Mailbag: Readers weigh in on JD Vance, the dangers of another Trump presidency

I recently read your blog post regarding JD Vance, the Republican V.P. nominee. I wanted to thank you formally via email for publishing your response, as I cannot tell whether J.D. Vance genuinely represents/reflects the Appalachian region’s experiences, identity, and political choices. 

I appreciate the blunt and frank tone of your post as well as its transparency. If I may, I’d like to express how gravely concerned I am about United States politics, as well as what I consider to be either a resigned apathy or near-cowardly disengagement by members of the American public at-large. 

Rohan

I’ve lived in rural Virginia all my life, and I had a tough upbringing, like JD Vance claims to have had.

Unlike him, I didn’t cash out, and to me, the way he portrays Appalachia is demeaning.

My approach has been to try to advocate for people in rural areas to get the chance to succeed that was afforded to myself and to Mr. Vance through higher education.

His approach seems to be to think that people from rural areas who don’t succeed are just failures.

I wish more rural voters would see that they’re being sold out by people like JD Vance. I’m going to keep doing my part to get that message out, and to also try to get Democrats to try harder to appeal to rural voters, in the face of the data that suggests that bypassing rural America doesn’t hurt politically.

It may not seem wise for Ds to spend their time and resources here from a vote-data perspective, but people here need somebody to stand up for their interests, and the Republicans sure aren’t doing that.

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What would you say are the top three reasons another Trump regime would be bad for the country? And bear in mind I loathe and despise this arrogant, insolent pile of excrement, but I’m curious from your vantage point. You have the paper on the wall with the ribbon and fancy lettering, so I very much value your takes. 

Bryan

Here’s where I come at things:

Because of my experiences, the most important things to me are, we need to spend more money on education, and not just for wealthy people in the NoVA suburbs, but for kids in rural areas, like us, so that we can have a chance to better ourselves; and then, two, universal healthcare, so that poor and working-class folks don’t go broke going to the doctor.

And then after that, we need to treat everybody – white, black, Latino, men and women, straight and LGBTQ+, etc. – as having been created equal.

And we need to take account for how we’re killing the climate, and this is the one world that we have.

I don’t see MAGA Republicans like Donald Trump valuing any of that. They don’t even talk about the need for equal access to good K-12 education, they actively oppose doing anything about equal access to healthcare, they don’t act as if they believe we’re all created equal, and they seem not to care about the environment.

A second Trump presidency means more dismantling of the incremental progress that we’ve made in the Biden years, just as the first Trump presidency was spent undoing a lot of the massive positive changes made during the Obama years.

The first Trump presidency put in place a Supreme Court that reversed Roe v. Wade, creating chaos for women in red states, came up with a ruling giving protections to the elites that the Founding Fathers didn’t envision when they wrote the Constitution, and it’s only going to get worse with this Court before it gets better.

I don’t doubt that this Project 2025 nonsense that they’re trying to run away from now is going to result in at least an effort four years from now, if Trump were to win in November, to try to rewrite the Constitution to allow him to serve a third term, with his Supreme Court paving the way.

There are millions more moderates, independents and people on the center-left, left and far-left than there are MAGA Republicans; we know that from the last two elections.

Trump won in 2016 on a technicality, the technicality being the Electoral College, which gives small states, which tend to be more conservative politically, more weight in votes.

He lost the popular vote in 2016 by 3 million votes, and lost in 2020 by 7 million votes.

I think he’ll lose the popular vote again, it’s just a question of by how much, and then, how the Electoral College plays out.

They’re using a flaw in our system to try to seize power, then rewrite the rules so that they’ll never lose again.

This is what we’re up against.