“The Trump GOP is no longer the party of Lincoln, Reagan or the Constitution,” Liz Cheney, the defeated leader of the GOP’s neoconservative faction in the House, lamented Tuesday.
Cheney’s complaint was posted on X — formerly known as Twitter — after President Donald Trump picked reformist Sen. JD Vance (R-OH) as his 2024 running mate.
Cheney’s lamentation focused on Vance’s opposition to her style of aggressive foreign policy, dubbed neo-conservatism. The policy has brought the United States into a proxy war over Ukraine with Russia and its ally, China.
Bill Kristol, another neoconservative and Never Trump advocate, posted the same neoconservative criticism of Vance:
But Kristol and other establishment voices also decry Vance’s push to reform immigration policy in favor of ordinary Americans.
With a headline saying, “The Authoritarian Ticket,” Kristol wrote:
Vance has been more consistently and fervently America First in foreign policy than Trump. He’s more committed to ethno-nationalism and anti-“elite” populism than Trump. He’s been more committed to destroying any non-political civil service than Trump. He’s more contemptuous of the norms, institutions, and mores of liberal democracy than Trump.
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If Trump wins this fall, he’ll spend the next four years enjoying the presidency, boasting of what he’s done, and basking in the adulation of his crowds. Meanwhile, Vance will be building up and exercising power, staffing the administration with proteges and henchmen, and transforming the executive branch, the Republican Party, and much else.
Trump may well have in the back of his mind that he’ll run again. Good luck with that. By 2028, it will be Vance’s administration and party. He’ll have Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and all the wannabe leaders of American-style fascism organized behind him.
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There is a coalition of democratic forces out there to be assembled, from ex-Reaganites to ex-McGovernites, from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Liz Cheney. There are political and civic figures available who could lead such a coalition with competence and conviction.
On July 10, Vance outlined his pro-American views at the NatCon4 conference in D.C., saying, “no-one can avoid that [immigration] has made our societies poorer, less safe, less prosperous, and less advanced.”
America is not a “nation of immigrants,” Vance argued:
America is not just an idea — though we were founded on great ideas. America is a nation. It is a group of people with a common history and a common future, and yes … one of the parts of that commonality as a people is that we do allow newcomers to this country. We allow them on our terms, on the terms of the American citizens. And that’s the way that we preserve the continuity of this project from 200 years past to hopefully 200 years in the future.
But pro-migration advocates are unswayed.
Vance believes that “if immigrants are willing to do your job for less, that requires government intervention,” complained libertarian writer Eric Boehm, in language mimicking a recent speech by Vivek Ramaswamy.
WATCH — Sen. JD Vance Reveals Strategy to Win Election with Working Class Rust Belt Voters:
Matt Perdie / Breitbart News“It now seems like Republicans are trying to compete with the Democrat party on economic issues,” complained Marc Short, a former top aide at the Koch advocacy group and to former Vice President Mike Pence. In Trump’s first term, he was given the job of congressional outreach, where he helped win a tax cut but not an immigration reform.
“Many Republicans misread the 2016 electorate shift as an economic nationalism moment and think voters want the government interfering in regulation or mandating a higher minimum wage,” Short said.
Other pro-migration advocates mourned Vance’s elevation. “It’s amazing how so much of the discourse on every topic is just ‘This plays well with some working-class people, so it’s good,'” complained David Bier at the pro-migration Cato Institute.
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