Op-Ed: Who Is JD Vance? Silicon Valley Millionaire MAGA Extremist

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Folks, I’m excited about Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign for President. In fact, excited isn’t a strong enough word to describe how I feel. But that’s an article for a different day. In the meantime, we need to keep our eyes on the goal: defeating the Trump/Vance Project 2025 plan that threatens our nation.

Speaking of Trump’s running mate, we really should have a conversation about Senator JD Vance. After all, Trump is the oldest Presidential Nominee in American history whose cognitive decline and overall health may not let him serve a full term. So we should know more about the guy he hand-picked to take over, right? So let’s talk. 

Jay-Z’s iconic 2003 track “Public Service Announcement” kicked off with the modern-day hip-hop philosopher from the People’s Republic of Brooklyn announcing “Allow me to reintroduce myself. My name is H.O.V.”

On the other hand, JD Vance’s reintroduction to America’s voters this month as Trump’s VP pick fell down a deep, dark H.O.L.E.

Okay, maybe that clever wordplay didn’t catch your attention. But who JD Vance is and what he stands for should.

Make no mistake, Vance is an evangelist for Trump’s Project 2025 who not only has close ties to the Heritage Foundation, the group behind Project 2025 but has actually publicly praised the right-wing roadmap for its “good ideas.” In fact, Vance is actually on the record supporting the Project 2025 plan to fire non-partisan civil servants and replace them with Trump appointees.

But that’s only part of it.

Of course, we could focus on the fact that Vance has called Trump “a total fraud,” “a moral disaster,” “cultural heroin” and “America’s Hitler.” But that kind of flip-flopping is nothing new in the MAGA GOP. 

Instead, let’s talk about the fact that Vance is calling for a national ban on abortion with no exceptions for rape or incest, which he considers mere inconvenient circumstances. Let’s talk about how Vance advocated cutting Medicare and Social Security calling them roadblocks to fiscal sanity. Let’s talk about the fact that Vance put our national security at risk by blocking dozens of ambassador nominations because he thinks American foreign policy is too woke. 

Wasn’t Sen. Vance a marine? You think he’d know better. But it just goes to show how little we know about the real JD Vance. After all, this is the same guy who not only used nonprofit funds meant to address the opioid crisis to run his Senate campaign but also hired a doctor employed by Purdue Pharma to spearhead Our Ohio Renewal’s anti-addiction efforts. Are you kidding me? That’s the same company that makes Oxycontin!

The real JD Vance doesn’t believe in climate change. The real JD Vance is an election denier who raised money for insurrectionists who tried to take over the Capitol on January 6. The real JD Vance called gun violence a “fake problem” and thinks bump stock bans are a distraction. The real JD Vance voted against the toughest bipartisan border security bill in decades because Trump asked him to and argued that abused women should stay in violent marriages.

Remember Brittany Watts, the Ohio woman who was criminally charged after having a miscarriage? Remember the 10-year-old rape victim who had to go to Indiana to get the abortion pill because it was banned in Ohio? Remember doctors in Ohio having to fly their patients out of state because politicians like Vance cared less about their lives than their anti-abortion donors? 

The real JD Vance wants the same abortion bans everywhere. He doesn’t believe a woman should be in charge of her own medical decision. He thinks he knows better. That’s why, when the people of Ohio came together to amend the state constitution to protect reproductive rights, the real JD Vance fought against them. He called their overwhelming victory a “gut punch.” But, apparently, he didn’t learn anything from it.

JD Vance wants us to believe he’s some kind of working-class hero from America’s heartland. But the real JD Vance is a Silicon Valley millionaire MAGA extremist who was mentored by the men who overturned Roe v. Wade and paid for by Project 2025. That’s a public service announcement if I ever heard one.

Antjuan Seawright (@antjuansea) is a Democratic political strategist, founder and CEO of Blueprint Strategy LLC and a senior visiting fellow at Third Way.

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