ohio, or next door in Pennsylvania and Michigan and in states across the country, jobs were being shipped overseas and children were being sent to war,” he said in his speech.
What Vance has not said is that the president who signed the North American Free Trade Agreement was George H.W. Bush, the same president who sent troops to Iraq in the Gulf War. Biden was a senator at the time and his vote was not key in any of those decisions. Still, also distorting Trump’s original position on the matter, he has said: “Somehow, a New York real estate developer named Donald J. Trump was right on all these issues while Biden was wrong. Joe Biden screwed up and my community paid the price.”
Vance has played the card that worked so well for Donald Trump in the 2016 election: criticism of globalisation and free trade, which has penalised white working-class families. The vice-presidential candidate wants to help Trump win votes in the decisive Midwestern states of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan, where the Republican beat Hillary Clinton but lost to Joe Biden.
The vice presidential candidate wanted to connect his personal story with the voters of those states. Vance, who rose to fame for his memoir Hillbilly. A rural elegy, published in 2016, which was considered key to understanding the anger of the white working class who felt they had lost out in globalization and saw in Trump an opportunity for revenge.
Democrats are also courting these voters. With their tax incentives and infrastructure plans, they have secured multi-billion dollar investments. Under Joe Biden, job creation records have been broken, many of which have been industrial jobs. In addition, his staunch support for unions has helped improve working conditions in sectors such as the automobile industry.
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The senator also played the card of his youth: “Biden has been a politician in Washington for longer than I have been alive,” he said. Vance added that Vice President Harris “is not far behind.”
Convert to Trumpism
Vance was a harsh critic of Trump at the time he was first elected, referring to him in interviews as “noxious” and someone who “is taking the white working class into a very dark place.” He even once referred to him as “America’s Hitler.” On Wednesday, however, he has embraced Trumpism.
She has again suggested that the attempted assassination of Trump was related to Democratic criticism of the former president and praised his response. “They said he was a tyrant. They said he had to be stopped at all costs. But how did he respond? He called for national unity right after a killer nearly ended his life,” she said. “And then President Trump flew to Milwaukee and went back to work. That’s the man I’ve gotten to know personally over the last few years. He’s tough, and he is tough, but he cares about people. He can be defiant against a killer one moment and call for national healing the next.”
In his speech he appealed to his roots, rekindling the sporting rivalry between Ohio and Michigan, he evoked the figure of his grandmother, to whom he attributes his success in life, and he introduced the public to his mother, who has been clean and drug-free for 10 years, he said.
She has again suggested that the attempted assassination of Trump was related to Democratic criticism of the former president and praised his response. “They said he was a tyrant. They said he had to be stopped at all costs. But how did he respond? He called for national unity right after a killer nearly ended his life,” she said. “And then President Trump flew to Milwaukee and went back to work. That’s the man I’ve gotten to know personally over the last few years. He’s tough, and he is tough, but he cares about people. He can be defiant against a killer one moment and call for national healing the next.”
The vice presidential candidate, who has formally accepted the nomination, has been introduced by his wife, lawyer Usha Chilukuri Vance, and by Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr. “No matter who you are, you can be part of this movement to Make America Great Again. Look at me and my friend JD Vance, a boy from Appalachia and a boy from Trump Tower in Manhattan. We grew up in separate worlds, and yet now we both fight side by side to save the country we love,” said the former president’s son. “And by the way, JD Vance is going to be an incredible vice president,” he added.
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