Republican Convention: A storyteller for Trump: Vance gives the approachable

After all the loud and extreme speakers at the Republican convention in Milwaukee, JD Vance seems almost gentle: In his first speech as vice presidential candidate, he does not raise his voice. When the audience interrupts him with cheers, he waits patiently and smiles. For his speech, he slips into the role of the storyteller who once celebrated success with the bestseller “Hillbilly Elegy” – and draws on his own family history in the working class to tell of an America that needs a strong Donald Trump to get back on the right track after the presidency of Democrat Joe Biden.

“I grew up in Middletown, Ohio,” said the 39-year-old senator at the beginning of his speech officially accepting the nomination to be Trump’s vice president. The fact that he is now standing on this stage is probably mainly due to the fact that Trump hopes that he will secure votes in the hotly contested “swing states” and especially among industrial workers. And that is exactly what Vance is starting to do this evening. For him, it is the first test run at the side of Trump, who is all-powerful in the Republican Party.

An American tale

The public is in favor of Vance simply because the same would be true of anyone the 78-year-old Trump would choose. In Milwaukee, almost every Republican seems to be a Vance fan at the moment. The senator was his first choice for the role of vice president, says 34-year-old Thomas Lane, a lawyer from California. Vance manages to make even someone like him believe “that you can achieve anything if you just work hard enough.” Rags to riches – the classic American story.

Vance says he comes from a small town “where people spoke their minds, worked with their hands, and loved God, their family, their community, and their country with all their hearts.” But it was also a place that was pushed aside and forgotten by “America’s ruling class in Washington.” Whether such a statement is credible from a top politician with a law degree from the elite Yale University, whose election campaign was financed with millions from a tech billionaire, is ultimately up to the voters to decide.

Vance speaks of the poverty in many parts of America, of despair and drug-related deaths. He links this to the difficult circumstances he himself comes from, the former alcohol addiction of his mother, who is also in the room and receives great cheers when the cameras focus on her. There is cheering and applause for the anecdote that his deceased grandmother, with whom he grew up, had supposedly hidden 19 loaded weapons in various places in the house.

Tired applause for vegetarian and Indian food

The reactions to the speech by his wife Usha, who stands on the stage shortly before him to introduce him, are more reserved. The top lawyer with Indian roots is given a friendly welcome, the people in the room are polite and respectful towards her, laughing when she makes a joke. But not all anecdotes end up in Trump’s “Make America Great Again” audience. When Usha tells us that she introduced her meat and potatoes-loving husband to a vegetarian diet and that her mother taught him to cook Indian food, there is only weary applause.

In the story that Vance tells afterwards, there is room for Usha and his children, his family, his time in the military and his student debt – but not his career in the financial sector. The “corrupt Washington”, according to the narrative, is Joe Biden and his Democrats.

Vance makes the incumbent US president, who is running for a second term, the face of globalization and a supporter of wars that the people of America are suffering from. “Jobs have been moved to other countries and our children have been sent to war,” Vance says at one point, referring to the Iraq War, which Biden supported as one of 77 senators during his time in the US Congress. At another: “Many people I grew up with cannot afford to spend more on food, gas and rent.” He blames Biden for this.

Trump as a defiant healer

He repeatedly returns to Trump, who smiles at him benevolently from the stands. Trump, says Vance, reversed “decades of betrayal by corrupt insiders in Washington within four short years” during his time as US president. He counts Biden among them. Vance presents the Republican Trump as a man of political moderation.

Referring to the assassination attempt on Trump this weekend, Vance said of the presidential candidate: “One moment he can stand defiantly against an assassin and the next he can call for national healing. He is a beloved father and grandfather.” Trump subsequently called for national unity, “for national calm, literally, after an assassin nearly took his life.” Shortly after the assassination, Vance blamed US President Biden for the attack.

America first

In his speech, he now promises Trump that they will work together to realize his “extraordinary vision for the country.” Shortly before, he outlined in broad terms what that might look like and presented a clear America-first policy in Trump’s spirit: “We will no longer buy energy from countries that hate us, but will buy it directly from American workers in Pennsylvania and Ohio and across the country,” Vance announces. “We will no longer sacrifice supply chains for unlimited global trade.”

At the end, Vance – like any good storyteller – draws the line back to where he started. He promises the people of Middletown “and all the forgotten communities (…) and in every corner of our country,” says Vance: “I will be a vice president who never forgets where he came from.”