Former President Donald Trump couldn’t remember the name of the controversial Ohio Republican candidate he endorsed for Senate.
“We’ve endorsed ... J.P.? Right?” he asked at a Nebraska political rally Sunday, appearing to look to someone offstage from the podium for help while he was addressing the crowd.
“J.D. Mandel,” he finally chose. “And he’s doing great.”
The name he was searching for was J.D. Vance, venture capitalist and “Hillbilly Elegy” author who has no experience in politics. (And it’s Josh Mandel; he’s running against Vance in the GOP primary on May 3.)
(Mary Papenfuss. “Trump Can't Recall Name Of That Ohio Guy He Endorsed For Senate.” Huffington Post. May 02, 2022.)
In Ohio, GOP candidates are embracing Trump for votes. While the candidates fight for survival, voters in Ohio are left to read between the lines.
In the case of J.D. Vance, days after giving Vance his endorsement, Trump told a crowd at a rally in Ohio that Vance was the GOP's best shot to take down Tim Ryan, the northeast Ohio congressman who is running in the Democratic primary for the open Senate seat.
“I studied this very closely," Trump said at the rally. "I like a lot of the other people in the race. I liked them a lot. But we have to pick the one that’s going to win. This guy is tough as hell. He’s going to win."
Vance's fundraising took off after the endorsement, and his poll numbers spiked. Each of the Republican candidates in the primary has built his or her campaign around an implicit hypothesis about how to appeal to Mr. Trump, and thus about what Trumpism is in the first place.
What About Vance's Prior Opinion Of Trump?
Back in 2016 and 2017 Vance referred to Trump as “reprehensible,” backing “Never Trump” presidential candidate Evan McMullin, and ostensibly responding to Trump’s Access Hollywood scandal by tweeting, “Fellow Christians, everyone is watching us when we apologize for this man. Lord help us.”
In an October 2016 tweet, Vance also wrote, “Trump makes people I care about afraid. Immigrants, Muslims, etc. Because of this I find him reprehensible. God wants better of us.” During Trump’s first months in office, Vance continued his condemnation of the new president, writing, “In 4 years, I hope people remember that it was those of us who empathized with Trump’s voters who fought him most aggressively.”
But, after Vance's past criticism of Trump began threatening his standing among conservatives, the Hillbilly Elegy author turned GOP Senate hopeful took to the former president’s favorite network to beg for forgiveness.
“Like a lot of people, I criticized Trump back in 2016,” Vance lamented during an appearance on Fox News. “And I ask folks not to judge me based on what I said in 2016, because I’ve been very open about the fact that I did say those critical things and I regret them, and I regret being wrong about the guy.”
Vance’s anti-Trump tweets, which had been deleted, were resurfaced by CNN just as he officially launched his campaign for the Ohio seat that Republican senator Rob Portman is vacating at the conclusion of his term next year.
(Caleb Ecarma. “Sad: J.D. Vance Desperately Tries to Disown Anti-Trump Tweets.” Vanity Fair. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/07/jd-vance-anti-trump-tweets. July 06. 2021.)
Let's Look At Vance
Published on the eve of the 2016 elections, J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy made him, then 31, a literary sensation. It sold more than three million copies, and is still a staple of high school and college curriculums.
Christopher Caldwell, opinion writer and author of The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties, says that pundits most likely speed-read the book for its sociological “takeaway,” a description of the left-behind whites who then seemed instrumental in rallying the Republican Party behind Mr. Trump and would soon put him in the White House.
(Christopher Caldwell. “The Decline of Ohio and the Rise of J.D. Vance.” The New York Times. April 29, 2022.)
While Vance retained a lot of the exotic patriotism of his kinfolk, even to the extent of choking up whenever he heard “Proud to Be an American,” he drew the line at their chosen candidate. In spirited interviews, articles, tweets and text messages throughout the 2016 election season,Vance made negative comments about Trump. He didn't vote for him. And, he claimed then to “see through” Trump's evil intentions.
Vance's political opinions didn't stop there. In 2021, Vance told podcaster Jack Murphy, who heads a men's group called Liminal Order, that he believed conservatives "should seize the institutions of the left. And turn them against the left. We need like a de-Baathification program, a de-woke-ification program.” If Trump were to win re-election in 2024, Vance told Murphy, Trump should "Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people."
(James Pogue. "Inside the New Right, Where Peter Thiel Is Placing His Biggest Bets.” Vanity Fair. April 20, 2022.)
Want more? In February 2022, Vance disowned comments he had made about the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. On Steve Bannon's podcast, Vance had said "I gotta be honest with you: I don't really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another" and "spare me the performative affection for the Ukraine." Vance released a statement about the comments and called the invasion "unquestionably a tragedy."
The statement repeated the "performative affection" remark and criticized "the obsession with Ukraine from our idiot leaders", which, according to the statement, "serves no function except to distract us from our actual problems."
(Zoe Richards."Backpedalling J.D. Vance Decides He Actually Does Give a Shit About Ukraine". The Daily Beast. February 24, 2022.)
“We are going to break up the big tech companies, ladies and gentlemen. We have to do it. You cannot have a real country if a bunch of corrupt scumbags who take their marching orders from the Communist Chinese tell us what we’re allowed to say and how we’re allowed to say it.”
– J.D. Vance at a rally for Donald Trump in Ohio (2022)
Then just last Friday, Vance bizarrely suggested President Joe Biden was trying to “kill a bunch of MAGA voters” with fentanyl. He indicated that the president was intentionally allowing drug traffickers across the southern border to sell the often deadly drug to all the right-wing “heartland” Republican voters hooked on drugs.
Apparently, Democratic voters would be unaffected by such a crazy plan because they don’t use drugs, was Vance’s implication. Back to reality – seizures of fentanyl at the border increased tenfold in Biden’s first year, compared to the Trump administration, statistics show.
(Mary Papenfuss. “Trump Can't Recall Name Of That Ohio Guy He Endorsed For Senate.” Huffington Post. May 02, 2022.)
Bottom Line
The nearly 130 candidates Trump has endorsed so far in 2022 cast a wide net – and test the former president's influence at the helm of the Republican party. In Ohio's crowded Republican primary for an open Senate seat, the candidates are intensely jockeying for Trump's blessing, positioning themselves as being significantly more "pro-Trump" or "America first" than their competitors and seeking face-time with him.
But not one man – Matt Dolan. The state senator has declined to kiss the ring, and instead run as a traditional conservative – pouring $10.6 million of his own money into the effort.
Dolan is the lone candidate who refuses to toe the Trump line. He has accused the former president of “perpetuat[ing] lies about the outcome” of the 2020 election.
He called the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol a “failure of leadership” by Trump and an “attack on democracy.” At a March 21 debate, Dolan was the only candidate to raise his hand when the moderator asked who believed it was time for Trump to stop talking about the 2020 election.
“What we sought to do from the outset was illustrate to folks that this race has to be about Ohio,” said Chris Maloney, Dolan’s campaign consultant. “You can be for pro-Trump policies and not share his personality, and that’s what is taking hold among Ohio Republicans.”
(Jim W. Dean, Managing Editor. “Republican who refuses to bend the knee to Trump surges in Ohio Senate race.” Politico. April 29, 2022.)
As for Trump endorsing candidates, Republican Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie says former President Donald Trump bases his endorsements on "emotional decisions" rather than "political analysis."
And, if you are like me, the purely political positioning and waffling is so sad … and yet so indicative of the rampant butt-kissing just to get elected. Integrity seems to matter not when votes are on the line. How can Republicans cling to a man whose White nationalism, narcissism, and anarchism have led to so much division and hatred? I believe the GOP's refusal to distance themselves from Trump spells more dark days for America – times when misinformation will reign and Trump's revenge will further cripple the political process.
Note:
Forgiveness? Trump isn't big on that. So what is the connection that made Trump and Vance such loving bedfellows? Peter Thiel.
Peter Thiel is the incredibly wealthy venture capitalist who was an early investor in Facebook and a co-founder of PayPal. Thiel has steered millions upon millions into campaigns boosting both Trump and Vance. That's Peter Thiel, who is rich enough to buy and sell both J.D. Vance and Donald Trump many times over.
Early in the campaign, Thiel cut a $10 million check to a super PAC supporting Vance's candidacy called Protect Ohio Values.
Thiel's friend Trump doesn't like losing, and he's probably getting tired of so many of his endorsed candidates going down the drain. He likely doesn't want it to happen again in Ohio, where the polls show Vance is within striking distance of winning, but not leading the polls.
So, Politico reported that Thiel had dumped another $3.5 million into Protect Ohio Values.
Why so generous to Vance? Well, because Trump wants it; and because Vance used to work for Thiel's Mithral Capital in San Francisco. Last year, Thiel was one of the investors in a new venture capital firm that Vance started in Cincinnati — Narva Capital.
"Peter Thiel spends $10 million the way you or I spend $100,'' said Mark R. Weaver, a longtime Ohio-based GOP campaign strategist. "It's not a lot of money to him."
Weaver said the Thiel connection is obvious, but he thinks Donald Trump Jr. might also have had some influence on his father's decision.
"Donald Junior and Vance have been friends; and I think his son finally got to him on this,'' Weaver said.
(Howard Wilkinson. “Analysis: Why Trump endorsed J.D. Vance, who once called him an 'idiot' (and worse).” BBC News Hour. 91.7 WVXU. April 21, 2022.)
Why does Trump matter so much in Ohio? A look back to some demographics gathered during the Election of 2016 provides answers. Ohio has struggled economically and is 80% white, with a population heavy on working-class voters who have moved to the right over the last decade. That’s significantly higher than the national average (somewhere around 70%).
The state’s lack of diversity compared to the nation is a seeming GOP advantage in Ohio given the differences in voting between white and nonwhite voters.
Consider that Obama won nonwhite voters 80%-20% in 2012 but lost whites roughly 60%-40% that year, according to exit polls. Democrats compete in Ohio because a big chunk of the state’s nonwhite vote (about two-thirds or more) is African American (black voters often give 90% or more of their votes to Democrats) and because Ohio’s white vote is not as Republican as the national average (Obama performed at least a couple of points better with Ohio whites than he did nationally).
According to the Upshot at The New York Times (2016), the national electorate should be nearly 45% non-college educated white and nearly 30% college-educated white (that site generally believes that exit polls overstate the percentage of nonwhites and college graduates in the electorate).
In Ohio, based on The New York Times’ analysis and University of Virginia research, the Ohio electorate in 2016 was about half non-college white and a third college-educated white. In other words, the gap between non-college and college-educated whites in Ohio is a little bit larger than the national gap, so a growing educational difference in white voter preference – with Trump overperforming with non-college graduates and underperforming with college graduates – probably works more to Trump’s advantage in Ohio than it might in some other states.
So for historical and demographic reasons, we should expect Trump to do better in Ohio than he does nationally.
(Kyle Kondik. “Why Trump will do better in Ohio than he does nationally.” Sabato's Crystal Ball. University of Virginia. October 2, 2016.)
Tom Nichols, contributing writer at The Atlantic and the author of its newsletter Peacefield, writes …
“But what should we call J. D. Vance, the self-described hillbilly turned Marine turned Ivy League law-school graduate turned venture capitalist turned Senate candidate? Words fail. His perfidy to his own people in Ohio is too big to allow him to escape with the label of “opportunist,” and yet the shabbiness and absurdity of his Senate campaign is too small to brand him a defector or a heretic.
“My friend Preet Bharara, the former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, tried to describe Vance recently and came up with 'pathetic loser poser fake jerk,' but that is a lot of words. To distill the essence of Vance as a public figure, the word that enters my mind is an anatomical reference beginning with the letter a. (ass).”
(Tom Nichols. “The Moral Collapse of J. D. Vance.” The Atlantic. July 14, 2021.)
Vance has not only repudiated his earlier views on Trump, but has done so with ruthless cynicism, embracing Trump and his madness while winking at the media with a What can you do? shrug about the stupidity of Ohio’s voters. “If I actually care about these people and the things I say I care about,” he told Time, “I need to just suck it up and support him.”
“There is a cultural movement in the white working class to blame problems on society or the government, and that movement gains adherents by the day.”
– J.D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis
Vance favors punitive tariffs, and he’s taken up the right-wing crusade against critical race theory. He won’t say the 2020 election was stolen, exactly, but contends it was “unfair.”
As for his evolution on Trump, Vance describes it as an awakening. “It’s sort of a – what is the word people online use – blackpilling or redpilling or whitepilling,” he says. “I’m not trying to cop his style. But when you stop trusting what the press is saying in the same way, it does have a transformative effect on the way you see not just Donald Trump the man, but the whole movement.”
(Molly Ball. “Breakfast with J.D. Vance, Anti-Trump Author Turned Pro-Trump Candidate.” Time. July 7, 2021.)
“I’m not just a flip-flopper, I’m a flip-flop-flipper on Trump.”
I know conservative Republicans will not read this blog entry when they see the headline I employed to label the work. However, these are the same folks that claim they detest liars, want to reform the “swamp” of politics, and return integrity to government. I am simply reporting about politics in the Buckeye State. I cannot believe that people want to continue their Trump support. Don't they question the need for the Ohio GOP candidates' death-grip on a MAGA direction when they could nominate better, more qualified, and less divisive people for office?
With book banning, less gun control, attacks on women's rights, and increased racism, Ohio faces so many challenges requiring honest, dedicated leaders, not “pathetic loser poser fake jerks” or “asses.” We live in a democratic society, I understand majority rules, yet I fear the next election may put officials in office who further choke diversity and equality in Ohio. Hell, their infamous leader can't even remember their names.
“Fool Me Once, Shame On You” – the earliest recording of this proverb in print is from a book called The Court and Character of King James by Anthony Weldon, 1651, where it reads: “The Italians having a Proverb, ‘He that deceives me once, its his fault; but if twice, its my fault.'”
"Won't Get Fooled Again"
We'll be fighting in
the streets
With our children at our feet
And the morals that
they worship will be gone
And the men who spurred us on
Sit in
judgment of all wrong
They decide and the shotgun sings the
song
I'll tip my hat to the new constitution
Take a bow for
the new revolution
Smile and grin at the change all around
Pick
up my guitar and play
Just like yesterday
Then I'll get on my
knees and pray
We don't get fooled again
The change, it had
to come
We knew it all along
We were liberated from the fold,
that's all
And the world looks just the same
And history ain't
changed
'Cause the banners, they are flown in the last war
I'll
tip my hat to the new constitution
Take a bow for the new
revolution
Smile and grin at the change all around
Pick up my
guitar and play
Just like yesterday
Then I'll get on my knees and pray
We don't get
fooled again
No, no!
I'll move myself and my family
aside
If we happen to be left half alive
I'll get all my papers
and smile at the sky
Oh I know that the hypnotized never lie
Do
ya?
There's nothing in the streets
Looks any different to
me
And the slogans are replaced, by the bye
And a parting on
the left
Is now a parting on the right
And the beards have all
grown longer overnight
Yeah
Same as the old boss
– The Who, Written By Pete Townshend (1971)
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