Vance on Statesmanship: Stop the Wounds and Build the Body Politic

Of the many talented figures in the second Trump administration, two have shone very brightly: Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President J.D. Vance. Last Saturday, July 5, it was Vance’s turn to take the spotlight and the microphone as he received the Claremont Institute’s Statesmanship Award, an honor previously given to such worthies as Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito.

Vance’s diagnosis of today’s left, represented well by New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, his account of the Trump administration’s current action to stop the wounds caused by bad policies, and his vision for what all Americans—not just our government—need to do to build this country up showed exactly why he has been one of the golden boys in this administration.

Vance’s 34-minute speech was full of light-heartedness, including jokes about his passion for Ohio State football and the fact that the think tank presenting him the award is “an intellectual center of California conservatism” that is “the only group maybe in California that makes me seem just like a reasonable moderate.”

It was also a serious speech, with few holds barred, about what Americans face on the left. The joke before launching into the serious part of Vance’s talk was about how his wife is usually the “good barometer for whether I’ve said anything that’s a little bit too far out there.”

“But,” he added, to raucous laughter, “unfortunately, for all of you, strap yourselves in because I’ve got the microphone. I’m going to say whatever the hell I want to for the next 30 minutes.”

What he wanted to say included the bad and the ugly of the challenges facing our country, but also what the Trump administration has been able to do for Americans, and what it and all of us need to be doing if we are to approach the “golden age” that the President has spoken about.

Vance began by expressing regret that his optimism about the left having a “come to Jesus” moment after the 2024 election was misplaced. Instead of reflecting on Americans’ rejection of “grown men beating up women in girls’ sports” and open borders “effectively undercutting the wages of American workers” and “making our country much less safe,” they have seemingly succumbed to “Trump Derangement Syndrome, that incredibly terminal and dangerous disease” that “is perhaps more virulent than ever among American Democrats.”

That Zohran Mamdani, “a 33-year-old communist running an insurgent campaign,” did so well in New York City’s mayoral primary is a sign that the left has no intentions of becoming re-hinged anytime soon. Yet his own victory a few weeks ago, Vance said, was significant. As the Trump campaign last year “was rooted in a broad working- and middle-class coalition,” so Mamdani’s, like the Harris campaign, was a coalition of “high income and college educated voters” that had no appeal for the “broad middle,” including black, “non-Bangladeshi Asian (particularly Chinese),” and non-college-degreed voters.

Vance pondered what unites Mamdani’s coalition of “Islamists, gender studies majors, socially liberal white urbanites, and big pharma lobbyists.” After all, such a group has myriad ideological collisions internally. The Islamists aren’t on board with “using taxpayer-funded money to fund transgender surgeries,” and the gender studies majors aren’t on board with much of anything the Islamists enforce. Vance concludes that, though many ordinary Democrats do not think this way, what motivates the left that is driving the Democratic bus is primarily hatred of the America that we have now. “They are arsonists, and they will make common cause with anyone willing to light the match.”

Vance didn’t mention it, but Barack Obama’s famous promise to “fundamentally transform” this country came to mind: who wants to fundamentally transform someone or something he loves?

Rather than a fundamental transformation, Vance wants to keep the America we love. He recognizes that “America in ’25 is more diverse than it has ever been.” But diversity can never be our strength when “the institutions that take this incredibly diverse country and form culture are weaker than they have ever been.” Without those strong institutions, we cannot “thrive and build a common sense of purpose and meaning as Americans.”

Nor can we do so when our “own government keeps on importing new neighbors every single year at a record number.” Social cohesion and shared trust bleed away without any stability in the population or institutions that will help encourage it. Vance lauded the Trump administration’s immigration policy as “the most important part of the successful first six months in the Oval Office because you first got to stop the bleeding.”

With the border largely secure, however, American statesmen need to rethink again what it means to be an American. Vance rejects the idea that being American is merely “agreeing with the principles of, say, the Declaration of Independence.” As important as these are, being American is much more than that.

Vance highlighted three important goals: a renewed sense of American sovereignty, preservation of the “basic legal privileges of citizenship,” and making America a nation that again builds things.

Josh Kovensky of the left-leaning Talking Points Memo attempted to portray Vance as promoting “a dramatically reduced vision of American citizenship. It’s one in which having ancestors who have lived here for generations entitles you to more…” Of course, this bit of dishonesty, reflected in Kovensky’s title, “J.D. Vance: Some Americans Are More American Than Others,” comes from manipulating Vance’s words to make it sound as if he were issuing a blood-and-soil declaration. Vance was responding to those on the left who “say you don’t belong in America unless you agree with progressive liberalism in 2025” by asserting that “the people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War have a hell of a lot more claim over America than the people who say they don’t belong.”    

The difference is not between those who are more or less American—it’s whether they are American at all. Regarding the responses to the Big Beautiful Bill, Vance observed that “most of the howling about the Big Beautiful Bill reduces to the fundamental fact that President Trump believes that Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security ought to go to the American people, not to illegal aliens who don’t have the right to be here.”

That people who have not followed our immigration laws and often show no love of or gratitude to our country should be collecting these benefits means that the states abetting it “cheapen the very meaning of our citizenship.”

Vance affirmed that “immigration can enrich the United States of America” and has done so. But it can only do so with good order, a real notion of citizenship that is “not just about rights” but also “obligations, including the obligations to our fellow countrymen,” and a widespread thankfulness for what we have here.

What “we should expect,” Vance asserted, from “everyone in our country, whether their ancestors were here before the Revolutionary War or whether they arrived on our shores just a few short months ago,” is “to feel a sense of gratitude.” 

Vance neither reduced the notion of citizenship nor downplayed American ideals in his address. What he did was point out that true statesmen must protect the privileges of and preach the fullness of citizenship, which includes the fullness of those ideals.

We need more honest, passionate, and blunt speeches like Vance’s. He shines brightly because his words illuminate both our challenges and our task if we are to remain and thrive as one nation.

David P. Deavel teaches at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. A past Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute, he is a Senior Contributor at The Imaginative Conservative. Follow him on X (Twitter) @davidpdeavel.