Exclusive — J.D. Vance on Mike Gibbons: 'Chamber of Commerce Republican' Is 'Never Going to Protect Ohio Jobs'

J.D. Vance, author of Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis and Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate seat from Ohio, said on Wednesday that Mike Gibbons, one of his GOP opponents is a “Chamber of Commerce Republican” who will not “protect Ohio jobs” from the status quo of globalization.

Vance said Gibbons sought the Ohio Chamber of Commerce’s support given his opponent’s interview with the organization in February.

“[The Chamber of Commerce] is a joke of an organization, which is why I didn’t seek their approval,” Vance said on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with special guest host Matt Boyle, “and the reason my other opponents did is, I think, revealing something about who they actually are. Look, these people are willing — Mike Gibbons and all the rest — are willing to go and bend the knee to the Chamber of Amnesty — is really what they are — to beg for their endorsement, even though that same organization has supported open borders. It’s supported trade policies that have devastated communities like mine, and also they’ve gone woke on a whole lot of social issues.”

“These people are not on our side,” Vance said of the Chamber of Commerce. “We need to wake up to this fact. The Chamber of Commerce is starting to support a lot of Democrats. I’m not going to pretend that this is an ally of the values that I hold when they’re just not.”

He continued, “That is the organization that all of the other Ohio Republican candidates decided to go kiss the ring, bend the knee, and beg for their support. I’m not going to do it. I don’t care about their support, and frankly, if they did support me, I think it would suggest that the good people in our party shouldn’t even vote for me the first place. Thankfully, I’m not going after their support, and I wear their scorn as a badge of honor.”

Vance said Gibbons’s analysis of international trade from 2005 revealed a “fundamental misunderstanding” of the causes of manufacturing jobs being lost by the U.S. to countries like China and Mexico.

He stated, “All of his commercials are that he’s ‘Trump Tough,’ right? And he criticizes me because I said critical things about Donald Trump six years ago, which of course, I did, and I have admitted, but I was wrong about Trump. He was a great president. That’s why I’ve been supportive of him.”

“When you go on and say that the ‘free market’ is why Ohio workers and why American workers are getting devastated by the Chinese, it shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the issue, and it shows that you’re not in line with why Trump won elected office in the first place,” he added. “Donald Trump became president because he was sick of America losing its industrial base to the Chinese. That issue — and immigration — are the reasons that I think Trump won, [and] the reasons why I think he was such a successful president.

He went on, “If you’re standing there and saying, ‘The Chinese have won, and there’s nothing we can do to stop it,’ you’re not a Trump America First conservative. You’re lame Chamber of Commerce Republican that doesn’t need to be anywhere near the U.S. Senate.”

Vance remarked, “It’s been the bipartisan consensus in this country that we should ship our manufacturing base off to China, off to Mexico, and maybe give some welfare checks to the people who lose their jobs. That’s really what this is about, is do you agree with that agenda, or you do think, like I think, that America should make things, that our workers should have good stable jobs that can support families, and importantly, that we [should] have enough economic power here in our own homeland, so we don’t have to depend on the Chinese and the Russians when we go to war?”

He concluded, “That’s really what this is fundamentally about, and the fact that [Mike Gibbons] appeals to these slogans instead of acknowledging that unless you’re willing to use the power of trade, the power of tariffs — like Trump was willing to do, — you’re never going to protect Ohio jobs. You’re never going to protect the American manufacturing base. We cannot keep electing people who repeat these tired old slogans from 30 years ago, while communities like mine, like Youngstown, have been devastated.”