The smear campaign against Sen. J.D. Vance is underway. Vance was a great VP pick for Trump because he supports the former president, backs policies that help working people, and comes from a rust-belt state.
Detractors will spend the next three-and-a-half months trying to tear Vance down in hopes of stopping a second Trump presidency. Vance's marriage to an Indian-American woman pisses off the far-right, who dislikes interracial relationships, and the left, who argue he and his wife are hypocrites because he supports deporting illegal immigrants and opposes birthright citizenship.
That's bizarre. Usha Vance was born in San Diego, and her parents, who are immigrants, are well-educated academics. Those are the types of immigrants you get in a merit-based system. Just because Vance married a brown woman and has mixed-race children, does that mean he must support an open border? Many illegal immigrants are fine people seeking better lives in America, hence why deporting every illegal immigrant isn't smart. Deportations of criminals and those not contributing to our country, however, keep Americans safe and protect the taxpayer. There's no conflict between opposing illegal immigration and being an immigrant or the child of immigrants, let alone finding non-white women attractive. Any straight guy with eyes does.
The media wants us to think Vance is terrible for women—because he opposes universal daycare and supports the traditional family unit. Subsidizing daycare is a bad policy because it offers a handout to the professional class while discriminating against those who opt for informal childcare. That includes stay-at-home mothers or parents who rely on family members, babysitters, etc., for care. If the government wants to help solve the childcare problem (undoubtedly a market failure), it should consider offering a more universal benefit (like a child allowance). Or it should at least go for solutions without ignoring the large number of children in informal care.
On the right, Vance is criticized for his economic views, with some commentators comparing him to Elizabeth Warren. It's an example of what's wrong with punditry: bombastic essay with little proof. Vance bucks Republican economic orthodoxy. He supports capping insulin costs, making childbirth free, allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices, a higher federal minimum wage, universal catastrophic coverage, and paid sick time for railroad workers. I like all of that as a right-winger with more pragmatic economic views. Working families are more likely to want solutions that improve their lives rather than worrying about what the pharmaceutical industry thinks.
The way Vance supports various ideas also differs from those of Warren. He wants the healthcare system to function as a market while protecting people from economic ruin and bankruptcies—not a government takeover that amounts to the largest entitlement program in American history. Vance also wants to increase the $7.25 federal minimum wage, unchanged for the past 15 years, to $10 an hour while enacting mandatory E-Verify nationwide. Compare that to Warren, who wants $15 an hour, an idea that failed with bipartisan opposition in Congress in 2021. The fight for 15, at least federally, is virtue signaling that has made it harder to raise the age; only a pragmatic increase that gets bipartisan support can become law, not something that more than doubles the wage.
People don't dislike Warren because she wants cheaper insulin. It's because she's a weird, awkward AWFL (affluent white female liberal) who faked Native-American ancestry to further her career while supporting affirmative action. While running for president, Warren wanted a small child who identified as transgender to approve of her Secretary of Education pick if elected. That's the Elizabeth Warren we know and can’t stand.
Other right-wingers complain that Vance was anti-Trump in 2016, compared him to Hitler, and voted for Evan McMullin. That was eight years ago, before Trump was president, and most Republicans, at one point or another, said something negative about Trump. Most Republicans opposed him in the primary, especially when he first entered the race in June 2015. One can change their political views or acknowledge that their initial predictions about Trump were incorrect. People can change their minds in light of new facts and evidence, especially when the new details prove their past hypothesis wrong.
Another area where Vance receives criticism is foreign policy because of his opposition to the war in Ukraine. Media outlets say that Russia likes him, and the rest of Europe hates him. It’s a pointless war. Russia's invasion of Ukraine was wrong, but Vance understands that Ukraine can’t win and that the war is a drain on the American taxpayer. There's nothing wrong with Republicans supporting a ceasefire that ends the death and destruction in these two countries while acknowledging Vladimir Putin’s evil.