‘He’s MAGA but he’s smart’: J.D. Vance seen as smooth-talking sidekick to Trump
Tucson, Arizona: Moments before Republican vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance took to the stage in Peoria, in the suburbs of Phoenix, a man in the outside overflow area collapsed in the Arizona heat, falling head first to the concrete floor with a loud “splat”.
When medics eventually carted him away for treatment, the crowd clapped, and then began their customary MAGA chant – “fight, fight, fight!” – coined as Donald Trump was escorted off stage in Pennsylvania after an assassination attempt.
“He’s MAGA, but he’s real intelligent”: Trump voter Randy Matthews says J.D. Vance is ready to be president if needed.Credit: Michael Koziol
Watching on, MAGA loyalist Randy Matthews had only nice things to say about the man they were all there to see: Vance. “Real smart,” was his initial appraisal. “He’s MAGA but he’s real intelligent. And nobody can faze him.”
It’s a common refrain from fans of the Republican vice-presidential nominee, who turned out in force in the crucial swing state of Arizona on Wednesday (AEDT) as Vance fronted two public events with a fortnight to go in this lineball election campaign.
Perhaps it’s telling that someone might be described as “MAGA but smart” within MAGA itself. For Matthews, it’s just as well Vance is bright; he worries Trump will be assassinated in office, a fear he said was widespread.
“Everybody’s worried. All these people that cross the border, there’s a million of them that are here to kill. They don’t care who they kill,” he claimed. “They’re trying to get him before he gets elected.”
Republican vice-presidential nominee J.D. Vance, at the rally at the Pima County Fair Grounds in Tucson, Arizona.Credit: AP
Immigration, crime and the security of the US border are huge issues in this desert state that shares a 600-kilometre border with Mexico, even as illegal border crossings fell 7 per cent to a four-year low in September, as US media reported on Tuesday. Tucson, Arizona, was the third-busiest migrant corridor after San Diego and El Paso.
It was an issue Vance prosecuted stridently during his one-day visit, albeit with a fraction less of Trump’s inflammatory and meandering rhetoric. Instead, he accused the Democrats of rolling out the red carpet to illegal immigrants, and vowed that under Trump, social security benefits would go “to the people who paid for them, not illegal aliens”.
That line elicited one of the loudest cheers from the Peoria crowd, as did a retort to his Democrat counterpart Tim Walz’s call for compassion towards migrants. “I agree that we ought to be compassionate,” said Vance of the Kamala Harris’ vice-presidential contender. “But our compassion as American leaders belongs first to American citizens and people that have the legal right to be here.”
Harris has also pledged to increase criminal penalties for people who repeatedly cross the border illegally, beef up Justice Department resources to pursue transnational gangs and revive a failed border bill to pull back on asylum rights and bolster Border Patrol.
Not all MAGA fanatics are crash hot on Vance after weeks of evasive answers on the key question of whether, in his view, Trump lost the 2020 election. Last week, Vance seemed to fall in line with the MAGA orthodoxy when he said there were “serious problems in 2020”, and that Trump did not lose that election – “not by the words that I would use”.
Over protests from the crowd, Vance took questions from local journalists, including one asking if he was confident in Arizona’s electoral system and if he would accept the state’s election result.
He replied that “we’re in a better place than we were in 2020”, though it was not clear if he was referring to the electoral system or the Trump campaign. He mentioned printer failures in the 2022 congressional elections and did not commit to accepting next month’s outcome.
Meanwhile, at a rally in Madison, Wisconsin, Walz made light of what he portrayed as Trump’s demotion of Vance in favour of technology billionaire Elon Musk since Vance had failed to adequately purport the “stolen election” lie.
“I’m going to talk about his [Trump’s] running mate; his running mate, Elon Musk,” the Democrat said to sustained applause. “Look, Elon’s on that stage, jumping around, skipping like a dipshit.”
After giving about $US70 million ($105 million) to the Trump campaign, Musk has now pledged to give away $US1 million a day until November 5 to a supporter who signs the petition set up by his America PAC campaign vehicle. Lawyers have described it as legally dubious, and Walz suggested Trump was “promising corruption” in front of Americans’ eyes by offering Musk a position in a second Trump administration related to government efficiency.
Musk has inserted himself as a polarising force in the closing weeks of the campaign; a rich new villain for Democrats and an energy boost for a Trump campaign that is often negative and has seemed listless at times. Supporters at Vance’s late afternoon rally outside Tucson, in southern Arizona, were invited to sign Musk’s petition and go into the draw to “earn” the $US1 million prize.
Republican voters Wally and Chris Menza were impressed with what they saw from Vance, and his log cabin story, told in the memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, of growing up amid socioeconomic hardship in Ohio with a drug-addicted mother, now sober.
“He’s extremely intelligent. He’s proved that he’s very hard-working. He means what he says and says what he means,” Chris said. Wally had it all planned out: he wanted Vance to be president in 2028, with Donald Trump Jr or turncoat former congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard as his running mate. “He’s our future,” Wally said. “We want 12 more years.”
President Joe Biden won Arizona by just 10,500 votes in 2020, the narrowest result in the state’s history, and the latest aggregate polls have Trump ahead by 1 to 3 percentage points this time.
Vance promised to return to the crucial state and, in trying to motivate voters to get to the polls, proposed a “nightmare scenario” of waking up on November 6 to find Harris had won by just 700 votes.
“Think about that,” he said. “And ask yourself what you can do from now until then to make sure it doesn’t happen.”
With Farrah Tomazin
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