Trump’s pick for running mate, US Senator J.D. Vance (R-OH), arrives on the first day of the Republican National Convention at the FiServ Forum on July 15, 2024, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.(Joe Raedle / Getty Images)
So far, the 2024 Republican National Convention in Milwaukee is less the traditional kitschy amalgam of state caucus boasting and procedural suspense and more of a joyous MAGA frat party. The mood on the convention floor was summed up as much by the event’s musical soundtrack as by the roster of heavyweight party leaders at the podium.
Monday afternoon’s most revealing moment was likely when House Speaker Mike Johnson, who was chairing the convention, began to launch into a new point of order, and then was abruptly shunted aside by the final, near-unanimous count of delegates voting to nominate Donald Trump as the party’s presidential standard-bearer. That latest round of celebration segued into a cover band’s workmanlike renditions of Grand Funk Railroad’s “We’re an American Band,” Cheap Trick’s “I Want You to Want Me,” the Doobie Brothers’ “China Grove,” and a host of other anthemic warhorses. The message couldn’t have been clearer: We don’t need party leaders instructing us that we’re about to retake the White House. We want to celebrate the election as a glorious MAGA fait accompli.
Indeed, when the Florida delegation announced the vote that officially clinched the nomination for Trump, Kool and the Gang’s “Celebration” blared through Milwaukee’s Fiserv Forum, as the GOP’s frat-boy mascots like Eric Trump and Corey Lewandowski strode across the floor wearing shit-eating grins. As I left the arena to go file this piece, I nearly stumbled into an impromptu press gaggle with former Wisconsin GOP governor Scott Walker—one of Trump’s earliest victims in the 2016 presidential cycle, now dutifully spinning for the party’s maximal leader. Bros were everywhere, feeling chuffed.
The exultation wasn’t all about Trump, of course—the delegate vote in Milwaukee was a long-foreordained coronation. It was also about his new partner in crime.
Just five or so minutes before Trump’s formal nomination was confirmed, J.D. Vance’s nomination as his running mate was announced to the convention, to more exultant cries of “Fight, fight, fight!” and “Trump, Trump, Trump!”—messages that, since the attempt on Trump’s life in Pennsylvania last weekend, are now largely interchangeable for the GOP faithful.
Amid the tumult, I struck up a conversation with Chris McGowne, an amiable, gangly lawyer in the Kansas delegation. (Full disclosure: I initially approached him because I thought he was the actor who played the character of Jonah in Veep.) He pronounced the Vance choice “an excellent pick,” one that shows how the Trump campaign “is trying to reach out to the great swath of forgotten men and women” suffering from the depredations of Joe Biden’s debt-fueled spikes in inflation. “J.D. Vance comes from a state hit with all these things,” McGowne said, “with blue-collar people literally struggling to buy groceries.” When I asked about how Vance’s string of attacks on candidate Trump during the 2016 cycle might sit with the base, McGowne was dismissive. “That’s the problem with politics. If you’re in politics, it’s like you can’t ever change your mind. It’s not about then. It’s about now.”
McGowne added that he has several friends who were Never Trumpers who now are “all in, because of the economy. People have had enough.” He’s also confident that any 11th-hour shifts that might come out of the Democratic Party in the weeks ahead won’t change this underlying dynamic. “You can literally pick a dead guy, and he’d do better than Kamala Harris,” McGowne said. “Please quote me on that.”
Trump’s embrace of Vance does represent an important shift in political reasoning within the party: In virtually every way, Vance is the antithesis of Trump’s first vice presidential pick, Mike Pence. Pence had been a box-checking choice from the Trump team in 2016, a way to placate what was then the traditional GOP base: As former president of the House Study Conference, he was an ardent and ideological right-wing culture warrior. He was also a way to reassure the GOP’s evangelical wing—then skittish about Trump’s checkered past on abortion rights, as well as his history of adultery and alleged sexual assault—that the head of the ticket could be kept on the straight and narrow.
Eight years later, none of that matters. The party is completely Trumpified. Now that Trump’s sexual predation is a matter of settled civil law, and has furnished the basis for his criminal conviction in Manhattan, it’s all readily dismissed as errant and demonic deep-state lawfare—a position corroborated for the MAGA faithful by Trump-appointed federal judge Aileen Cannon’s decision on Monday to throw out the prosecution of Trump for hoarding classified documents in his Mar-a-Lago compound.
Vance has rapidly charted the same dismal trajectory that the rest of the GOP has followed over the past nine years. Where he once likened Trump to Hitler in group chats with sympatico Never Trumpers, he now raises the Reichstag Fire–like cry in the wake of the Butler assassination attempt that Joe Biden and the Democrats had made the shooting all but inevitable.
But, as McGowne said, Vance’s complete repudiation of his past views on Trump is a feature, not a bug. Especially since Trump’s selection of Pence went badly off MAGA script on January 6, it’s clearly a boon to Trump’s ego to have a running mate who’s come cringingly into the MAGA fold as the opening act of his electoral career.
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In his successful 2022 run for the Senate, Vance tirelessly flogged pet MAGA talking points, from the bogus immigrant violent-crime wave to unsubtle callouts to the “great replacement” theory to false-equivalence comparisons of Democratic dismay over the 2016 election results to the January 6 MAGA coup attempt. Vance’s shameless pandering is precisely the quality Trump now values most in an ally—he long stood out in the field of sycophantic GOP vice-presidential hopefuls as the most prodigious bootlicker on offer.
This is why Vance is much more than a standard-issue hard-right hypocrite: He represents the future of the Republican Party. Hillbilly Elegy, Vance’s confessional account of the trials of the white working class in the country’s forgotten interior was less an act of political empathy than a MAGA platform in utero: He delivered stern jeremiads on the morale-sapping effects of income supports, while contending that the usurious policies of payday lenders actually benefited the working-class borrowers they plunged into penury. The same glaring contradictions assailed his Senate run, which was kept on critical life support via $5 million from Silicon Valley ghoul Peter Thiel as Vance presented himself as the tribune of the forgotten men and women of the deindustrialized heartland. (Thiel had earlier donated $30 million in super PAC money jointly to Vance and Arizona Republican Senate hopeful Blake Masters during their respective primary runs.)
Vance, in short, is the perfect vessel for the sort of fathomlessly cynical strain of pseudo-populism that can present itself as the salvation of the working class at a multimillion-dollar spectacle staged at an arena named for the financial services industry, on a street named for a pioneering Wisconsin feminist and civil rights leader.
The original Populist movement, it bears reminding, actually wanted to replace America’s existing financial system with a scheme of currency exchange to directly reward workers and farmers, and to curb the predations of financiers and monopolists. For the Vance brand of phony mediagenic populism, there is no better anthem than “I Want You to Want Me.”
Chris LehmannTwitterChris Lehmann is the DC Bureau chief for The Nation and a contributing editor at The Baffler. He was formerly editor of The Baffler and The New Republic, and is the author, most recently, of The Money Cult: Capitalism, Christianity, and the Unmaking of the American Dream (Melville House, 2016).