Vance Speaks to the Great American Middle in Middletown

On Friday, Vice President J.D. Vance spoke at the same Middletown, Ohio, steel plant that employed his grandfather – “Papaw” to those who read his first memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, or watched the Netflix special based on it.

While he was there to campaign for other Ohio Republican candidates, including gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy and Senator Jon Husted, Vance’s speech helped establish why he is likely to be a front-runner for the 2028 Republican presidential ticket. Vance speaks to the middle Americans who want a successful nation that provides opportunity for success for them and their children.

Vance tapped into the drama of his complicated grandfather during his remarks. More importantly, he pointed to his grandfather’s basic desires for an America that works for her citizens and does not serve as the world’s policeman.

Vance pointed to a Wall Street Journal editorial from the early 1980s that demanded open borders and the free movement of both people and jobs as evidence for how this dream was stolen from millions of Americans. While the Journal’s utopia sounded romantic in the abstract, what it meant was that too many corporate c-suites thought more about the bottom line than about the nation and her citizens that had afforded them the ability to build those businesses in the first place.

Vance recounted what that meant for the parents of his friends growing up: losing good jobs as they were sent across borders. “If you were lucky,” Vance said, “your neighbor’s job got shipped to a foreign country, or their tax dollars got shipped to fraudsters.” But, alluding to the scourge of illicit drugs, particularly fentanyl, that have ravaged communities like his hometown, Vance described the fate of the “unlucky”: “you were left raising a grandchild while you were mourning the child killed by the very poison brought across that border.”

Vance highlighted the work of the Trump administration to remove the illegal aliens, many of whom are criminals. He lauded the record drops in crime that the country has experienced over the last two years. He noted that former Ohio Democrat Senator Sherrod Brown, who is running against Husted this year, while pretending to be a common-sense moderate, never raised his voice against the invasion that the Biden administration both allowed and encouraged.

Brown has notably styled himself as a Trump-adjacent figure on trade policy, clearly recognizing the economic devastation that outsourcing has wrought on the Buckeye State’s once mighty manufacturing sector. But the reality is that Brown, a career politician, was in office while all those jobs were flowing overseas and did nothing to stop it.

Vance’s pitch was for an America in which citizens actually come first in matters of public policy. He cited statistics about the vast bulk of jobs during this administration going to American citizens. And he lamented how so many jobs were being given to those from outside the country under the Biden administration. The Trump administration, he said, prioritizes the good of Americans. (Although Vance didn’t mention it specifically, the Trump administration launched “its first sweeping investigation into alleged fraud involving H-1B and PERM work visas” this summer.)

Vance’s recounting of the story of Kevin Flanagan drew the most attention. Flanagan was a computer programmer for a bank. In 2003, the Californian was informed that he was losing his job. To make matters worse, Flanagan was informed that unless he trained the foreign worker who was taking his job, he would not receive his severance package.

Flanagan “dutifully” did what he had to, Vance told those assembled. He then went out to his truck and shot himself. The story, while tragic and morbid, captures the severity of the plight facing the American worker which helped thrust Trump and his America First movement to power.

Vance appealed to the ordinary Americans who make Western Civilization run. He referred to the “crazy” 20th-century Louisiana politician Huey Long, whose catchphrase was “every man a king.” And he paid tribute to the innovators—“the army of doctors and nurses and researchers”—who have made progress in fighting rare diseases.

The vision Vance pitched was of an America that secures the blessings of liberty for her citizens—not for fraudsters and criminals. Safe communities, good jobs, and churches where Americans are free to worship.

The speech showed yet again that Vance, like other Trumpian figures such as Marco Rubio and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, is a serious talent who knows that the success of the Republicans this fall and in the years to come will hinge on being able to demonstrate what the GOP can do to bring opportunity to ordinary Americans, push back against the defeatist, anti-American lies of the left, and build up American communities.