The senator said he wanted to “respond to [Trump’s] call for unity myself”, calling the GOP a “big tent” whose “disagreements make us stronger” and which is “unafraid to debate ideas and come to the best solution”. That’s not the message Vance sends to Mitch McConnell back in D.C., but it’s the one he now needs to send, tasked with a new mission to help Trump win voters beyond Ohio’s friendly borders.

Vance declared the GOP the party of “single moms”, celebrating his own mother’s ten years of sobriety as she watched on and mouthed “that’s my boy” while sitting feet from the former president. To loud applause, the Republican VP pick said his party would support the “working man” over “Wall Street”.

This is the same party that gathered in 2004 to renominate George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. It’s the same party that cheered the Iraq War, and the same party applauded along as Arnold Schwarzenegger spoke about the “liberating breeze of democracy” and referred to pessimists who fretted over China’s rise as “economic girly men”.

Vance is not Mike Pence, and Mike Pence is not at the RNC. Nor are Bush or Cheney or their notable offspring. So will the RNC in 2028 feature union bosses and screeds against Wall Street? What about in 2032 and 2036? These questions feel impossible, especially in the context of a news cycle that feels like it was written by M. Night Shyamalan. But it’s central to the broader questions about whether, with Trump and Vance, the New Right won the war or merely a series of battles.

The battle for Trump’s VP slot was being fought by the likes of Rupert Murdoch and Peter Thiel, lobbying for Doug Burgum and Vance respectively. In the days after Trump was shot at the Butler rally — as Biden donors continued to hesitate — Elon Musk, Bill Ackman, and Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz lined up in support of the GOP ticket. Andreessen, an e/acc “techno-optimist”, is on the board of Meta, and joins a group of cryptocurrency boosters who’ve recently offered their support to Trump.

China and Mexico loom large here in Milwaukee. Unlike Schwarzenegger, Vance skewered Biden for giving “China a sweetheart trade deal that destroyed even more good middle-class jobs”. Delegates chanted “bring them home” as the parents of a Hamas hostage spoke on stage and cheered as a young man spoke of suing Harvard over antisemitism. CNN and Politico are running a “grill” in the middle of the convention, drawing plenty of media-hungry Republicans.

Trump, meanwhile, sits stoically like Commodus at the Colosseum, leaving reporters and delegates in suspense about the nature of his “whole different speech”, rewritten after the tragedy on Saturday.

Vance’s remarks indicate a strategic emphasis on “unity” within the “big tent”. Excitement among techno-optimist venture capitalists point to at least some opportunism, which in turn could herald the rise of a powerful new interest group of billionaires on the Right who, as with Trump and his son, have found common cause with a man like Vance from Appalachia. Then there are China hawks and Israel defenders, who tap into deep cultural support for patriotism among Republicans. One 98-year-old D-Day veteran electrified the crowd when he said: “With President Trump back as commander-in-chief, I would go back to reenlist today and I would storm whatever beach my country needs me to.”

Meanwhile, the party machine is still eager to collaborate with elite journalists and lobbyists when it gets them into the right parties and signs the right clients. And so Vance and his team are now part of a system he’d very much like to dismantle.

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Emily Jashinsky is UnHerd‘s Washington D.C. Correspondent.

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