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MIDDLETOWN, Ohio –– Ohio Sen. JD Vance said Monday he would fight for “forgotten communities all across our country” if elected as vice president, channeling his small town Ohio upbringing into a populist economic message.
“My life wasn't all that different from a lot of people who grew up in Middletown, Ohio,” he said. “It was tough, but it was surrounded by loving people, and it was surrounded by something that if we don't fight for is not going to be around for the next generation of kids, and that's opportunity.”
The first-term Senator was named as former President Donald Trump’s running mate last week at the start of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, a weeklong celebration for a party unified and remade in Trump’s image.
Vance’s speech combined biography – rattling off anecdotes from his time at Middletown High School – and philosophy, connecting things like American trade policies enacted in the 1990s to the decline in manufacturing jobs in the Midwest.
“We're going to fight for every single worker in this country,” he pledged. “If you work hard and play by the rules, you ought to be able to put a good dinner on the table and send your kids to whatever vacation and whatever school you want. To work hard and play by the rules, you get a good life. It's that simple.”
Hundreds of supporters packed the auditorium of Middletown High School and waited for hours outside to hear the hometown hero share his vision for America in his first solo rally since accepting the vice presidential nomination.
A one time vocal critic of Trump when he first ran for president in 2016, Vance has evolved over time to be one of Trump’s staunchest defenders in Congress, online, and now on the campaign trail.
“He is not the caricature or the lie that the media has told you that he is,” Vance said of the former president. “He is a person who believes this very simple thing, and they call him a radical for it, but it happens just to be common sense: his radical idea is that America should make more stuff in its own country for its own citizens, and that the American nation belongs to the American people.”
Vance’s selection as the GOP’s vice presidential nominee is widely seen as a deepening of Trump’s populist and dire message that America will cease to exist if he is not elected this fall instead of broadening his appeal to more voters.
The sometimes fatalistic language of Trump’s campaign was echoed by Ohio state Sen. George Lang, who warned of violence if Trump did not take office again.
“I believe wholeheartedly Donald Trump and Butler County's JD Vance are the last chance to save our country,” Lang said at the rally. “Politically, I'm afraid if we lose this one, it's going to take a civil war to save the country – and it will be saved.”
The rally comes just 10 days after a failed assassination attempt against Trump at a campaign rally in Butler, Pa., where the former president was grazed in the ear, one attendee was killed and two others were injured.
Many in the audience wore shirts emblazoned with the iconic image of Trump, surrounded by Secret Service agents, chanting “Fight! Fight! Fight” with an upraised fist.
Vance spent most of his speech focusing on populist policies that a second Trump administration would enact, railing against China, Democratic economic plans and supporting Trump, whose “radical idea is that America should make more stuff in its own country for its own citizens, and that the American nation belongs to the American people.”
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