Trump endorses Bernie Sanders clone, J.D. Vance, for U.S. Senate

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Donald Trump J.D. Vance Bernie Sanders U.S. Senate

Donald Trump endorses Bernie Sanders clone, J.D. Vance, for U.S. Senate

In another attempt to feed his massive ego and put Trumpist Republicans in Congress, Donald Trump has endorsed J.D. Vance for the U.S. Senate in Ohio, a man who claims to be a “conservative” but pushes policies straight out of Bernie Sanders’ playbook.

As usual, Trump made the endorsement based on Vance’s fealty to Trump (via National Review):

Former president Trump endorsed GOP candidate J. D. Vance in Ohio’s Senate race.

Once a vocal critic of Trump during his first presidential bid, Vance declared his support for Trump in 2020 and has since carried his mantle with a populist platform.

“Like many others, J.D. Vance may have said some not so great [sic] things about me in the past, but he gets it now, and I have seen that in spades. He is our best chance for victory in what could be a very tough race. The Democrats will be spending many millions of dollars, but the good news is that they have a defective candidate who ran for President and garnered exactly zero percent in the polls. The bottom line is, we must have a Republican victory in Ohio,” Trump wrote in a statement announcing the endorsement. (emphasis mine)

“Populist platform” is code for nationalism, which means J.D. Vance believes as National Conservatism founder Yoram Hazony does when it comes to the belief that “traditional conservatism” has placed too much emphasis on personal liberty and needs to be replaced.

During an appearance with Tucker Carlson — a defender of social fascism and an AOC-inspired anti-capitalist — last fall, J.D. Vance pushed some of Bernie Sanders’ agenda when he declared that the government should seize the assets of political non-profits that don’t believe as he does and then redistribute that wealth to organizations that agree with his “conservative” views.

Much like Obama used the IRS to target his political enemies, J.D. Vance wants to target the political enemies of Trumpist Republicans. “Why don’t we seize the assets of the Ford Foundation, tax their assets, and give it to the people who’ve had their lives destroyed by their radical open borders agenda?” Vance “hypothetically” asked Carlson.

Throughout the show, Carlson and Vance tried to portray nonprofit groups as an exotic Democratic Party plot and the whole idea of tax-exempt status as some sort of left-wing conspiracy. Carlson complained that groups like the Ford Foundation can “completely change the country, non-democratically, using their tax exemption” and was openly shocked that Democratic Socialists like Bernie Sanders weren’t calling for taxing “openly partisan” nonprofits.

In his best Bernie Sanders voice, Vance concluded that groups like the Ford Foundation, the Gates Foundation, and the Harvard University endowment “fundamentally cancers on society.”

Did you hear Carlson’s “Amen” at the end of Vance’s liberty-hating rant?

It’s not all that surprising for Trumpist Republicans like J.D. Vance to tout Bernie Sanders-inspired policies and use them as a reason to vote for him because Trump’s Republican Party has rebranded conservatism as nationalism — which is warmed-over Democratic Socialism with an “R” attached.

Additionally, J.D. Vance is another example of how people who once opposed Donald Trump have willingly sold their souls to him to be in his good graces (via CNN):

In deleted tweets first discovered by CNN’s KFile, Vance wrote in 2016 that he would not vote for Trump in the presidential election and instead] support Evan McMullin, a former CIA operations officer who ran as an independent. Vance also called Trump “reprehensible.”

“Trump makes people I care about afraid. Immigrants, Muslims, etc. Because of this I find him reprehensible. God wants better of us,” he wrote in October 2016.

In another deleted tweet — this one sent following the fallout of the infamous Access Hollywood tape — Vance wrote, “Fellow Christians, everyone is watching us when we apologize for this man. Lord help us.”

But that was before Vance decided to run to represent Ohio in the U.S. Senate; now he has officially apologized for his past statements about Trump and has earned the endorsement of his orange messiah.

Further evidence of the Bernie Sanders influence on J.D. Vance’s campaign came from fellow nationalist Josh Hawley –– his presidential aspirations are tied to Trumpism and nationalism — when he endorsed Vance months before Trump.

In April 2019, Hawley joined Rick Scott (R-FL) on a bill imposing price controls on prescription drugs. The bill was so anti-free market in application that it was described as legislation that “could have been written by Bernie Sanders.”

Immediately after the current Congress was sworn in (February 2021), Hawley joined Bernie Sanders and Ron Wyden on a class warfare proposal to tax corporations that don’t pay their employees $15/hr.

“For decades, the wages of everyday, working Americans have remained stagnate,” Hawley said at the time, “while monopoly corporations have consolidated industry after industry, securing record profits for CEOs and investment bankers.”

The Ohio Republican primary has been a race toward Trumpism. In addition to Vance, businessman Mike Gibbons, former state Treasurer Josh Mandel, and former state Republican Chair Jane Timken have been busy trying to out-Trump one another by mimicking his style and pushing his worn-out claim of election fraud.

Meanwhile, billionaire tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel is donating $3.5 million to a super PAC backing Vance after he won Trump’s endorsement. Additionally, J.D. Vance will leverage Thiel’s donations by appearing with Trump at a campaign rally this Saturday to push his Bernie Sanders agenda.

Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders have been two sides of the same coin ever since the 2016 campaign season, which makes the endorsement of a candidate like J.D. Vance a logical choice — not to mention his embrace of all things Trump.

As the 2022 and 2024 elections draw nigh, don’t be surprised when the number of Trumpist Republican nationalist candidates increases. Likewise, don’t be surprised when so-called conservatives like J.D. Vance run on Bernie Sanders’ Marxist/socialist agenda.

Such is the state of the Trumpist Republican Party.

 

David Leach is the owner of the Strident Conservative. He holds people of every political stripe accountable for their failure to uphold conservative values, and he promotes those values instead of political parties.

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