Former President Donald Trump’s running mate on his way to the White House, Senator JD Vance, accepted the Republican Party’s nomination for Vice President yesterday, blaming the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) for taking good jobs from the United States to Mexico after 30 years.
“When I was in fourth grade, a career politician named Joe Biden supported NAFTA, a bad trade deal that sent countless good American manufacturing jobs to Mexico,” Vance, 39, said in his acceptance speech for the vice presidential nomination.
The Ohio senator overlooked the fact that his own party was the one that cast the most votes in the Senate for the approval of the agreement with Mexico and Canada in 1994 – and which Trump replaced with the USMCA – with 34 Republican votes against 27 from the Democrats, including, as he said, Biden’s.
Today, Trump will speak at his party’s convention to formally accept his nomination for president.
Vance appeals to the working class
Senator JD Vance used his keynote speech at the Republican National Convention last night, as former President Donald Trump’s running mate, to appeal to the working class in the industrial states of the so-called Rust Belt, key to winning the November 5 election.
Born in the old steel town of Middletown to a family of Appalachian migrants, Vance used his life story to try to connect with the workers of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, without whom his Democratic rivals cannot win the White House.
“I promise you one more thing: to the people of Middletown, Ohio (my hometown) and to all the marginalized communities, I will be a Vice President who will never forget where he came from,” he said.
Vance, 39, headlined the third night of the Republican National Convention flanked by his wife, Usha Vance, a lawyer and daughter of Indian immigrants, and presented himself as the heir to the nationalist populism promoted by Trump since his 2016 campaign.
“I think the message is very attractive in places like western Pennsylvania or eastern Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin where we feel forgotten. We were the center of the manufacturing industry, but we don’t have a government that recognizes that we should bet on our own interest,” Josh Kail, a Pennsylvania delegate present at the speech, told Grupo REFORMA.
Introduced by Donald Trump Jr., the Yale University lawyer and former Marine insisted time and again on speaking to what he considered the “forgotten people,” the working class in states affected by deindustrialization, and criticized American elites.
“In small towns like mine, in Ohio, or the ones next door, in Pennsylvania or Michigan, in states all across our country, jobs were shipped overseas and our sons were sent to war,” Vance told an audience that included the former president himself and his family.
The vice presidential candidate also took the opportunity to blame President Joe Biden for the drug epidemic affecting his communities.
“Our country has been flooded with cheap Chinese goods, cheap foreign labor, and deadly Chinese fentanyl. Joe Biden got it wrong, and my community has paid the price,” she said.
Under the US Electoral College’s indirect voting system, the winning candidate in the November election must obtain 270 of 538 electoral votes, of which the four Rust Belt states have a combined 61.
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