“President Trump represents America’s last best hope to restore what — if lost — may never be found again. A country where a working-class boy born far from the halls of power can stand on this stage as the next vice president of the United States of America.” - JD Vance
Tulsi Gabbard’s voice is greatly missed from the Republican National Convention. However, it still resonates profoundly in our culture, especially after Vice President Kamala Harris insulted JD Vance’s love of country and called her out as only Tulsi Gabbard can.
So many of us, especially on the Left, don’t think much about the people who put their lives on the line every day in service of this country. However, in JD Vance, Trump found someone who can offer more than just empty words.
According to Military.com:
Vance, 39, is the first post-9/11 veteran to find a spot on a major party ticket and, if elected, would likely be the first Marine veteran to serve as the second-in-command… He is the first veteran on a major party ticket since John McCain in 2008.”
That mattered when the Gold Star families took to the stage to “say their names,” a chant heard over and over again since the catastrophic exit from Afghanistan, the first real sign to the American people and to the world that the leader of the United States did not know what he was doing.
What a difference eight years makes. When he was still green as a politician and not yet the leader he is today, Trump famously made fun of a Gold Star dad after he read out loud the Constitution at the Democratic National Convention in 2016. The press made much of it at the time, but they’ve said nothing about how our government memory-holed the deaths of 13 American soldiers.
Say their names.
Democrats and the media have repeatedly excused the disastrous military operation that would ultimately destabilize the global order — nothing to see here; move along, move along. It wrecked Biden’s approval ratings, and they’ve never recovered.
Say their names.
Up until Night 3 of the Republican National Convention—Make America Strong Again—there had never been any major ceremony or remembrance of the fallen. We saw their military funerals. There was a hearing in Congress.
But their names, faces, and personal stories had never been properly memorialized in any major way, not in the State of the Union, and wholly forgotten during the first presidential debate of 2024.
Say their names.
The general public has never called them heroes. That changed last night.
Before their appearance at the RNC, a short documentary played with interviews from the Gold Star families, all of them angry that the Biden administration had mostly ignored them while Trump hadn’t. He’d given them his time. He knew their children, they said. That matters if you’re the Commander in Chief, a job neither Joe Biden nor Kamala Harris are suited for.
When the families finally appeared on stage, tears were already streaming down the faces of almost everyone in the hall, as they often are when we come together to talk about military deaths. We know they died serving their country. Some grown men could be seen openly weeping at the unimaginable loss of an avoidable tragedy.
But because the legacy press has been in the Biden administration's pocket for eight years now, Afghanistan has never become the full-scale political scandal that it should have been. What happened to all that gear? What happened to Afghanistan? Did it spark the two wars in Ukraine and Gaza?
I don’t know anything about military operations, but I know that when you rush out of a country, you’d better be sure you protect your soldiers from terrorists, and you’d better be sure you aren’t leaving with bodies falling off airplanes. We’re better than that.
No one watching was prepared for just how moving it would be to hear the names of the dead soldiers, all of them way too young, finally read out loud. As tears streamed down their faces, they bravely held up pictures of their loved ones, gone forever, gone too soon.
We don’t often see such moving tributes at political conventions, which celebrate how successful and united a political party is heading into an election. But here, under the direction of Trump, it would not be the same old thing—big hats and Jimmy Buffett songs. This was going to make a strong case for changing the guard and not a moment too soon.
Like Melania Trump, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner are noticeably absent from the RNC, at least so far. They have decided that family must come first. They can’t raise their children with the entire Left viciously savaging them and everything they do. That’s probably a wise decision. It was then left up to Trump’s oldest granddaughter, beautiful young Kai, to speak to the crowd.
You wonder, how could the Left find anything hateful in that? I haven’t even bothered to look because, to tell you the truth, I don’t even want to know.
“This morning I did walk out of a Federal prison in Miami. Joe Biden and his Department of Injustice put me there…If they can come for me, and they can come for Donald Trump, be careful, because they will come for you.” - Peter Navarro
It’s still hard to believe, even knowing how often this kind of thing happens in history, that both Peter Navarro and Steve Bannon have been thrown in prison for Contempt of Congress. Bannon still sits in a prison cell, missing all of this that he’s worked so hard for all of these years, finally bearing fruit.
Navarro’s time in prison is apparent on his face. He looks a little older, thinner, and much wiser. I suspect you are never the same when you serve time, just as you’re never the same when you dodge a bullet.
As our authoritarian government and its weaponized Justice System still hope to jail Trump, they would be well advised to take a good long look at Peter Navarro and Bannon, too, when he’s finally freed. These men are made as tough as they come, and if they have to go to prison, they will. Yes, even Trump.
The appearances by everyday Americans and their struggles under the Biden regime are the right messages to send, especially now, with all eyes on the event. While it’s true that the hungry beast of the churn cherry-picked things they could ridicule—Matt Gaetz, Rudy Guiliani taking a fall—there was no getting away from the truth of just how badly the Democrats have failed the American people.
And there’s no getting away from how united and powerful the GOP has become with Trump as its leader.
And I promise you one more thing. To the people of Middletown, Ohio, and all the forgotten communities in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Ohio, and every corner of our nation:
I promise you this — I will be a vice president who never forgets where he came from.
Bruce Springsteen abandoned them. Stephen King abandoned them. The Democrats abandoned them. Hollywood abandoned them. But JD Vance and Donald Trump will not.
When you grow up the way Vance did, the way I did, in a rough and tumble way where you dodged violence, and you never knew where your next meal was coming from, you either get lucky and find an anchor to steady the ship or you are lost at sea. For Vance, he found an unlikely person to turn him into someone who, like Trump, could take it and take it and take it some more.
Maybe to some people it doesn’t make sense for Trump to choose Vance. But remember, he’s eyeing 2028, not just 2024. He’s looking for someone as tough as he is, and there aren’t many of those kinds of people walking around.
Like Vance, Trump was raised to be tough by tough people. His life wasn’t hard because they were poor — they were not — but because his father was hard. He raised “killers” to never back down and always fight back. In that family, you didn’t just have to survive. You had to win.
These two men, with everything they’ve survived, now know what it’s like to have bullets whizzing past your head. They have stuff to take on what has become a ruling class oligopoly that will use every tool at their disposal to stay in power and to destroy anyone who dares confront that power.
Can Vance give the kinds of speeches that win elections? Yes. He can. But what touched me more than that was when he shined the light on his mother, who is now ten years sober. There she sat, with echoes of the abuse and torment from Hillbilly Elegy, with her hands folded in her lap and House Speaker Mike Johnson sitting next to her, as JD opened his heart and told her he loved her.
As she stood, the warm and welcoming MAGA crowd began softly chanting, “JD’s Mom…JD’s Mom….JD’s mom.” How can anyone not love these people? As she sat back down, she mouthed, “That’s my boy. That’s my boy.”
Surviving addiction is not for the weak. You either end up sober or dead. One of the people closest to me, my last boyfriend whom I’d broken with after four years, had kicked the heroin habit for decades.
That’s why it was such a shock on a random morning when he texted me and said he was trying to figure out what to do with his life. The COVID lockdowns had left him lonely and depressed. I should have offered to see him, but our relationship was over, and that was that.
The next day, I found out shortly after sending me that text he had shot himself up with heroin and overdosed. I couldn’t believe it. I texted him back, stupidly, Rick? Are you there?
JD’s mom has the face of someone taking it one day at a time on a precarious path with only two potential outcomes. Hopefully, she has the kind of support she needs. But she should know she is loved, and now the people in the red hats have welcomed her with open arms. And JD has welcomed her home.
He promised a celebration for leaving her past behind and kicking a dangerous habit. Maybe, he said, that celebration would be in the White House. From his seat, gazing upon everything he helped build, Trump nodded and smiled.
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