Posted on 04/20/2022 1:25:35 PM PDT by conservative98
Donald Trump has made a courageous decision in backing the Hillbilly Elegy author in the Ohio GOP Senate primary.
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Former President Donald Trump made the most courageous decision of his post-presidency so far by endorsing J.D. Vance for the GOP Senate Primary in Ohio. Vance is an authentic representative of America’s populist tradition, contending against a field of establishment phonies. For the discontent that propelled Trump to the White House in 2016 to be addressed, Vance must find his way into the halls of the Senate. And thanks to Don’s nod, he likely will.
A disclosure: Vance and I are friends. We first met online around his conversion to Catholicism, a distant friendship that deepened at the height of the pandemic before we finally met “in real life,” as the kids say. And that’s a good place to start a brief for Vance. The Vance I’ve gotten to know over the past few years has something few politicians possess: namely, depth of soul.
Readers of his memoir, including liberals prepared to rise above their partisan hatred, will have glimpsed this quality in Hillbilly Elegy. Vance can be shrewd, yes. He is book-smart and people-smart. He rose from “the holler” to the stratospheric heights of Yale Law School and venture capital. But he is still foremost the grandson of “Mamaw”: the ferociously loyal guy who will offer to host you and your family for a weekend refuge from New York City’s lockdown madness while his wife is pregnant and he’s running for the Senate.
The book-smarts matter, too. Anyone who has spent any amount of time around members of Congress knows that most are absolute morons. Yes, they might possess a base kind of intelligence for flattery and for sniffing out others’ weaknesses. But genuine intelligence, deepened by serious reading, is something else. Vance has it. That obscure blog offering cutting-edge takes on this or that social problem? Chances are, he not only reads it but knows the author.
Most important, Vance has courage, of the kind Trump must have recognized when he decided to endorse Vance, over and against the opposition and underhanded scheming of much of the Republican establishment, including inside the Buckeye State GOP.
It took courage for Trump, during the GOP primaries, to question many of the Swamp Republicans’ most donor-beloved orthodoxies, from privatizing entitlements to endless war. It took courage for Trump, as president, to stand by his second Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, once he became the target of an unprecedented barrage of lies about his sexual record. It took courage for Trump, as commander-in-chief, to put the United States on the path to withdrawal from the Middle East, knowing it would invite the wrath of the national-security Blob.
Likewise, it took (and takes) courage for Vance to question the pro-war uniparty’s rush to escalation in Ukraine. Many other would-be populist contenders among the party’s new crop of interesting senators and senators-in-waiting succumbed to the pressure to endorse MOAAARRR war. That includes two of Vance’s primary opponents, the dull Mike Gibbons and the ridiculous Josh Mandel, both of whom endorsed a European-led no-fly zone over Ukraine—a step that would almost certainly have drawn Washington into a catastrophic shooting war between NATO and Russia.
Vance’s memoir arguably ended on a note somewhat discordant with most of the rest of the text, preaching cultural transformation and self-help for his people languishing in the poverty shacks and trailer parks of Appalachia. More recently, however, Vance the intellectual has reached the true conclusion of his own memoir: That while self-help and self-making should be encouraged, the policies this nation’s ruling class has adopted for the past two generations have materially harmed working-class people. It takes courage, finally, to grow politically. I seriously doubt Vance’s cookie-cutter opponents have the capacity for that, even if they were so inclined.
Godspeed, J.D.
Read it, Mark.
It’s only a matter of time until the GOP Senate is to the left of the Democrats. Is there a single conservative in the Senate? You have to be a megaRINO like Vance to run.
Propaganda: We in Ohio know that he’s a San Francisco venture-capitalist carpetbagger who got 10 million from Peter Theil to come and steal the Ohio seat, to benefit Theil and the rest of the Silicon Valley crowd. No thanks!
Trump’s greatest failing is that he can’t see through phonies.
You were schooled on this before. He is from Ohio.
nickercarraway = still a nevertrump buffoon
He hasn’t lived in Ohio for 20 years. And he has almost no native support here.
Ugh. Soo disappointed that Trump endorsed JD Vance. Ugh again.
Was leaning Gibbons because of his endorsement by Rand Paul. Was originally thinking Mandel, but don’t like how he left the race and gave up the spot to the dims.
LOl. You are bashing conservatives and defending a man who said far worse about Trump than I ever did and said it publicly. This man has spent his career kissing up to Hollywood and Manhattan “beautiful people.” What a winner.
Calling it now: JD Vance will be a MISTAKE, a RINO who will support the Left.
J.D. “Everyone between Hollywood and Manhattan are drug-addicted rednecks who need to be euthanized”
Vance
Vance also called Trump "reprehensible."
Vance endorsed Evan McMullin. [I think that's reprehensible.
Maybe you are the nevertrump buffoon?
I believe in traditional conservatism and the Constitution. Sorry,I haven't evolved into neoRINOism.
And he’s spent the last 20 years bashing Ohio and trying to prove, “he’s not one of them.”
Impossible since he is only 37 and grew up in Ohio, graduated from an ohio high school, joined the Marines at 19 and served for 4 years, then went to and graduated from Ohio State University. Went to Yale Law. He moved back to OH 5 YEARS ago. Do the math.
JD Vance is part of the new right. Even though I’m in my mid sixties, I get it. Sorry others don’t see it or haven’t looked into it enough to understand.
I’m voting for him. He’ll make a great Senator.
At this point, I am picking anyone Trump picks.
He is pretty smart, and learned from trying to get along with deep state establishment types.
I presume many of them will be gone in a next go-round. Reince Prebus and Jeff Sessions were thought to be safe picks who could show him around washington... they sucked ass.
You must like Sessions and Pence.
New right = Democrats. They aren’t fiscally conservative, they aren’t socially, they aren’t socially conservative, they aren’t foreign policy conservatives, but they spend most their time on social media, so they are good.
Funny how mindless obstinacy leads people to make sh*t up. Happens here more and more often.
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