JD Vance's tricky sales tour

Politico

6 days ago

BIRTH OF A SALESMAN — Vice President JD Vance is testing out a new career path: traveling salesman.
Earlier today, the VP ventured to his home state of Ohio to deliver a speech boosting Republicans' One Big Beautiful Bill Act — or the 'megabill,' as the law has come to be known around Washington. It's the second appearance Vance has made in recent weeks to sell the bill in the Rust Belt, with his first sales trip having taken him to the small manufacturing town of West Pittston, Pa., earlier this month.
It is, to say the least, a challenging assignment for the vice president. Vance has pitched himself to voters as the face of a more populist GOP, one that champions the interests of blue-collar Americans, stands up to powerful corporations and questions Republican economic orthodoxy on tax cuts and welfare reform. Yet the megabill — which delivered a massive tax cut to high earners, curtailed Medicaid and food stamps programs for low-income Americans and handed out a slew of business-friendly tax perks to large corporations — is a minimally adulterated expression of the old conservative orthodoxy that he and his allies claim to oppose.
Now, it's Vance's job as VP to defend the bill to the hilt in front of the increasingly working-class, big-corporation-suspicious Republican base.
The knotty nature of the assignment reflects the subtly difficult political position that Vance finds himself in six months into President Donald Trump's second term. Vance, who is the presumptive frontrunner for the Republican nomination for president in 2028, rose to prominence as the leader of the GOP's populist 'New Right,' espousing an anti-interventionist foreign policy, a protectionist economic policy, a hardline anti-immigration agenda and a no-holds-barred approach to the culture war. Trump's selection of Vance as his running mate in 2024 was widely interpreted — including by yours truly — as a sign that Trump 2.0 was siding with New Right in the ongoing ideological skirmish within the GOP.
Yet it's safe to say that that assumption has not stood the test of time. Though Trump has occasionally sided with conservative populists on issues like tariffs and immigration, he has hardly governed like a New Right ideologue. At prominent moments, he has even broken publicly with the populist right's position, most notably with his decision to bomb Iran, his move to ease certain elements of his immigration crackdown and his now-infamous about-face on releasing the Epstein files.
Though less salacious and sensational than Epstein or Iran, the megabill stands as another sign of the ideological distance between the Trump administration — which Vance is a senior member of — and the populist New Right, which Vance nominally leads. Stuck in the middle, Vance has mostly managed to lay low, opting to serve as the mediator rather than as a partisan in various intra-administration factional fights.
With that in mind, Trump's decision to tap Vance as the face of the administration's megabill stands out. In some respects, the decision recalls the self-effacing tests that Trump occasionally pushes on his subordinates to prove their loyalty: forcing then-press secretary Sean Spicer to lie about the size of the inauguration crowd in 2017, for instance, or more recently making FBI director Kash Patel, once a leading Epstein truther, go on TV to defend the administration's decision not to release the Epstein files. In this case, Trump has tasked the aspiring figurehead of the populist GOP with selling arguably the least populist bit of legislation to pass the president's desk so far this term.
Vance, in dutiful vice-presidential fashion, has obliged, doing his best to put a populist spin on the bill. In his speech in Ohio today — delivered in front of a crowd of hard-hat-wearing workers at a steel plant in the small industrial city of Canton — he drew attention to the megabill's provisions limiting federal taxes on tips and overtime pay, while arguing that the tax cuts will increase workers' take home pay and ensure that a larger portion of each paycheck ends up in workers' pockets. In his speech in Pennsylvania earlier this month, he highlighted the bill's creation of the so-called Trump accounts, an automatic one-time deposit of $1,000 into a tax-preferred savings account for newborn babies.
On the whole, he has cast the bill as part of the administration's broader effort — supported by tariff increases, tax incentives to manufacturers and a crackdown on illegal immigration — to reverse the 'stupid logic' of globalization, as Vance put it in Canton, which incentivized American companies to invest in ventures abroad rather than at home.
Yet it's clear that Vance's populist talking points won't on their own overcome doubts about the bill's more plutocratic provisions. In Canton, Vance fielded two questions from reporters about the Medicaid cuts, the scope of which he suggested had been overhyped by the media. 'What I'd say to those Ohioans [worried about losing coverage] is don't believe every false media report that you hear,' Vance said. The cuts, he argued, are designed to prevent illegal immigrants and people not actively looking for work from receiving benefits but will not affect low-income Americans who are either working or actively looking for work. (Independent estimates have found that approximately 320,000 Ohioans will lose Medicaid coverage over the next decade under the new legislation.)
There's reason to believe that Vance's feelings on the bill are more mixed. In Jan. 2024, Vance told POLITICO Magazine that he thought the 2017 tax bill — which created the tax cuts that new bill made permanent — was a 'good not great bill,' citing the inclusion of 'some more standard GOP tax fare,' some of which he approved of and some of which he didn't. Among the provisions in the 2017 bill that he did approve of was the cap on state and local tax deductions — which the megabill substantially raised. He also noted that cutting the top marginal rate — as the new bill does, in line with the rates from the 2017 bill — was not 'a high priority for him,' though he said that he would have voted for the bill, despite his reservations, if he had been in the Senate at the time.
Now that the situation is less hypothetical — Vance cast the tie-breaking vote to pass the legislation through the Senate — these quibbles seem to have fallen by the wayside. In this respect, Vance's megabill sales tour serves as a tidy symbol of his polysemous political position: divided between his self-professed role as the torchbearer of conservative populism on the one hand, and his current role as the dogged defender of a decidedly un-populist administration on the other.
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Jacqueline Munis contributed to this newsletter.
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