Guess who agrees with this criticism? Vice President J.D. Vance, that’s who. At least he did back before he became a full-fledged devotee of Donald Trump.
This matters not just because it badly undermines the current GOP push to slash Medicaid. It also sheds new light on Vance’s evolution as a public figure and the sordid compromises he’s made to rise to the pinnacle of MAGA politics.
These are precisely the types of voters who would have been hurt by the 2017 House GOP effort to repeal the ACA. That bill would have phased out the ACA’s Medicaid expansion and transitioned to block grants to states, booting millions off the program, many of them in Trump country, if the bill hadn’t failed in the Senate.
In a 2017 interview with the Cleveland Plain Dealer, for instance, Vance faulted the GOP repeal effort’s Medicaid cuts, which he explicitly cast as a betrayal of Trump voters. Vance said Trump had been elected precisely because he refrained from saying, “I’m going to take away your Social Security and your Medicaid.” This, said Vance, had differentiated Trump from plutocratic Republicans who wouldn’t “take care of working-class people.”
President Trump actively championed that bill at the time. And though the Senate killed it, Vance didn’t forget what it had revealed about Trump and Trumpism. In 2020 private texts obtained by The Washington Post, Vance lamented that Trump’s first term had “thoroughly failed to deliver on his economic populism.” It is likely, given Vance’s criticism of the GOP repeal effort, that this was a partial reference to that.
Some might be tempted to dismiss the importance of Vance’s previous quotes. After all, it’s widely known that Vance was an early critic of Trump before converting to a major supporter and then becoming his running mate.
If Vance and Trump end up supporting some version of the deep Medicaid cuts in the GOP bill—which is very likely—then it should go without saying that Vance should be held to account for all the ways this move betrays those previously stated ideals.
Yet as Vance rose higher in the MAGA firmament, he increasingly trafficked in the ugly lies, the hateful cultural appeals, and the proudly sadistic cruelties of MAGA—the very things Vance previously claimed constituted a negligible fraction of Trumpist politics. Vance stopped caring about all the ways that Trump-era GOP policies continued to screw over the working-class voters who Trump was supposedly fighting for.
Instead, Trumpism actively embraces hierarchy and subjugation of the non-chosen. It wields the state to facilitate the division of Americans into MAGA “winners” and non-MAGA “suckers” and “losers.” Thus it is that the stated aims of the 2017 iteration of Vance so often seem to vanish when the state falls under Trump-MAGA control.
It is possible that Trump and Vance will ultimately oppose House Republicans’ cuts to Medicaid. On Tuesday, Trump privately directed them to refrain from cutting Medicaid other than eliminating “waste, fraud, and abuse.” But in the next breath, Trump also endorsed “common-sense work requirements.” So it’s likely that Trump will support all sorts of GOP bureaucratic chicanery that in the name of combating “fraud” actually pushes millions off Medicaid. And Vance, the great populist champion of the working poor, will go along with him every step of the way.
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