Vice President JD Vance pointedly ignored tariffs when explaining why Republicans were crushed by Democrats in the midterm elections.
This glaring gap showed at least two things: 1) that civil war for control of the post-Trump GOP and its agenda has begun, and 2) that a central fight will be over protectionism versus free trade. In more than 600 words on X about the causes of voter angst, Vance didn’t mention what 65% of the public cites as a concern because tariffs push up prices paid by American consumers and thus make life less affordable.
Vance is signaling that, in his fight to take the next step up in the White House, he has decided to turn more sharply against free trade and embrace tariffs even more warmly and a good deal more consistently than President Donald Trump has done.
Unlike his boss, who waves his tariff club threateningly or drops it capriciously on a whim, the veep will build tariffs into an unbroken wall around domestic manufacturing, supposedly to protect jobs and put America first. But the policy is a loser. Disapproval of Trump exploded on “Liberation Day” when he began his trade and tariff war. His popularity never recovered.
Vance is a committed protectionist, and he doesn’t want voters, especially in his base, to think it is tariffs that hit shoppers so hard in the pocket. He is fortunate in this deception because, bad as tariffs are, they are not the only things that have pushed prices higher. The war with Iran has also done so. And the veep uses this to his messaging advantage.
In his X post, Vance cited an unidentified pollster as having shown him that four moves would bring voters back to the GOP. They are, in order, 1) end the war, 2) focus on cost of living/inflation, 3) put America first, and 4) change our relationship to Israel.
There is an ugly message here, and it can best be understood by reading the list both forward and backward. Proceeding forward, 1, 2, and 3 all point to anxiety about prices and lack of affordability. This is because the war pushed energy prices higher and so made everything else more expensive. Points 2 and 3, which focus on the cost of living and putting America first, are essentially the same point. In this order, coming to item 4, changing the U.S. relationship with Israel, is an oddity and an outlier.
But read the whole list in reverse order, and it reveals Vance’s thinking to be this: we are too close with Israel; we were suckered into the Iran war by the Jews; that failed to put America first because the war wasn’t in our interests; our too-close alliance with the Jews is what has made life unaffordable for Americans.
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This Vance message is essentially the same as that of Abdul el Sayed, an anti-American Democrat who has lamentably just been elected to the Senate from Michigan. His backers made an advertisement in which a husband and wife lament that they cannot buy what they need in a supermarket because the U.S.-Israel alliance is siphoning money out of their pockets to kill Palestinians.
It is a grotesque falsehood, but it is the line that the vice president is tiptoeing up to as he starts his 2028 campaign.