Republicans are caught between a golden age and a dark age as they head into the midterm elections.
Does America have the “greatest economy in our history,” as President Donald Trump said in South Carolina last week — with manufacturing booming, growth “exploding,” and inflation “defeated”?
Or are we mired in the deindustrialized dystopia Vice President JD Vance described last week in Ohio? Where American-born factory workers are offing themselves in despair, and students can’t afford burritos?
Vance is doing his best to square the two. Speaking to a sea of hard hats in Middletown, the vice president blamed “40 years of bad policy” for America’s hard times and praised Trump’s economic policies as the beginning of a long-term fix.
“I’m not saying it’s going to be easy or it’s all going to happen overnight,” Vance said. “But in just 18 months, we have seen an explosion of rebuilding in the American heartland. We have seen trillions with a ‘T,’ trillions of new dollars of investment pour into the United States of America.”
Back in South Carolina, Trump said it was going to be easy, that it was easy, and that the mission is now complete.
“We have the greatest economy in our history,” Trump said. “In just 19 months, we’ve turned this country completely around.”
No one takes Trump’s bluster literally — when Trump calls something “the greatest,” Americans know what he means. The problem is the tonal dissonance. Is the White House taking a victory lap on the economy? Or is it “feeling voters’ pain” and asking them to be patient a while longer?
Imagine the average Republican voter attempting to explain the party’s economic message after watching both speeches.
“We’re in the golden age,” he or she might say, “except not yet, and we need to be patient. But it’s the greatest economy ever. Trump made America great again.”
Winning campaign messages don’t tie voters in knots like this. They are coherent, compelling, and easy for anyone to repeat, from the savviest media surrogate to the guy at the end of the bar.
For the midterm, Vance’s is the better of the two. The sour public mood on the economy demands acknowledgment. Trump’s Golden Age gusto plays like denial. Paired with his fixation on ballrooms, putting his name on famous buildings, and renaming bodies of water, it plays like indifference.
Vance’s promise of better days ahead at least gestures at empathy. But for Republicans clinging to power, either message alone is better than both at once.
The deeper issue isn’t that Trump and Vance are out of lockstep. It’s that they’re on two different calendars.
The president is running to salvage what’s left of his second-term agenda — a Democratic House and Senate would bury the rest of his presidency in oversight and subpoenas. He needs the golden age to be true, and he needs us to believe it.
The vice president is running to replace him in 2028. Fresh off a book tour and looking trim, Vance introduced himself in Ohio as a stand-alone proposition with a theory of the country all his own. His self-presentation as champion of the forgotten man sits uncomfortably beside Trump’s boasts about already fixing the forgotten man’s every problem. It’s difficult to see how the two men keep this up through 2028.
But Vance has no other choice. Trump’s favor hangs over his presidential aspirations like an anvil. The vice president can’t tell the campaign story he wants — the one where long-forgotten workers from hollowed-out industrial towns finally get their champion — until the nomination is secured and Trump is in the rear-view.
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This leaves Republicans stuck playing a negative-sum game in the run-up to November: two men telling two stories that cancel each other out.
A blue wave is coming. That looks unavoidable now. Getting the economic story straight could limit the damage. But that’s no small ask. Trump is preternaturally incapable of describing anything he’s touched as less than finished. And Vance is forced to make his case without ever quite making it.