President Donald Trump closed the Republican Party’s Midterm Convention last night with very brief, at least by Trump standards, remarks asking the delegates and attendees to take a pledge to vote in the crucial upcoming midterm election. So, the real close was left to Vice President J.D. Vance, who did not miss a beat in advancing the MAGA agenda and adopting Donald Trump’s combative style.
However, J.D. did not merely parrot President Trump’s style and message, he added his own polish to it, a gloss that was sometimes more refined, but just as tough and earthy as Donald Trump’s.*
So, when a protestor somehow got into the arena with Mexican and Palestinian Authority flags, J.D. didn’t miss a beat:
… what the people at home missed is that we just had a protestor interrupting us and waving the Mexican flag.
Well, well, my friend, if you love Mexico so much, get your ass over there, I'll buy you the plane ticket.
I had, ladies and gentlemen, I had a whole speech written, but I think I got to change it because we just discovered the symbol of the far left, an idiot waving a Mexican flag at a protest when he should be waving the flag of the United States of America. [Audience chants "USA"] Now, we, we all know, of course, that as much as that person might wave around a foreign flag, he'd much rather live in Dallas or in Cincinnati or in any one of our great cities than [live in] Mexico.
And J.D. wasn’t afraid to go straight at the enemy and dismiss their predictable lines of attack:
Here's what the Democrats did.
They refused to prosecute the crime. And by the way, they called everybody who noticed their fraud racist for noticing that there were people stealing from our children and our new and expectant mothers. [Audience boos] The Democrat legacy of the last few years was that they bankrupted our country and left us poor.
Vice President Vance also seems to have absorbed President Trump’s unerring eye for the core issue before us, the Democrats’ “hardcore hatred” of conservatives and America.
So, it was natural for him to smoothly move off the teleprompter and go directly to the opportunity that was right before him:
Our flag waving friend over there is actually the new congressional delegate for New York 14. He's here campaigning. But you got to ask if it's not love a country, what is it that drives this new generation of radical Democrats? It's not new policies. They'll say the same stuff, defund the police, abolish the border, the green new scam.
We've heard all this stuff before. But I think that what's new about them is what motivates them is a new type of hardcore hatred. Now don't take my word for it. Listen to what these people have actually said in their own words. In Manhattan this November, you have Democrat candidates who declare their life goal is, and I quote, "The total eradication of Western civilization." [Audience boos]
A few years ago, they cheered on the most horrific slaughter of innocent civilian Jews that we have seen in a generation. In Lansing. [Audience boos]
In Lansing, you have Democrats who call for quote, "destroying the American way of life." [Audience boos].
And from our perspective, not even President Trump could have delivered a better close that J.D. did when he succinctly laid out what’s at stake in this election by explaining it is NOT the details of the President’s policies, but what kind of country, or if we will even have a country, should the Democrats prevail in this election:
I'm here to tell you, "This is who the Democrats are now, my friends." They're not just the party of little higher taxes, maybe some dumb regulations. They're not the party of FDR or JFK. Hell, they're not even the party of Bill Clinton anymore.
The Democrats are the party of hatred. [Audience members call out "Devil"]
hey are the party that despises America and the people who built it. They are the party that can find sympathy for the terrorists who perpetrated 9/11, but they say that people with names like James Vance are incapable of loving people with names like Usha and they couldn't be more wrong. Ladies and gentlemen, because the Democrats have become such a nightmare, we can never, we will never let them win.
We're gonna beat them back in November. So I'm asking you, my fellow Republicans, to remember that this November is so much more than red team versus blue team. It's so much more than having good politicians in Washington. It's about sending a message to the Democratic Party that if you send your crazies, we're gonna send you packing.
Last night’s remarks were in my opinion the best speech Vice President JD Vance has given. And it hit a demographic that Republicans must have to win with a simple message:
And so, to the radicals who wish to abolish my family and the thousands and millions of other families all across our country, we have a simple message for them: Stay the hell away from our kids.
Not only was J.D. able to channel President Trump’s “I’m on your side message,” but he added his own personal and generational gloss to it with his emphasis on family and what Democrats will do to the traditional nuclear family if they ever regain power. Clearly, it was a speech that earned him the mantle of successor to President Donald J. Trump and his MAGA movement.
*This article relies on the transcript of Vice President J.D. Vance’s remarks produced by Roll Call.
