JD Vance knew what he was doing. The occasion was carefully chosen: a speech in the old steel factory in Middletown, Ohio, where his grandfather worked for nearly four decades as a welder. Vance had already spent 15 minutes reeling off the achievements of the administration. New manufacturing jobs, child molesters deported and (he has an awkward style) record demand for metal-cutting machines.
Then, subtly, almost as if he’d just been hit by the thought, he quoted the slogan of the “great” populist from rural Louisiana, Huey Long. “He once said that ‘every man a king’ was the goal of his political programme. But no man is a king if their castle is under siege by criminals. No man is a king if they can’t take their family out for dinner without being mugged.”
It was an interesting choice. Long was a brute in the interwar period – a tar-and-feather anti-liberal who kidnapped his opponents, handled the National Guard like a private militia and treated his allies like the sell-outs they were. He had a hole cut in the ceiling of the Louisiana Capitol so that the rain would fall on one man who resisted him. He would punch the air while he spoke as if he was lamping a Rockefeller. The patrician academic Arthur Schlesinger called him a “redneck revolutionist”. Franklin D Roosevelt feared that he would be a “candidate of the Hitler type for the president in 1936”.
But he also built 9,700 miles of road, 111 bridges and gave free textbooks to schoolchildren. He fought for the poor against the New Orleanian oligarchy and what he called the “lying newspapers”. He would have run for president if he hadn’t been assassinated in 1935.
The very-online vice-president would have known that quoting a man whose grassroots organisation was called Share Our Wealth would ignite a debate among the Maga cognoscenti about the direction of the party after Trump. True, his slant on Long was less about taxing the rich and more about catching muggers. But his implicit message was simple: the heir apparent was calling for Maga to return to its populist roots.
The obvious problem for Vance is that those roots have shrivelled. The administration he works for hasn’t been particularly populist. In fact, the president has inverted Long’s slogan and tried to turn himself into the only king in the country. The sole piece of major legislation that Trump has passed is a huge tax cut extension. The war against the “administrative state” ended with Elon Musk’s return to the gigafactory. Yes, illegal migration has been halted – but, as a consequence, the issue has lost its populist verve. Even the rhetoric coming out of the Oval Office has lacked the politically redeeming features of a populist rant.
Trump prefers to rant about… what exactly? Canada? It’s sometimes hard to locate the enemy in his wayward spiel – a cardinal populist sin. The target can be (must be, perhaps) ambiguous by its very nature. But it cannot be irrelevant. His habit of boasting about his home renovations makes him seem more like a doddering daytime television presenter than a politician – which, in a sense, he is.
Listen to one of his speeches from the 2016 campaign, and the contrast is like night and day. Endless foreign wars, Clinton corruption, Mexican rapists: Trump once shot from the hip at his opponents. There was even some old-fashioned economic nationalism. The populist Rasputin Steve Bannon was whispering in his ear about bringing back the steel mills and building great, big, beautiful bridges – rhetoric that might have got an appreciative “oorah” from Long. Now, Trump’s nemesis is the National Capital Planning Commission. He has always been a mediocre populist because the focus of his hatred quickly narrowed from the nation’s wounds to his personal enemies.
All of this is characteristic of an administration that Vance clearly regards as failing – and something he wants to correct. And even leaving aside the damage that Trump has done to Maga, there are problems with Vance’s strategy. The “populist playbook” is mostly filled with lessons on rhetoric. He still stumbles, struggles to anticipate applause and his improvisations don’t land. His style falls in the cracks between the demotic and the academic. Why, for instance, say “median” housing costs are coming down and not simply that rents are getting cheaper?
The other hiccup in Vance’s populist plan is his previous life as a Silicon Valley venture capitalist. The new scourge of American politics is the data centres proliferating across its landscapes. They unite everyone from Luddites to civil liberties campaigners to Nimbys to environmentalists to the tax-the-billionaires socialists. When Standard Oil threatened to leave Louisiana, Long said that if it did, it could “go to hell and stay there”. When Vance was asked about data centres a few days after his speech, he told America that he didn’t think they were “that controversial”. Polls would suggest otherwise.
Vance will never own a political stage in the way that Long did. But while his rivals for the 2028 Republican nomination keep their counsel, Vance has looked at where this administration is going wrong and unapologetically planted a large populist flag. Whichever challengers emerge, the battle lines of the coming primaries will form around his standard.
[Further reading: The loathing of technocracy]
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This article appears in the 02 Sep 2026 issue of the New Statesman, Meet Generation Screwed
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