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There is Something Seriously Off With J.D. Vance
That makes two of them
The Trump campaign desperately needs an adult on the team, a normal adult, not one spouting incomprehensible nonsense or another misogynist, i.e., woman hater. It is only a week since Trump chose J.D. Vance as his running mate and it is not going well at all.
I really wonder what kind of vetting they did that made this choice seem like a winning one. A Senator with less than two years experience, a west coast venture capitalist pretending he is a hillbilly, a man whose ideas about the role of women are rooted in some mythological fantasy of 1950s America.
It really looks like Trump overrode his advisors and made this pick on impulse, no big surprise there. Vance was chosen to appeal to the hardcore MAGA crowd while Trump set his sights on Joe Biden. But then Joe Biden was gone and his replacement is a strong independent woman who speaks for many others, young and old, but all living in the present, not back in the days of obedience.
It took less than a week (but what a week!) for Republicans to start questioning the choice. In that week Vance has managed to offend a large cross section of a major voting bloc with his extreme views on abortion, marriage, and other issues, like independence, important to women in general across the political spectrum.
No big surprise there. But it apparently was never suspected that he might be running against a ticket with a highly experienced woman leading the ticket, perhaps the greatest political miscalculation in recent history.
As an older white male I know a lot of my contemporaries are not really comfortable with the company of females, something that has always mystified me. We’re the last dregs of a society which still hung onto the idea that women need men, but Vance was never a member of that ancient group. Yet somehow he thinks those antiquated values are a key to winning elections.
The selection of this man tells us everything we need to know about the entire Trump worldview. Everything centers around the idea that white men are meant to run the world, despite our having done a fairly terrible job of it. But that idea is dead when it comes to younger voters, not just Gen Z, but everyone below the age of…