What Trump can learn from Vance ahead of his national address

President Donald Trump could do worse than stick to JD Vance’s script in his primetime national address on Wednesday night.

The vice president is just back from Allentown, Pennsylvania, where he delivered the administration’s most coherent and disciplined argument for its 10-month stewardship of the economy.

Vance, unlike his boss, can stick to a pre-crafted political message and deliver it effectively. Trump, by contrast, loves to mock aides who send him on trips with prepared remarks. “I haven’t read practically anything off the stupid teleprompter,” he bragged at his own event in Pennsylvania last week. The president was tasked with showing empathy over high prices and instead veered off into rants about Somalis and windmills.

Vance’s argument, in his Keystone State do-over, was that any stress Americans feel over high prices for groceries and housing was the fault of Democrats and that when Trump’s policies start kicking in next year, everything will improve. “We inherited a nightmare of an economy from Joe Biden,” he said.

Unlike Trump, Vance was willing to concede that many Americans don’t recognize the economic “golden age” his boss keeps heralding. “Even though we’ve made incredible progress, we understand that there’s a lot more work to do,” Vance said. “The thing that I’d ask from the American people is a little bit of patience.”

The administration will be hoping that Vance’s show of recognition will convince voters that Trump cares too, despite his inability to show it. “I promise you, there is no person more impatient to solve the affordability crisis than Donald J. Trump,” the vice president told his crowd.

Vance has better working-class credentials than his billionaire superior. He referred Tuesday to his hard-knocks Appalachian upbringing, portrayed in his memoir “Hillbilly Elegy.” The book describes how the grandmother he knew as “Mamaw” bought a calculator she could barely afford to help her future Yale Law School graduate grandson pass a test at school. Even if he’s since made millions, according to Federal Election Commission filings, Vance can at least make a decent fist of showing he gets what working Americans face.

Still, Vance delivered a distinctly upbeat assessment of an economy beset by weakening fundamentals that has left many working- and middle-class Americans with a deep sense of insecurity. He had no choice but to echo Trump’s “A-plus-plus-plus-plus-plus” rating of his own performance on the issue. (Vance used slightly fewer pluses.)

He argued that Trump’s tariffs, which many economists say are hiking prices, ignited a massive flow of inward investment. He vowed that the administration would not allow any more US jobs to go abroad. He claimed Trump had already engineered higher wages and lower inflation. The inflation rate, according to the latest official data, was at 3.0% year-on-year in September, at the same level Trump inherited from Biden. Wage growth in Tuesday’s jobs report was sluggish.

‘Rome wasn’t built in a day’

The White House’s creative accounting exemplified the shadow over Vance’s polished political performance: Just because he can hammer home a message doesn’t mean it’s a good message.

“Rome wasn’t built in a day,” Vance said. Voters who thought they’d elected Trump to perform his promised quick fix might see this comment as rather tone-deaf. And while Vance is correct that prices shot up under Biden, slamming the former president is unlikely to cut it in the midterm elections next year.

The vice president’s rhetorical tightrope walk paralleled a perennial challenge for administrations. How do they bank credit for claimed economic improvements that many citizens don’t perceive? The Obama administration wrestled with this puzzle before the 2012 election, when the president needed to empathize with the economic pain of voters but also to convince them he’d conquered the Great Recession as he sought a second term.

The current administration is falling into another trap caused by happy talk on the economy. Its boasts don’t reflect the daily reality perceived by voters. As Vance traveled to Pennsylvania to talk up the economy, new official data underscored fresh concerns for the coming year, with unemployment ticking up to 4.6%, the highest level in four years. Vance spun the number as an optimistic sign that people who’d quit looking for work under Biden had returned to the jobs market.

But multiple polls show that voters are frustrated with high prices, have lost confidence in Trump’s capacity to fix the issue and have soured on his presidency more generally. A failure to turn around such perceptions could spell disaster for Republicans in the midterms.

Trump tries to change the mood about his presidency

The White House says that Trump will speak Wednesday evening about the “historic accomplishments that he has garnered for our country over the past year.” Presidents often like to sum up their efforts before Americans start to concentrate on the holidays. And in addition to the economy, Trump will be expected to crow over his successful crackdown on the southern border and perhaps to explain his apparent bid to topple Venezuela’s leader.

Perhaps the formal surroundings of the presidential mansion and its Christmas decor will provide the structure that Trump lacks in his freewheeling rally-style events and press conferences. Scripted occasions are not, however, always where he feels the most comfortable. And he has a lot of work to do.

The president has been adamant in recent weeks that the affordability crisis exists only in the minds of Democrats, blasting the pain of high prices as a “hoax” — his favorite word for an inconvenient political threat. His insistence that the country is basking in an economic golden age has only reinforced perceptions that he’s out of touch, as has his obsession with legacy plays like the new White House ballroom.

Vance’s trip on Tuesday was the latest sign that there will one day be political life after Trump. While the president is all about confrontation and blasting enemies, the vice president seems to understand that he’ll have to have a more rounded appeal in a potential 2028 campaign.

Working the crowd in Pennsylvania, Vance showed versatile political skills. He was concise, energetic and sparky. His relative youth at the age of 41 makes for a contrast with his 79-year-old boss — as well as with Biden’s low-energy road trips to tout the economy when he was struggling to quell high prices.

Vance easily parried the stunning new political controversy over candid insider revelations by White House chief of staff Susie Wiles in a Vanity Fair interview, including her remark that Vance had been “a conspiracy theorist for a decade.” He told reporters with a smile that “sometimes I am a conspiracy theorist, but I only believe in the conspiracy theories that are true.” The response turned a dicey spot into a base-rallying moment by hitting GOP talking points over masks during the pandemic, Biden’s eroded capability late in his term and the raft of criminal probes against Trump.

Yet as Vance comes under increasing scrutiny as the potential 2028 GOP frontrunner, another insight emerged from his trip to Pennsylvania. Despite his swipes at the “fake news” and mockery of Biden’s physical condition, he was still operating within the traditional confines of a politician delivering a speech and nailing a message.

Given Trump’s wild behavior in recent weeks, including a distasteful social media post about the murder of Hollywood director Rob Reiner and his wife, many Republican strategists might welcome the stability.

But Trump became president because he reinvented the rules of politics with histrionics that forged a bond with supporters that was as much emotional as it was ideological.

When he finally leaves the stage, Republican politics may look a lot more conventional.

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