In Milwaukee, JD Vance’s nomination, Union leader speech reshapes Republican Party

Donald Trump’s decision to pick JD Vance as his running mate marks a significant moment in his re-engineering of the Republican Party.

Milwaukee: Donald Trump’s decision to pick JD Vance as his running mate, and his invitation to the president of one of America’s biggest labour unions to address the Republican convention, marks a big moment in Trump’s radical re-engineering of the Republican Party. The traditional party of America’s big business is becoming the party of a segment of America’s workers.

Republican presidential nominee and former U.S. President Donald Trump and Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance point to the stage during Day 1 of the Republican National Convention (RNC) (REUTERS)

This process has been in the works for eight years now, ever since Trump upended the conventional assumptions of the Republican Party about trade, globalisation and jobs. In this view, liberal trading arrangements had led to a massive exodus of American jobs to the rest of the world, particularly China; it had hollowed out American cities and towns and devastated families; and it was time to return to manufacturing and bring investments and jobs home. While Trump sought to implement this largely through the instrument of tariffs, he continued to confront an older Republican establishment that wasn’t quite at home with his policy prescription.

That changed in Milwaukee, for Trump’s utter dominance of the Republican platform has allowed him to fuse his policy beliefs with the political character of the party itself now. And nowhere was that more clear than on Monday in two ways.

The first was the selection of Vance.

In Hillbilly Elegy, the book that catapulted him to national fame, Vance said he identified with millions of working class White Americans of Scots-Irish descent who had no college degree. “To these folks, poverty is the family tradition—their ancestors were day laborers in the Southern slave economy, sharecroppers after that, coal miners after that, and machinists and millworkers during more recent times. Americans call them hillbillies, rednecks, or white trash. I call them neighbors, friends, and family.”

He wrote of how the fortunes of white working class seemed dimmest in the Appalachian Mountains, the region stretching from Alabama and George in the South to Ohio and even parts of New York in the north. ““From low social mobility to poverty to divorce and drug addiction, my home is a hub of misery... working-class whites are the most pessimistic group in America.” Explaining the phenomena, Vance said this was because they were more socially isolated than ever. “Our religion has changed—built around churches heavy on emotional rhetoric but light on the kind of social support necessary to enable poor kids to do well. Many of us have dropped out of the labor force or have chosen not to relocate for better opportunities. Our men suffer from a peculiar crisis of masculinity in which some of the very traits that our culture inculcates make it difficult to succeed in a changing world.”

While he didn’t see Trump as offering a solution to this crisis when he wrote the book, Vance’s politics and policy approach evolved. In 2020, in a piece titled “End the Globalization Gravy Train”, Vance slammed an American economy built on “consumption, debt, financialization, and sloth” and the reliance on China and pleaded for an anti globalisation again.

After winning his Senate race, Vance has been actively backing causes that working class can identify with and developing a closer relationship with unions, the pillar of the Democratic Party. His position on American foreign policy aligns with that of Trump, where they reject an expansive definition of American interests and an expansive role of America in the rest of the world and instead seek the priorisation of American economic interests as fundamental basis on which decisions ought to be taken.

The second change on Monday night in Milwaukee was the presence of Sean O’Brien, the president of the International Teamsters, a 1.3 million strong labour union. This was the first time in 121 years history of the Union that its leader addressed the Republican convention.

And in his speech, with both Trump and Vance in the audience, standing, and listening to carefully, O’Brien strongly slammed big business and said corporates received the most welfare in America. He batted strongly for the right of unions to organise. He asked for worker rights, including in new tech and gig economy. He spoke of inflation and cost of living crisis. He called the American chamber of commerce, a traditional pillar of Republican support, a union of big business. And refusing to endorse Democrats, which Teamsters has done in recent elections, O’ Brien said, “Today, the Teamsters are here to say we are not beholden to anyone or any party. We will create an agenda and work with a bipartisan coalition, ready to accomplish something real for the American worker.”

Two caveats are essential here. Democrats still retain the support of many organised labour unions, Joe Biden himself is seen as a forceful pro labour leader and has become the first president to stand in a picket line. And Republicans continue to enjoy the support of corporates, especially with their promises of tax cuts, deregulation, support to fossil fuel based energy policies, and attack on environmental and social responsibility. But what’s also happening simultaneously is this churn where the composition of Republican class base is changing, and its rhetoric and policies are shifting.

O’Brien also hailed Trump. “President Trump is a candidate who is not afraid of hearing from new, loud and often critical voices, and I think we all can agree, whether people like him or they don't like him, in light of what happened to him on Saturday, he has proven to be one tough S.O.B.”

The audience clapped and Trump smiled. He had reason to, for he had done what was considered unthinkable - change America’s Party of the rich to America’s party of the workers and unions. How they retains the support of the old class base, and expand into the new class base will be the Trump-Vance test in the years to come.