Five Quotes from J.D. Vance That Tim Walz Could Throw in His Face

For a politician who has only been in office for 21 months, J.D. Vance has left behind an enormous paper trail.

When an opponent provides excess material, candidates can struggle to prioritize lines of attack. That will be one of Tim Walz’s many challenges tonight in the vice presidential debate.

Most voters probably already know what Vance said about “childless cat ladies.” But Vance has said many things that haven’t gotten the same attention.

Certain quotes in the Vance record could help prosecute the case that not only is Donald Trump’s running mate a hypocritical opportunist but also a power-hungry lapdog who would never resist illegal orders from the boss—as Trump’s previous VP Mike Pence did on January 6, 2021.

Below are five quotes from Vance that could find their way into tonight’s debate.

But first, here’s what’s leading the Washington Monthly website:

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Democrats Hope Walz and the Party’s Military Veterans Have the Right Stuff: Suzanne Gordon, of the Veterans Healthcare Policy Institute and Steve Early, longtime labor journalist, review the military veterans running for high office this year, and what that might mean for privatizing veterans’ healthcare. Click here for the full story.

California Dreaming: Anatomy of Trump’s Craziest Lie: Contributing Writer David Atkins examines the ludicrous claim Trump really got the most votes in the Golden State. Click here for the full story.

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1. Vance wrote that Eastern Kentucky culture was inherently “destructive”:

Walz is undoubtedly familiar with Vance’s memoir Hillbilly Elegy. Soon after Kamala Harris picked him, Walz used the book to fire a shot across Vance’s bow: “Just like all of us in regular America, we go to Yale, then we have our careers funded by Silicon Valley billionaires and then you write a book about the place [where you spent part of your childhood] and you trash that place.”

But the best evidence of Vance trashing his grandmother’s Kentucky community is not in 2016’s Hillbilly Elegy but in a 2014 article he wrote for National Review, which I flagged for the Washington Monthly in August.

Vance wrote:

Young students in eastern Kentucky sometimes tell their teachers that they hope to ‘draw’ when they grow up. But they’re not talking about a career as an artist; they’re talking about drawing a government check. These kids weren’t programmed like that at birth; they were taught something destructive by their communities.

2. Vance urged Appalachians to leave Appalachia:

From the same article:

…for the multigenerational poor, home might be the worst enemy. Appalachian loyalty to the land is the stuff of legend, yet the stubbornness of poverty in the region means that those who stay risk being poor forever … If we cannot improve the urban ghetto or the mountain hollow—and the evidence suggests we can’t—then the best anti-poverty program is a ticket to somewhere else.

3. Vance called working-class whites losers

Two years later, in Hillbilly Elegy, Vance argued that the modern conservative movement was conning working-class white into blaming the government for their own problems:

There is a cultural movement in the white working class to blame problems on society or the government … The message of the right is increasingly: It’s not your fault that you’re a loser; it’s the government’s fault.

Instead, Vance counseled “we hillbillies” to “stop blaming Obama or Bush or faceless companies and ask ourselves what we can do to make things better.”

Walz can credibly connect these quotes: What Vance really believes is working-class people are losers, government can’t help them, and what they need to do is leave their hometowns.

4. Vance decried right-wing “conspiracy-mongers and fringe lunatics”

Vance is now burying his past words and employing the scapegoating and smearing he once decried.

In his book, Vance urged his fellow conservatives to reject misinformation and conspiracy theories.

He wrote, “There is an industry of conspiracy-mongers and fringe lunatics writing about all manner of idiocy.” He called out Alex Jones for September 11 trutherism, and other internet sources for other insane conspiracies. “You can’t believe these things and participate meaningfully in society,” Vance counseled.

Yet this month the Ohio senator not only disseminated rumors about Haitian immigrants eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, but he repeatedly defended them after the rumors were proven false.

On CNN he said, “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”

But it’s not even true that Haitian immigrants are causing suffering in Springfield. As the Republican Governor Mike DeWine wrote in The New York Times, “Springfield is having a resurgence in manufacturing and job creation. Some of that is thanks to the dramatic influx of Haitian migrants who have arrived in the city over the past three years to fill jobs.”

In DeWine’s own words, the suffering is being caused by the lies Vance pushed: “As a supporter of former President Donald Trump and Senator JD Vance, I am saddened by how they and others continue to repeat claims that lack evidence and disparage the legal migrants living in Springfield. This rhetoric hurts the city and its people, and it hurts those who have spent their lives there.”

5. Vance said Trump “failed to deliver”

“Trump has just so thoroughly failed to deliver on his economic populism (excepting a disjointed China policy),” Vance said in a direct message to an anonymous recipient in February 2020, who shared it with the Washington Post.

Vance has disavowed many examples of pre-presidency criticism of Trump, claiming he changed his mind after seeing Trump govern. “I regret being wrong about the guy, ” he told Fox News in 2021, “I think he was a good president. I think he made a lot of good decisions for people, and I think he took a lot of flak.”

But that doesn’t square with his 2020 assessment, which was made well into Trump’s presidency, just before the pandemic lockdowns throttled the economy.

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Best,

Bill Scher, Washington Monthly politics editor

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