On June 28, 2016, soon-to-be Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump was in the Rust Belt of Western Pennsylvania to give a speech at a metals recycling plant, Alumisource, on the economy and trade. The days of the region’s mighty steel industry — when the metal was manufactured from iron ore dug from the earth, not recycled — was in the past. While the jobs had left, the people remained behind.
Trump used the speech, delivered three weeks before he would be nominated for the first time in Cleveland, to rail against international trade agreements and the bogeyman of globalization.
That very day, a Tuesday (as books are always published on Tuesdays) Harper unveiled a slim volume by a 31-year-old lawyer called “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis.” J.D. Vance’s book was about growing up in Appalachia and a small fading industrial city of Middletown, Ohio.
“Hillbilly Elegy” would be a national best-seller about Americans in the heartland who have been left behind and many saw it as explaining Trump’s appeal to the disaffected. Trump would win the election that fall, having carried states like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, thought to be Democratic strongholds. In 2020, Trump would lose those three states to Joe Biden and with it the White House.
Trump is now in another Midwestern city, Milwaukee, to receive his third nomination and yesterday he picked Vance, a freshman Republican senator from Ohio, as his running mate.
Now aged 39 (he turns 40 next month) Vance is younger than three of Trump’s children (Don Jr. Ivanka and Eric). Unlike a peer such as Mike Pence, Trump sees the newbie senator (he’s been in elected office just a bit more than 18 months) as a successor, not should Trump be unable to serve out the next four years if he wins this fall, but to carry on Trump’s mantle beyond that.
Which goes to the question that has existed since Trump’s crashing the Republican Party in 2016 and making it his own: Is there Trumpism after Trump? We have observed Trump for decades and absolutely misjudged his appeal and popularity in the party in 2016, which Vance’s book may have predicted.
Trump has tremendous charisma, which is why NBC put “The Apprentice” on the air 20 years ago. Without his outsized personality, which was seen in his immediate reaction to signal to his supporters after being shot on Saturday, another politician with the same policies will likely not be able to replicate the magic. But even if Vance can’t keep the brand going into 2028 and beyond, he is 1,000% loyal, which Pence didn’t give Trump on Jan. 6.
Vance was a tough critic of Trump from 2016 onwards, but when Vance made his own run for office in 2022, he went full in, accepting Trump’s lies about the 2020 election and it paid off. Trump blessed Vance with an endorsement in a crowded GOP primary for an open seat. In a seven-person contest Vance came in first, with less than a third of the vote. He then won in November. As a senator, he is entirely for, by and about Trump.
And yesterday, his loyalty got him the spot on the ticket.
Should he win, he’ll be the youngest veep since Richard Nixon was Ike’s No. 2. Nixon did take over, but it was 16 years later. So is Vance ready to be president during the next four years? He’ll have to answer that during this campaign.