🎙️ Voice is AI-generated. Inconsistencies may occur.
By naming Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio his running mate, Donald Trump settled a longstanding battle over the affections of the Republican Party—confirming his commitment to Americans-First economics as the means to elevate the American working and middle classes.
After Trump broke through the Democratic wall by winning blue-collar voters in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin eight years ago, the supply-siders, libertarians, neo-liberals, and neocons who have dictated post-Cold War GOP economics have been playing defense against an emerging coalition of Americans-First thinkers focused on national interests. Inspired by Trump, the new populists are drawing from the classic, winning playbooks of Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, and Ronald Reagan.
In naming the Marine combat veteran with Appalachian ancestry as his wingman, the former president has decided to keep "dancing with them that brung him" to his 2016 victory—average Americans whom Hillary Clinton despises as "deplorables" but Richard Nixon cherished as his "Silent Majority." And who comprised the New Deal electoral coalition that both Nixon and Reagan reconstituted.
Consequently, the donor-class glitterati—whether the editors of the Wall Street Journal or the Koch-funded infrastructure of think tanks and media outlets that had driven GOP electoral prospects into the ground before Trump—are on the outs.
Indeed, the Trump-Vance ticket reflects the rising stock of National Conservatism, a network of policy theorists and politicians on both sides of the Atlantic who have labored since 2019 to redeem Anglo-American conservatism from libertarian captivity—and realign U.S. conservative policy thought with Trump's priorities. Providing the intellectual backbone of the MAGA movement, the promise of "NatCon" was on display during a three-day conference in Washington last week — where Vance delivered the capstone address, embodying his generational and electoral appeal.
The project tilts heavily toward cultural, moral, and political concerns. But reoccurring NatCon speakers, like Senators Josh Hawley and Marco Rubio, and stakeholder organizations from Oren Cass's American Compass to a rebranded Heritage Foundation under Kevin Roberts, grasp the imperative of delivering high-wage jobs with dependent benefits for workers, not just tax cuts for investors. More than other conservatives, these natcons share Lincoln's convictions that "the dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate for the stormy present," and that labor "deserves much the higher consideration" than capital.
An alternative VP pick also spoke—Vivek Ramaswamy, who championed "national libertarianism" against a straw man he dubbed "national protectionism." His view was radically out of step with President Trump's economic nationalism. Conceding his was a minority view at the conference, Ramaswamy nonetheless pitched a qualified libertarianism: bullish on immigration but not tariffs, with a reluctance to leverage prudent statecraft to reboot U.S. manufacturing or recover a family-wage economy. Perhaps Vivek doesn't realize that libertarianism sits discredited with the voters, not to mention with conservatives most supportive of Trump.
Leave it to J.D. Vance to set Ramaswamy straight at the concluding VIP dinner. The now-veep nominee indicted mass immigration and the outsourcing of our defense-industrial base, both favored causes of Wall Street, as epic failures of the political class to serve our own citizens. The millennial patriot also connected emotionally, as he did in Hillbilly Elegy, resonating with the forgotten Americans all across the fruited plain, demonstrating his understanding, passion, and ability to explain America-First economics better than any peer Trump considered for the slot.
That's why the Vance selection helps seal the Trump legacy, ensuring that in his second term, the 47th president will reshape the GOP to serve the nation's citizens, and make America great again.
Mr. Patterson was an associate commissioner for communications at the Social Security Administration, 2017–19. He also served as a speechwriter at HHS and the Small Business Administration under President George W. Bush. Bracketing his service to President Trump, Patterson was the 2016 Republican nominee in New Jersey's 1st congressional district and a 2020 GOP candidate in New Jersey's 2nd district.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
