“I ask folks not to judge me based on what I said in 2016, because I’ve been very open that I did say those critical things and I regret them, and I regret being wrong about the guy. I think he was a good president, I think he made a lot of good decisions for people, and I think he took a lot of flak.”
When Vance called Trump “reprehensible” and labeled his policies “immoral,” Vance got it all wrong. Back in 2016, who knew how monumentally great Trump’s presidency would prove to be?
As Jonathan Chait joked, Vance initially gambled that the parts of the American heartland he purports to speak for would not be taken in by Trump, but he’s since adjusted his understanding of what those voters want:
Like any good capitalist, Vance pays careful attention to market signals and is quick to reposition his product when he has misjudged consumer demand.
I would add something else: What’s also ugly about this is that Vance has completely overhauled his assessment of the moral content of Trump’s policies in addition to his assessment of voters’ susceptibility to the Trump con.
After all, what does Vance mean when he says Trump made “a lot of good decisions for people”?
Note that in 2016, Vance expressly singled out Trump’s treatment of immigration for harsh condemnation. Vance ripped Trump as “reprehensible” because Trump was making “people I care about afraid,” in particular “immigrants” and “Muslims.”
And when Vance tore into Trump’s policies, Vance also explicitly cited immigration. In the piece denouncing those policies as “immoral” and “absurd,” Vance also noted that he understood why many in the “struggling Rust Belt” nonetheless “adore” him:
Politicians of both parties told us that free trade with Asia and Latin America would spur economic growth, and maybe it did somewhere else. In our towns, though, factories continue shutting down or moving overseas. We might have sympathy for the Mexican immigrant trying to make a better life for his family, but many see those immigrants primarily as competition for an ever dwindling supply of jobs.
In other words, Vance said at the time, Trump was exploiting the vulnerability of struggling rural and small-town Americans to demagoguery about immigrants (and globalization).
If anything, Trump’s treatment of immigrants proved worse than his campaign rhetoric and proposals suggested. We got the thinly veiled Muslim ban, as promised, but also family separations. We got a concerted effort to prevent as many migrants as possible from exercising their legal right to apply for asylum with policies such as “Remain in Mexico,” which resulted in a humanitarian disaster, albeit one outside our border.
Yet, whereas Vance originally ripped such policies as “immoral” and “reprehensible” because they would “frighten” immigrants and Muslims, Vance now suggests they were the right thing to do:
Before, Vance claimed to have a ground-level understanding of the true nature of Trump’s appeal, but regretted it as a form of demagoguery that was reprehensible and immoral toward immigrants, without actually solving struggling Americans’ problems.
Now Vance has seen the light. Trump was not only right about what those voters really want; he was morally righteous in offering it to them as well, the humanitarian consequences be damned.
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July 07, 2021 at 03:14AM
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J.D. Vance realizes Trump was right about Trump voters, after all - The Washington Post
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