J.D. Vance has a long history of telling the truth about Donald Trump, which is proving awfully inconvenient now that Vance’s chief public role as Trump’s vice presidential running mate is to lie about him and “sanewash” his most unhinged claims at every conceivable opportunity.
The latest example of Vance’s unfortunate truth-telling? In direct message exchanges from February 2020, Vance flatly declared that he saw Trump’s presidency as largely a failure by one of Vance’s own most important metrics.
“Trump has just so thoroughly failed to deliver on his economic populism,” Vance said in the exchanges obtained by The Washington Post, while adding a parenthetical about how Trump’s policies toward China were a partial exception to that rule.
The immediate significance of this—expect Tim Walz to mention it in passing at next week’s vice presidential debate—should be self-evident. One of Vance’s key arguments for Trump is that his first presidency was a right-populist success story on behalf of American workers. Yet as that presidency wound down, Vance apparently admitted privately to something very different.
But let’s not overlook the explanation for this apostasy that Vance’s spokesman offered to the Post, because it too shines a harsh light on Vance’s evolution from Trump critic to MAGA devotee. The spokesman insisted that in his messages, Vance was merely criticizing the failure of others during the Trump years, i.e., “establishment Republicans who thwarted much of Trump’s populist economic agenda.”
But this tidy excuse is undermined by another Vance message. As the Post notes, Vance’s claim that Trump had failed to deliver on economic populism came in the context of a discussion about wealthy people running for president in 2020 and whether Trump donors would back one of them instead:
Vance said he doubted that Trump’s richest donors would abandon him in 2020 because he had continued to serve their interests as president, despite his populist rhetoric. “Not sure any of these people feel like they need to switch sides,” he wrote.
Recall that Trump’s single biggest initiative as president was arguably his multitrillion-dollar tax cut for the wealthy and corporations, which made the rich richer without delivering promised trickle-down economic growth or other benefits to workers. Trump enthusiastically championed these tax cuts. That cannot be blamed on “establishment Republicans.” Vance himself said then—correctly—that Trump had faithfully served the GOP donor class’s interests. The after-the-fact spin from Vance’s spokesperson is absurd.
Then there’s another big first-term initiative, Trump’s 2017 drive to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Here again Trump was as enthusiastic a proponent of repeal as any Paul Ryan disciple in Congress. And we know that Vance himself viewed this as a sellout of populism. How can we be certain of that? Because at the time, Vance said so.
In an interview with the Cleveland Plain Dealer in June 2017, Vance decried the version of Obamacare repeal-and-replace that Republicans were moving through Congress at the time. He faulted its deep cuts to the ACA’s Medicaid spending, and explicitly cast this as a betrayal of Trump voters. Trump had been elected because he was a Republican who wasn’t saying, “I’m going to take away your Social Security and your Medicaid,” Vance said, allowing Trump to differentiate himself from other Republicans who wouldn’t “take care of working-class people.” That bill would indeed have hurt untold numbers of poor and working-class Trump voters.
Yet Trump aggressively pushed for it to pass—while congressional Republicans were a major driver of it, Trump absolutely was, as well. Indeed, you can watch video of Trump celebrating the House’s passage of the plan as then–Speaker Ryan and other Republicans applauded gleefully (before repeal died in the Senate). That plainly was a betrayal by Vance’s own lights. There’s no way to pretend now that Trump was stymied by them into committing this sellout.
If anything has changed since then, it’s that along these lines, Trump has only gotten more shameless. It’s true that Trump does differ from Ryan-style Republicans in some ways, such as with his promise of more tariffs, which the GOP donor class likely will oppose. But Trump has vowed that in a second term he would make his 2017 tax cuts on the wealthy and corporations permanent, and he has even promised to cut corporate taxes further, which could be a huge giveaway to the biggest, richest corporations in America.
Even worse, during this cycle, Trump has literally promised roomfuls of top GOP donors that he will keep their taxes low while soliciting bucketloads of campaign contributions. Let it not be lost that another Vance spokesman, under questioning from New York Times reporters, admitted that Vance supports this corporate tax–cutting aspect of Trump’s agenda.
During his convention speech, Vance tried to package another Trump term as the second coming of Trumpist populism, describing Trump as “a leader who’s not in the pocket of big business” and “won’t sell out to multinational corporations.” Perhaps some reporter might ask the Great Populist Intellectual Vance how this squares with the corrupt gilded-back-room promises to chortling plutocrats that Trump has been making of late.
Trump has also renewed his vow to repeal the ACA and replace it with something indeterminate. Here Vance has helped clarify Trump’s intentions, suggesting recently that a Trump-Vance presidency would allow insurance companies to segment people into different risk pools, which would probably push many people with preexisting conditions off insurance or cause their premiums to soar.
In some respects, this idea is similar to the plan pushed by Trump and the GOP in 2017, as Brian Beutler and Jonathan Cohn helpfully detail. That’s the scheme Vance once described as anathema to right-populism. It’s all but certain that as part of this promised repeal push, Trump and a GOP Congress would again target Medicaid for savage cuts.
Now, however, Vance is actively helping Trump spin all this as unthreatening, as maximizing “choice” for regular Americans. That’s the language Ryan-esque Republicans used to sell the previous iteration, only with a more populist gloss: Vance says all this while also pushing the fiction that Trump doesn’t want to kick people off the ACA at all.
When Vance declared in 2020 that Trump “thoroughly failed to deliver on his economic populism,” Vance almost certainly meant it as direct criticism of Trump. It’s remarkable that one of Vance’s primary roles is now to employ his populist cred to bury that history—and to seduce working-class voters into accepting an agenda that promises an even bigger betrayal of that populism than Trump could even attempt the first time around.
