Vance praises Trump’s ‘rebellion’ against GOP donors in new book

“[A]s the decline in Christianity has left us without a shared moral language, economics has stepped into the vacuum,” Vance writes in Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith. “We pretend there are scientific answers to questions of values.”

Vance cites his stepmother, “a devout evangelical and committed Republican,” lamenting that she found herself voting for “the party of the rich.”

“And something happened in the 1990s, as Christian conservatives fused with the Republican Party, is that we were taken advantage of,” Vance, 41, continues. “Most Christians don’t care about lower taxes for global corporations or institutional investors. They may have been actively hostile to those things.”

Vance credits Trump with reorienting the Republican electoral coalition. “Indeed, one of the subtexts of the Trump rebellion in the Republican Party in 2016 was that business elites out the working-class members of their party cared far more about factory jobs than abstract libertarian economics.”

While the book is largely about Vance’s return to Christianity and conversion to Catholicism, he also at times applies Catholic social teachings to political questions and prioritizes social conservatism over the low-tax, low-regulation economic variety.

At the same time Vance is releasing his new book, former Vice President Mike Pence is promoting his own What Conservatives Believe, which defends Reaganite economic and social conservatism from Trumpian innovations.

Pence served as vice president under Trump from 2017 to 2021 and was his running mate in the 2016 and 2020 campaigns. He unsuccessfully sought the 2024 Republican nomination, but failed to gain any traction and dropped out before the Iowa caucuses.

“One of the reasons Donald Trump’s first campaign took the country by storm is that he spoke in visceral, moral terms about basic fairness: America was getting ‘ripped off’ by other nations stealing our industrial base; the United States needed to reform its health care system in a way to ensure that no one ‘died in the streets,’” Vance writes. “It’s hysterical to look back at the think pieces written during the 2016 election — for example, in National Review, attacking Donald Trump for endorsing ‘protectionism’ or ‘socialized medicine’ — and realize that the very people who pretended to speak for Republican voters had no idea what Republican voters thought.”

Vance is supportive of Trump’s overtures to union workers. “[W]hile some of critics on the left attack our administration for being insufficiently pro-labor, the most strident critics of our policy come from the right, where Republicans criticize us for being too accommodating to the labor lobby,” he writes. When Teamsters Union President Sean O’Brien spoke at the 2024 Republican National Convention, “some GOP donors complained that he sounded like a socialist.”

“The president ignored these complaints,” Vance continues. “I thought Sean’s arguments echoed a lot of the themes from traditional Christian social teaching.”

Elsewhere, Vance takes up for the child tax credit in the latest Trump tax cuts against supply-side critics. “Many of these policies have been criticized by libertarian members of the Republican coalition,” he writes, citing a Wall Street Journal piece he said argued that “it’s equally defensible to provide a tax credit to parents of a dog as it is to parents of children.”

He concludes, “Of course, I think children have a different role in society than dogs because I am blessed with both a heart and a brain.”

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Vance also defends the dignity of work against progressive policies like universal basic income.

“I pointed out that most major religions, as well as basic common sense, draw a distinction between earning a living for yourself and having it provided to you,” he writes. “A job isn’t just a source of a wage; it also gives people something to do, allows them to feel accomplished, and provides community.”

But Vance’s arguments with the GOP donor class could come up as he tries to raise money as the Republican National Committee finance chairman in the midterm elections, as well as in a possible presidential campaign later.