In newly uncovered remarks from 2017, Donald Trump’s 2024 vice-presidential pick, JD Vance, said “some people who voted for Trump are racist and they voted for him for racist reasons”.
“Race definitely played a role in the 2016 election,” Vance said. “I think that race will always play a role in our country. It’s just sort of a constant fact of American life. And definitely some people who voted for Trump are racist and they voted for him for racist reasons.”
The remarks were first reported by Mother Jones.
Trump won the 2016 election. Vance was then a US marine turned venture capitalist, famous as the author of Hillbilly Elegy, a bestselling account of his Appalachian youth widely seen to have foreshadowed vital support for Trump in Rust belt states.
He was then a Trump critic. But Vance is now a hard-right Republican US senator from Ohio, this month named as Trump’s running mate for the November election.
His rollout has not been smooth. Under fire for misogyny including calling his opponents “childless cat ladies”, his past opposition to Trump – including calling him “America’s Hitler”, “cultural heroin”, a “morally reprehensible human being”, “a disaster” and a “bad man” – has also been widely reported.
Vance’s remarks about Trump and race were made in February 2017, at the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics. While he said race had been a factor, he simultaneously downplayed its role in the election in the same interview.
“I always resist the idea that the real thing driving those Trump voters was racial anxiety or racial animus partially because I didn’t see it,” Vance said.
“I mean, the thing that really motivated people to vote for Trump, first in the primary and then in the general election, was three words: ‘jobs, jobs, jobs,’ right?
“And it’s very easy … to only see the really offensive stuff that Trump did replayed over and over again.
“But if you go to one of his rallies, it’s maybe 5% him being really outrageous and offensive and 95% him talking about, ‘Here are all the things that are wrong in your community. Here’s why they’re wrong. And I’m gonna bring back jobs.’ That was the core thesis of Trump’s entire argument.”
Vance said it would be “a little bizarre” to attribute Trump’s 2016 victory entirely to “racial animus”, because “one, the country is less racist now than it was 15 years ago, and we weren’t electing Donald Trump 15 years ago, and two, that wasn’t the core part of his message, and that wasn’t what a lot of his voters were really connecting with.”
He did, however, have concern about Trump’s attempt to ban Muslims from entering the US, one of his first – and most controversial – White House moves.
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And Vance mentioned his own mixed-race marriage, to Usha Vance, a lawyer of Indian descent, and “stuff directed at me and my wife on online message boards and Twitter and so forth.
“So I definitely buy that this was a racialised discourse unlike any that we’ve had in a really long time, but I don’t blame Trump’s voters for that.”
Those to blame, he said, were “typically well educated, coastal elitist people like [the far-right activist] Richard Spencer and the alt-right”.
In 2016 and 2017, “alt-right” was a label given to an emergent far-right world of online discourse and organising.
Vance is now widely seen as a leading voice of the new right, defined by Politico as “a loose group of conservative academics, activists and politicians”, influenced and funded by rightwing Silicon Valley figures, which contends that liberalism has failed and authoritarian means are justified to achieve rightwing aims.
In 2017, Vance said the “alt-right” was “driven by people … who are … cognitive elites in their own weird way”. His host, the journalist Alex Kotlowitz, cited Trump’s 2016 campaign chair and White House strategist, saying: “Like Steve Bannon?”
Vance said: “Right. Yeah.”