JD Vance caricature by DonkeyHotey, Openverse
JD Vance caricature by DonkeyHotey, Openverse
Ooops. On the fourth day after Vance-a-mania at the Republican Convention, the Wise Man and Wise Woman behind the Trump campaign were already having second thoughts.
Republished with permission from Lucian K. Truscott IV
I was marveling yesterday about how the Democratic Party managed to, in the space of just 24 hours, go from a state of anxious tissue twisting over the status of Joe Biden’s electability to near-universal unity over the candidacy of Vice President Kamala Harris, who was said to have made more than one hundred phone calls from the Vice President’s residence at the Naval Observatory to party leaders after Biden stepped aside on Sunday. It occurred to me to wonder, would the Republican Party be able to pull off a similar mid-campaign switch if something untoward were to befall their similarly aging candidate for president?
And then I ran across a piece by Tim Alberta in The Atlantic that he wrote on Sunday almost immediately after Biden had announced the withdrawal of his candidacy. The piece was based on a series of interviews he had had with Trump’s co-campaign managers, Suzie Wiles and Chris LaCivita, about their worries after Biden’s June 23 debate debacle that the Democrats would somehow pull it together to run someone younger and more dynamic and more attractive to younger voters…and then suddenly on Sunday, that day arrived. The Trump managers’ main concern about the Democratic Party, it emerged in Alberta’s telling, was their fear of the power of “institutional Democrats” who run a “well organized and well-financed machine” that was being held back only by the Democrats’ then candidate, Joe Biden.
The Trump campaign eminently prepared to run against the fading Biden in a campaign which would entail “each candidate needing to convince voters that he was less unqualified than his opponent.” The withdrawal of Joe Biden on Sunday threatened all their plans, and at the time Alberta wrote his piece late on Sunday, Vice President Harris had not solidified the unanimity of support she has just three days later.
But it was an aside deep in the text of the Atlantic piece that caught my eye: “The selection of Ohio’s Senator J. D. Vance as Trump’s running mate, campaign officials acknowledged, was something of a luxury meant to run up margins with the base in a blowout rather than persuade swing voters in a nail-biter.” In a post on TwitterX later, Alberta expanded on the Trump campaign concern, calling it the “second-guessing of JD Vance.”
Ooops.
On the fourth day after Vance-a-mania at the Republican Convention, the Wise Man and Wise Woman behind the Trump campaign were already having second thoughts.
It’s not hard to see why. Donald Trump has been able ever since he announced his candidacy the first time in 2015 to equivocate on the abortion issue without doing much damage to himself. He went from being pro-abortion when he was a New York Democrat who contributed twice to Kamala Harris’ campaigns, $5,000 in 2011 and another $1,000 in 2013. Surely Trump was aware that he was contributing money to the campaign of a left-of center Democrat who proudly championed her support of Roe v. Wade, along with women’s rights to contraception in all forms and the use of the morning after pill as a form of contraception after sex if a woman’s regular birth control fails to work.
Trump must know that the break he has gotten from the evangelical wing of the Republican Party over abortion will not extend to his running mate. In March, NBC News published a report on Trump’s potential choices for a running mate, quoting a campaign source saying “Trump is laser-focused on the abortion issue, especially when it comes to his vice presidential pick.” The Trump campaign realized even then they had to walk a fine line between pissing off the evangelicals by picking someone too soft on abortion and potentially losing even more of the independent and suburban mom vote they were already worried about by picking an abortion hard-liner. Their solution? Curiously, they picked JD Vance.
Equivocation on abortion isn’t in the JD Vance Bible, recently acquired from the Catholic Church after his conversion in 2019. Vance has been proudly “100 percent pro-life,” a self-characterization that was bannered under the words, “END ABORTION” on his website right up to the day it was announced that Vance was Trump’s pick as his running mate. Then Vance’s “100 percent” stand suddenly disappeared.
Vance can run, but he can’t hide. Vance supports the Ohio law that makes abortion illegal after 6 weeks of pregnancy with no exceptions for rape and incest. CNN reported after Vance was picked as Trump’s running mate that as recently as 2022, when Vance was running for the Senate, he appeared on a podcast and said, “I certainly would like abortion to be illegal nationally.” Such a national ban on abortion would legislatively overturn the Dobbs decision returning laws concerning abortion to the states.
But Vance didn’t stop there. Vance told his podcast audience that he was “sympathetic” to “some federal response” that would prevent women from traveling across state lines to get abortions. Vance described his position this way: “Okay, look here, here’s a situation—let’s say Roe vs. Wade is overruled. Ohio bans abortion, in 2022 or let’s say 2024. And then, you know, every day George Soros sends a 747 to Columbus to load up disproportionately black women to get them to go have abortions in California. And of course, the left will celebrate this as a victory for diversity—uh, that’s kind of creepy.”
Vance was speaking in January of 2022, before the Trump Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in a 6-3 decision. Since then, Vance has joined the chorus of Republicans calling for enforcement of the Comstock Act, the 1873 law that bans the shipment across state lines of any materials that could be used to perform abortions. Recent Republican rhetoric has indicated that would include the abortifacient drug Mifepristone as well as any materials that might be used in a medical abortion, right down to and including surgical scrubs and medical face masks.
Vance has even gone so far as to oppose new medical privacy regulations under HIPPA that would prohibit “the disclosure of protected health information (PHI) related to lawful reproductive health care in certain circumstances.” The regulation was passed after it became known that legislatures in red states that ban abortion have passed or were considering passing laws allowing the monitoring of women’s reproductive health. “Many Americans are scared their private medical information will be being shared, misused, and disclosed without permission. This has a chilling effect on women visiting a doctor, picking up a prescription from a pharmacy, or taking other necessary actions to support their health,” said HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra in announcing the publication of the Final Rule regarding women’s health records.
JD Vance was one of eight senators to write a letter to Secretary Becerra urging him to “withdraw [the proposed rule] immediately.” If Trump and Vance win in November, the rule protecting women’s reproductive health records will doubtlessly be withdrawn, allowing states to use police and other law enforcement sources to hunt down women who are trying to access Mifepristone by mail or planning to travel out of state to obtain an abortion.
Vance has sought to soften his virulent anti-abortion stance, even telling an interviewer recently that because his running mate supports women’s access to Mifepristone, he supports it, too.
Yeah, and I’ve got a bridge over the Ohio River to sell you, too. Earlier this month, the Department of Transportation announced an $87.5 million grant to replace a bridge between Steubenville, Ohio and Brooke County, West Virginia. Senator JD Vance of Ohio and Senator Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia both voted against the Democratic infrastructure law that will provide the funds to replace the decrepit Market Street Bridge that has been on the list of threatened bridges for years.
That’s JD Vance and Republicans for you in a nutshell. He was against the infrastructure bill until he was for it. He is (now) for softening the Republican position on restricting or outright banning Mifepristone until he’ll be against it. It seems that JD Vance’s conversion to Catholicism has an exception for those anointed by Donald Trump.
Isn’t that convenient?
Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist and screenwriter. He has covered stories such as Watergate, the Stonewall riots and wars in Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels and several unsuccessful motion pictures. He has three children, lives in rural Pennsylvania and spends his time Worrying About the State of Our Nation and madly scribbling in a so-far fruitless attempt to Make Things Better.
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