Excerpts: JD Vance’s RNC Remarks as Planned Center on American Populism

Excerpts from a speech from Sen. JD Vance (R-OH), who has been named former President Donald Trump’s running mate, for the Republican National Convention (RNC) focus on populist themes that run deep through the nation’s heartland.

“My message to my fellow Americans is: Shouldn’t we be governed by a party that is unafraid to debate ideas and come to the best solution?” Vance’s prepared remarks read:

That’s the Republican Party of the next four years: United in our love for America and committed to free speech and the open exchange of ideas. So, tonight, I stand here humbled, and I am overwhelmed with gratitude to say I officially accept your nomination to be vice president of the United States.

Vance’s remarks hark back to his famous childhood story, told through his New York Times best-selling memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, of growing up amid economic despair in a small southeast Ohio town.

“I grew up in Middletown, Ohio, a small town where people spoke their minds, built with their hands, and loved their God, family, community, and country with their whole hearts,” Vance’s remarks state. “But it was also a place that had been cast aside and forgotten by America’s ruling class in Washington”:

When I was in the fourth grade, a career politician by the name of Joe Biden supported NAFTA, a bad trade deal that sent countless good American manufacturing jobs to Mexico.

When I was a sophomore in high school, a career politician by the name of Joe Biden gave China a sweetheart trade deal that destroyed even more good middle class jobs. And when I was a senior in high school, Joe Biden supported the disastrous invasion of Iraq. And at each step of the way, in small towns like mine in Ohio or next door in Pennsylvania or in Michigan and other states across our country, jobs were sent overseas, and children were sent to war.

Vance’s remarks praise Trump’s longtime opposition to job-killing international free trade agreements.

“Somehow, a real estate developer from New York by the name of Donald Trump was right on all of these issues while Joe Biden was wrong,” Vance’s remarks read. “Donald Trump knew, even then, that we needed leaders who would put America first.”

“Thanks to these policies that Biden and the other out-of-touch politicians in Washington gave us, our country was flooded with cheap Chinese goods and cheap foreign labor and, in the decades to come, deadly Chinese fentanyl,” Vance’s remarks continue.”Joe Biden screwed up, and my community paid the price:”

Things did not work out well for a lot kids I grew up with. Every now and then, I will get a call from a relative back home who asks, “Did you know so and so.” And I’ll remember a face from years ago. And then I’ll hear, “They died of an overdose.”

As always, America’s ruling class wrote the checks; communities like mine paid the price.

For decades, that divide between the few, with their power and comfort in Washington, and the rest of us only widened. From Iraq to Afghanistan, from the Financial Crisis to the Great Recession, from open borders to stagnating wages, the people who govern this country have failed and failed again.

That is, until President Donald J. Trump came along.

Vance’s remarks also call out the Biden administration’s record inflation, sky-high housing prices, as well as the Wall Street tycoons who have reaped the benefits of economic downfall.

“Months ago, I heard some young family member observe that their parents’ generation — the baby boomers — could afford to buy a home when they first entered the workforce. ‘But I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to afford a home,’ they said sadly,” Vance’s remarks read:

The absurd cost of housing is the result of SO MANY failures of America’s leadership class. And I can tell you exactly how it happened. Wall Street barons crashed the economy, and American builders went out of business. As tradesmen scrambled for jobs, houses stopped being built. The lack of good jobs led to stagnant wages.

Then Democrats flooded the country with illegal immigrants. So citizens had to compete — with people who shouldn’t even be here — for precious housing. Joe Biden’s inflation crisis is really an affordablitity crisis. Many of the people that I grew up with can’t afford to pay more for groceries, more for gas, more for rent, and that’s exactly what Joe Biden’s economy has given them. So, prices soared, and dreams were shattered. And China and the cartels sent fentanyl across the border, adding addiction to the heartache.

Vance’s remarks end with a hopeful message about turning the nation around under a future Trump administration:

President Trump’s vision is simple: We won’t cater to Wall Street; we’ll commit to the working man. We won’t import foreign labor; we’ll fight for American citizens. We won’t buy energy from countries that hate us; we’ll get it right here from American workers. We won’t sacrifice our supply chains to unlimited global trade; we’ll stamp every product made in the USA. We will build factories again, put people to work making real products for American families, made with the hands of American workers.

“Together, we will protect the wages of American workers — union and non-union alike — and stop the Chinese Communist Party from building their middle class on the backs of our hard-working citizens,” his remarks continue.

“Together, we will make our allies share in the burden of securing world peace: No more free rides for nations that betray the generosity of the American taxpayer. Together, we will send our kids to war only when we must,” Vance’s remarks read. “But, as President Trump showed with the elimination of ISIS, when we punch, we will punch hard. Together, we will put the citizens of America first, whatever the color of their skin.”

“We will, in short, make America great again,” Vance’s remarks state.