JD Vance trots out an old scapegoat
By BRET STEPHENS
JD Vance, America’s loutish vice president, has a theory of the Republican rout in last week’s midterms. As he explained in a lengthy social media post the day after the elections, voters who abandoned Donald Trump’s 2024 coalition in favor of Democrats could be won back if the GOP did four things: ended the war with Iran; focused on inflation and the cost of living; “put America First”; and changed “our relationship to Israel.”
Translation: There are Jews out there to be blamed by imputation, implication, derivation and association.
As it happens, while Democratic and independent support for Israel has plummeted in recent years, most Republicans remain well disposed toward the Jewish state — much more so than in the 1990s, and about where they stood when George W. Bush or Ronald Reagan was in office. How, then, does Vance expect his party to help itself politically by abandoning a broad majority of its base? Perhaps for the same alchemic reason that people have, throughout history, found it expedient to look for scapegoats: They are what stands in the way of some longed-for redemption.
A better appraisal of the electoral debacle that befell Republicans comes from political analyst Sean Trende: “Almost every decision made during the past two years alienated some portion of Trump’s coalition,” he wrote in a commentary for the American Enterprise Institute. “Trump governed as if the only thing that mattered was Donald Trump’s opinion.”
Did the war in Iran leave some anti-interventionist Republicans feeling betrayed? Of course, though it helped even less that Trump failed to win the war he started. Is there an anti-Israel streak in the Republican Party? Yes, and it’s been there going back to the days of Rep. Paul Findley of Illinois and Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. But Republican turnout never hinged on it.
What did matter? A significant part of the Republican electorate has always been part of the business community. Trump alienated that base with his “Liberation Day” tariffs, followed by their bizarre and capricious implementation. As one business owner told me last year, “With Trump I thought, maybe, there might be a method to the madness. I’m concerned now that there’s a madness to his method.”
Another part of the base is rural America. But farmers in Kansas (who will soon have their first Democratic senator in nearly a century) were walloped by retaliatory tariffs on sorghum, and farmers in Iowa (which will soon have a new Democratic governor and senator) were spooked by threatened tariffs on Canadian potash, and Nebraska (where a Democrat flipped the 2nd Congressional District) took a hit when Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents raided a meatpacking plant. “Hell, I voted for this moron once,” one livestock farmer told opinion research company Navigator. “He’s just gone off the rails.”
There’s also that portion of the MAGA base that believed in Trump’s promises to drain the proverbial swamp — the nexus of money, influence and power that used to offend conservatives when it came to, say, Bill and Hillary Clinton. Those voters may have been willing to overlook many of Trump’s legal imbroglios, especially those that seemed politically motivated.
Less easy to overlook: The luxury 747 gifted by the Qatari royal family. The wedding after-party for Donald Trump Jr. and his new bride, Bettina, paid for by a Russian oligarch. The $5 billion that Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, has sought in the Middle East for his private equity firm while also serving as an American diplomatic envoy. The Trump family’s preposterous profits from its cryptocurrency ventures among the billions that Trump has amassed since returning to office.
Then there are Hispanic voters, who in 2024 helped swell Trump’s winning coalition. Many of them favor strict border enforcement and do not object to deporting violent migrants. But they do have issues with the reign of terror ICE imposed on one Hispanic community after another; with the capricious detaining of nannies; with unlawful arrests at immigration courts; with deportations to hellish destinations like Equatorial Guinea. Trump just rewarded the chief architect of these policies, Stephen Miller, with elevation to the post of White House chief of staff.
Who else? Security-minded Republicans are appalled by the chaos at the Pentagon under its man-child secretary; the president’s juvenile and destructive mistreatment of long-standing allies like Canada and Denmark; the near abandonment of Ukraine; the incessant outreach to Vladimir Putin. Civil liberties-minded Republicans are appalled by Trump’s legal assaults on his perceived political enemies, the clownish management at the FBI, the bald attempts to interfere with election procedures. Small-government Republicans are appalled by our $40 trillion-and-counting national debt and the shambolic performance of the short-lived Department of Government Efficiency.
And working-class Americans — the people in whose name Trump promised to govern — may be forgiven for not finding solace in a president who, out of some combination of personal callousness and political idiocy, said, “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation” when it came to keeping Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. Would it have taxed the president’s brain too much for him to argue that, precisely because he cared about people’s finances, he would not allow a nuclear-armed Iran to someday hold the whole Middle East hostage?
What all this amounts to is a record of political malpractice that has no equal in American history — not under Joe Biden, Jimmy Carter, Herbert Hoover or James Buchanan. Until Vance’s self-serving public betrayal of his boss last week, the vice president was a full partner in every bit of it. Give him this: that he now seeks to shift a big chunk of the blame to some Jews is, if nothing else, true to type.
