A Win for JD Vance Is a Bigger Win for Trump’s America

President Donald J. Trump applauds the crowd as he is introduced on stage at the Summit on Transforming Mental Health Treatment on Thursday, Dec. 19, 2019, at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building South Court Auditorium at the White House. (Official White House Photos by Tia Dufour)

Congratulations to JD Vance on his primary win last night. Vance came from behind in the polls to secure a win propelled by an endorsement from Donald Trump. This could be the shot heard around the world. Right now, strategists, especially Republican ones, are realizing this: The slick, smooth-talking politician is dead. Don’t even think about going that route for the midterms. We’ve had enough of the Romneys and the Obama-like-smooth-talkers. It’s truly embarrassing how they talk.

It’s time to get down to business. The business of America is business. Period. Trump has always led with a businessman’s approach, and guess what, it works. In an excellent commentary piece in The WSJ from 2017 that I keep in a folder, Reuven Brenner writes, “The ‘Longshoreman Philosopher’ Saw Trump Coming in 1970. ‘Scratch an intellectual, and you find a would-be aristocrat who loathes the sight, the sound and the smell of common folk.’ Those words might have been written last year, as an explanation for Donald Trump’s rise or a rejoinder to Hillary Clinton’s denunciation of ‘deplorables.’”

“The Longshoreman Philosopher” was written by Eric Hoffer in 1970. He saw the Trump movement years before it ever happened and was better known for his 1951 classic, “The True Believer: Thoughts on the nature of Mass Movements.” When I read Hoffer, I’m reminded of the real Americans I encounter in my life, through my conversations with you, on the water fishing, or spending time on the trails in New Hampshire. Regular people. The ones who make this country tick.

And sure enough, there’s Hillary on Monday at the Met Gala, all smiles alongside America’s other elites, while being served by masked peasants. Aren’t we sick and tired of these ridiculous politicians? The ones getting rich off you and me? Sad people. Just a sad life they live.

And so, what we need is the truth. And that’s what Trump told America, like it or not. Because the truth can hurt. We are way beyond the point of the Dems’ solution to everything being the distribution of your wealth. We need to get back to the truth, the moral high ground, where if you did something, earned a living, saved for retirement, that’s yours, not the government’s. You built that.

“In the less stratified America of 1970, the combination of Hoffer’s erudition and his aversion to elitism was not as unusual as it seems today,” Brenner continues. “Even John F. Kennedy had been skeptical of intellectuals. Arthur Schlesinger noted that JFK had ‘considerable respect for the experience of businessmen,’ which ‘gave them clues to the operations of the American economy which his intellectuals, for all their facile theories, did not possess.’”

It’s going to take a lot of kicking and screaming to drag some Republicans along, but that’s where we are. This is not a time for compromise, which so many lifelong politicians are all too happy to do. This is about keeping your country with leaders who will fight, not negotiate, for you. Making America Great isn’t negotiable. Enough with these talking heads. This midterm is up for grabs for a states’ rights movement for the right way to live. Republicans need to get on the Trump train or stay home.

Action Line: Click here to watch America get back to business with me.