How J.D. Vance Co-Opted Parts of the Kennedy Platform at the Republican National Convention

By Elsa Hjalmarsson Lyons, The Kennedy Beacon

It may now seem like a month ago, but something subtle and yet resonant happened last week when newly-announced Donald Trump running mate J.D. Vance took the stage at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

On July 17, Vance stood in front of a spellbound crowd at the Republican National Convention and dedicated his vice presidential campaign to the “forgotten communities” of his native Appalachia and the Midwest. He spoke tenderly about growing up in a place “where people spoke their minds, built with their hands, and loved their God, their family, their community and their country with their whole hearts” — but a place that had been “cast aside” by “America’s ruling class in Washington.” 

Vance offered up effusive praise for Donald J. Trump, perhaps partly in response to the media’s focus on his past criticism of the former president. He lambasted President Biden’s policies for fueling poverty and addiction in the American heartland. Contrasting images of Trump and Biden loomed large over his speech; but another, unnamed presence billowed beneath his words. 

Vance’s emphasis on corporate capture of the government; his combination of patriotism with an unflinching recognition of America’s failures to live up to its constitutional values; and his earthy, populist vocabulary all bore Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s invisible trademark. Vance was tapping into the momentum of a growing movement. 

For example, addressing disagreement within the Republican party, Vance spoke about the value of free speech and vibrant debate. His argument should sound familiar to anyone who has heard RFK Jr. talk. “Now, I think our disagreements actually make us stronger,” Vance told a raucous crowd in Milwaukee. “That’s what I’ve learned in my time in the United States Senate, where sometimes I persuade my colleagues and sometimes they persuade me. [...] shouldn’t we be governed by a party that is unafraid to debate ideas and come to the best solution?”

Kennedy has passionately defended the right to dissent throughout his candidacy and his life. His congressional testimony last July is a case in point. "Respectful debate is the fertilizer, it's the water, it's the sunlight for our democracy. We need to be talking to each other," Kennedy said. Vance’s comments reflect Kennedy’s brand of free speech absolutism, which is interlaced with a specific kind of humility. It’s the humility of a leader who recognizes that, as Oscar Wilde wrote, “The truth is rarely pure and never simple” – and, I would add, always evolving. 

For Kennedy, that humility manifests as an open invitation to challenge his beliefs. “You can always change my mind with facts,” Kennedy said in a May interview. “If you […] show me I'm wrong about one of my presumptions, I'm gonna change my mind.” Vance played with the same idea in affirming his willingness to be “persuade[d]” by fellow senators. The difference is that Vance envisions the Republican Party as a pantheon for free speech, while Kennedy sees party politics as antithetical to the village-square culture that both men have said they believe in. 

Vance also echoed Kennedy’s critiques of corporate crony capitalism. “We need a leader who’s not in the pocket of big business, but answers to the working man, union and nonunion alike,” he said. “A leader who won’t sell out to multinational corporations, but will stand up for American companies and American industry.” 

Vance’s “America First” rhetoric certainly owes more to the MAGA movement than to anything Kennedy espouses. His speech emphasized the threat of “cheap Chinese goods[,] cheap foreign labor [...and] deadly Chinese Fentanyl” to the American working-class. RFK Jr. tends to focus more on how aggressive military interventions around the world have hollowed out our economy. But by using phrases like “in the pocket” and “sell out” to describe the government’s relationship to “big business,” Vance is channeling the spirit of Kennedy’s anticorruption platform. The idea of untangling the government from corporate interests is a distinct feature of the independent candidate’s campaign. 

Vance may be able to harness energies that Kennedy has helped to unleash, but it’s not so easy to match the depth of RFK Jr.’s devotion to fighting corruption. During his 2016 campaign, former president Trump promised to “drain the swamp,” but the issue always felt too abstract in his hands, pithy slogan aside. When Kennedy speaks about cleaning up the government, he does so with a fierce precision, because he has spent the past forty years suing corporate-controlled government agencies. For Kennedy, the drive to “drain the swamp” is a calling; for Trump, it’s a catchy three syllables. We don’t yet know where Vance will fall on that spectrum. 

So far, Kennedy is the only candidate who has frequently called attention to younger generations’ diminished hopes of owning a home. He has proposed a plan to radically lower mortgage interest rates by offering millions of Americans tax-free 3% mortgage bonds backed by the government. Vance made housing one of the many focal points of his speech, and specifically referred to how young people are being shut out of home ownership. But he blamed “illegal aliens” for taking “precious housing” away from Americans, while Kennedy has offered up critical perspectives on outsized corporations that gobble up residential real estate – like BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street. Here is an important difference between MAGA populism and Kennedy populism: RFK Jr. refuses to scapegoat vulnerable human beings. Instead, he keeps directing our gaze towards the corporate culprits that hold the American dream hostage. 

This tension between the two politicians is also manifest in their attitudes towards rising rates of addiction in this country. There’s no question that both men understand addiction on a more intimate level than the average politician. Vance’s mother struggled with substance abuse and alcoholism; Kennedy himself is a recovered heroin addict. But politically, they’ve approached the issue from radically different angles. 

In his reference to “Chinese Fentanyl,” Vance attaches the issue to a sense of invasion or even contamination with the foreign, the other. His and Trump’s rhetoric around immigration reflects a similar tendency – they tend to tap into a certain kind of anger directed towards an obvious outsider. Meanwhile, Kennedy’s documentary “Recovering America” tackles the problem from a forward-looking perspective; the film centers on healing, dignity, and hope. Kennedy has also pledged to prioritize the establishment of recovery centers all across the country, sanctuaries that would help Americans find strength in synergy with the natural world. 

In his speech, Vance also spoke about the United States’ failed military crusades in Iraq and Afghanistan. “Together, we will send our kids to war only when we must,” he said. “But as President Trump showed with the elimination of ISIS and so much more, when we punch, we’re going to punch hard.”

Here too lie traces of the Kennedy platform. Vance’s words about fighting wars “only when we must” parallel Kennedy’s distinction between wars of necessity and wars of choice. But the vice presidential candidate’s pledge to “punch hard” departs from the Kennedy roadmap – it associates military campaigns with a kind of scrappy masculinity, a maneuver Kennedy rejects. In a June foreign policy address delivered through the Nixon Foundation, RFK Jr. said that what makes a nation powerful “is to be engaged in the world, but by projecting economic power rather than military power.” 

Speaking about threats to the dollar as a global currency in the same speech, Kennedy explained that “the way to keep the dollar strong is to keep our country strong, and we can do that by redirecting our bloated military budget toward infrastructure, education, and health, and building [...] small business.” He concluded that our country’s “destiny” is “not to dominate the world, but to inspire it.” 

Kennedy and Vance – and Trump – seem to agree about some key foreign policy points, at least on a surface level. All three men have suggested that the Ukraine war is an unnecessary conflict that could be resolved through negotiation. But Kennedy’s commitment to peace, like his commitment to rooting out corruption, has a uniquely visionary and even spiritual quality to it. It’s a commitment that transcends politics; that’s why I believe it’s a commitment we can trust. 

In Milwaukee, Vance clearly had a target audience. At the beginning of the speech, his introduction was interrupted by a roaring chant of “O-H-I-O,” letters that spell the name of his home state. He told the crowd, “You guys, we gotta chill with the Ohio love. We gotta win Michigan too here, so.” At the end of the speech, he mentioned four states by name: Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. The first three are considered swing states in this election; Ohio has been identified as a swing state in the past, though it swung the same way in 2016 and 2020. 

Vance’s bestselling memoir Hillbilly Elegy was about poor people in rural America, but many see it as a missive addressed to an upper-middle-class liberal audience – those who couldn’t understand why anyone would vote for Trump. At the RNC, on the other hand, Vance was speaking directly to people from his America, the Trump voters he described in his book. So it’s interesting that he chose to lean so far into RFK Jr.’s political territory. 

In October 2023, Kennedy declared his independence from political parties. But before that, he was a Democratic candidate facing up against Joe Biden. Now Trump’s Vice Presidential pick is poaching talking points from RFK Jr.’s ideological habitat. And while Kennedy’s views on some issues have shapeshifted or sharpened, his core values remain the same. 

So maybe categories like Democrat and Republican, liberal and conservative, are more fluid or flimsy than we assume. In 2016, 12 percent of Bernie Sanders voters became Trump voters after Clinton won the Democratic nomination. That was the same year that Hillary Clinton declared that half of Trump supporters belong in a “basket of deplorables” — that these people are “irredeemable” and that “they are not America.” In some ways, Hillbilly Elegy can be read as a response to these comments. 

Martin Luther King Jr. made a speech in 1967 called “The Other America.” In it he explained that two almost irreconcilable realities coexist in this country: one of overwhelming abundance, and one in which crushing poverty “constantly transforms the buoyancy of hope into the fatigue of despair.” There are still two Americas, and maybe the most important metric for a good leader is whether or not they can understand and address this dissonance. Maybe the real relevant binary in this country right now is populism versus politics-as-usual, not Democrat versus Republican. 

But there is only one true populist running for president today. There is only one candidate who understands that to love a country, you have to love its people – all of its people. There is only one candidate who addresses every American every time he speaks. There is only one candidate whose respect for human life and freedom infuses and enriches every statement he makes, whose empathy is as broad as it is deep. 

No wonder J.D. Vance is surfing the Kennedy tide. 

Elsa Hjalmarsson Lyons is a student at Amherst College.