WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — It was a wintry night in January 2017, just two weeks into the Donald Trump presidency, and the conversation centered on the populist uprising unfolding before our eyes.
Seated around the Westwood Manor dinner table were bestselling author J.D. Vance, then-Purdue University President Mitch Daniels, political operative Mark Lubbers and this writer.
Vance was on The New York Times Best Seller list for his “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis” and is now a U.S. senator from Ohio. He’s on Trump’s vice president shortlist (despite his current beard) and could very well find himself on the GOP ticket in Milwaukee early next week. And he offered this jaw-dropper:
“In 20 years, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders will be in the same party. And in 20 years, Hillary Clinton and Paul Ryan will be in the same party. I think that is very, very interesting and that shift will be a big part of where we go over the next 20 or 30 years.”
It made sense in the Hoosier context.
Just nine months earlier, both Trump and socialist U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders had won the 2016 Indiana presidential primaries with 53% of the vote. It occurred despite Hoosier Democratic leaders and superdelegates unanimously backing Hillary Clinton, while Gov. Mike Pence, and all but two members of the Republican National Convention delegation backed either Sen. Ted Cruz or Ohio Gov. John Kasich.
During the Indiana presidential primary, Hoosiers witnessed Trump and Sanders insisting the economic and political systems were “rigged.” Both used the Carrier and United Technology job flight from Indianapolis to Mexico as evidence. But on the ideological spectrum, they were approaching the vortex seemingly 180 degrees apart.
This writer pressed Vance on how to gauge the upheaval that had gripped the U.S. Capitol and filled airports and public squares with protesters as Trump’s nascent presidency began (it was three years and 49 weeks before the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection). “I don’t think anyone in this room can say where we’re going to end up in the next three or four years,” I observed.
In the Feb. 2, 2017, edition of Howey Politics Indiana, I also observed: “The Indiana Trump brain trust of Rex Early and Tony Samuel witnessed dozens of denizens who had never turned out before, filling Golden Corral dining rooms and mowing Trump’s name into the Hoosier version of Kentucky bluegrass, viewing the Manhattan mogul as either an economic savior or a raging bull preparing to smash Capitol Hill marble and stuffy Senate decorum.”
For more than an hour at the Loeb Playhouse, the former Indiana governor and future Ohio senator grappled with and parsed the cultural divides that have pockmarked American society. The cultural and political elites had missed 15 years of the Trump reality TV show “The Apprentice,” creating a social blind spot that Trump cunningly exploited en route to his stunning 2016 upset.
“This is, to me, a very significant problem in our country right now, and I wish that I could say that it’s gotten better since November, and I don’t know that it has,” Vance said. “It may have even gotten worse.
“I think that that level of smugness is something that is really, really destructive to our political culture, and it’s something that, you know, frankly, you see it all the time,” Vance told Daniels.
“Look, if you are a Hillary Clinton supporter and you think that every single Donald Trump voter is just a bigot, or if you’re a Donald Trump voter and you think that every Hillary Clinton supporter is just ... sort of an out-of-touch-elite who doesn’t care about you, you are going to learn a lot about each other by spending more time and you may have a more substantive conversation.
“That doesn’t mean you’re going to agree on everything,” Vance continued. “It doesn’t even mean that you have to agree with the moral values all the time. It just means approaching it in a way that I think is again much more empathetic, much more compassionate, and that’s something that we don’t have a whole lot of in our country right now.”
Now on the Trump veepstakes shortlist, Sen. Vance on Sunday called for a special counsel to investigate President Biden. “I think what Donald Trump is simply saying is we ought to investigate the prior administration,” Vance told Kristen Welker on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
When he led the House Republican Study Committee, U.S. Rep. Jim Banks took Vance’s lead and in a March 2021 memo to then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy explained, “President Trump gave the Republican Party a political gift. We are now the party supported by most working-class voters. The question is whether Republicans reject that gift or unwrap it and permanently become the Party of the Working Class.”
In 2012, Wall Street sources contributed $6 million to President Barack Obama and almost $20 million to GOP nominee Mitt Romney. In 2020, Wall Street sources donated four times more to Joe Biden than Trump, something Banks called a “paradigm reversal.”
“If you think about what Trump really ran on ... he slaughtered a lot of Republican sacred cows,” Vance explained during the Q&A with Daniels. “He talked about immigration and primarily talked about it through the lens of wages and wage competition.”
Will it be a Trump/Vance ticket? We shall soon see.
Howey is a senior writer and columnist for State Affairs/Howey Politics Indiana. Follow him on X @hwypol.
