Why You Shouldn’t Vote for Trump, According to J.D. Vance

By KAILI JOY GRAY

Note: Donald Trump announced his selection of Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance as his vice presidential running mate on Monday, July 15. The following article is composed of direct quotes from Vance about Trump, given in interviews, op-eds, tweets and text messages.

I’m a “never Trump” guy. I never liked him.

I don’t know who I’m gonna vote for. I’m definitely not gonna vote for Trump because I think that he’s projecting very complex problems onto simple villains. I quickly realized that Trump’s actual policy proposals, such as they are, range from immoral to absurd.

Trump instead offers a political high, a promise to “Make America Great Again” without a single good idea regarding how. [His] promises are the needle in America’s collective vein. … Trump is cultural heroin. He makes some feel better for a bit. But he cannot fix what ails them, and one day they’ll realize it. Whether he wins or not, people are going to wake up and realize these problems are still there.

Without some recognition that some of these problems in our community are not the fault of other people, they’re not going to be solved by a Mexican border wall or better trade deals with China. Without some recognition along those lines, I don’t believe these problems are ever truly going to get better.

And if you think, as I do, that Donald Trump doesn’t necessarily have a good message either, that’s maybe not the best approach to politics. It’s not how you win these folks over. And if you’re worried about them being racist now, when you push them away and push them to somebody like Trump, you’re only going to make the problem worse.

But I’m not surprised by Trump’s rise, and I think the entire [Republican] Party has only itself to blame. We are, whether we like it or not, the party of lower-income, lower-education White people, and I have been saying for a long time that we need to offer those people SOMETHING (and hell, maybe even expand our appeal to working class Black people in the process) or a demagogue would. We are now at that point. Trump is the fruit of the party’s collective neglect. … I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler. How’s that for discouraging?

The other big problem I have with Trump is that he has dragged down our entire political conversation. [He] is changing the way people think about other groups of people in a very negative way. [T]here is definitely an element of [his] support that has its basis in racism or xenophobia.

People listen to what their political leaders are telling them, and my view is both that Trump is tapping into some racially ugly attitudes, but also that he is leading people to racially ugly attitudes. ... [He] is exploiting something but he’s also leading the White working class to a very dark place. His rallies may be cathartic, as he screams and yells at conjured enemies, but he offers no solutions. His entire candidacy is an exercise in pointing the finger at someone else. In pointing that finger so repeatedly and enthusiastically, Donald Trump has debased our entire political culture.

I can’t stomach Trump. I think that he’s noxious and is leading the White working class to a very dark place. [He] makes people I care about afraid. Immigrants, Muslims, etc. Because of this I find him reprehensible. God wants better of us.

Mr. Trump is unfit for our nation’s highest office.

Andrew Mangan contributed research to this piece. Kaili Joy Gray is a staff writer for Daily Kos, where this originally appeared. See the online version, with links to sources of quotes.

From The Progressive Populist, August 15, 2024

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