Dick Morris Helps Newsmax Hype Vance As Trump’s VP

Posted on September 12, 2024

Dick Morris seemed to be float a certain vice presidential candidate for Donald Trump in a July 13 Newsmax TV appearance:

A battle-tested Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio, as a vice presidential candidate, is a demanding and in-tune Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump can get behind, according to presidential campaign adviser Dick Morris on Newsmax.

“In terms of who, I don’t know — and I haven’t talked to him about it: My own guess would be if the list of candidates they’re talking about now is J.D. Vance, because he’s been road-tested in a very tough campaign in Ohio, when he was elected to the Senate,” Morris told “Saturday Report.”

“And, and I think he’s the kind of guy Trump would like, and in particular, he has experience that goes beyond just politics.”

There could be a running mate picked outside of Vance, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and North Dakota GOP Gov. Doug Burgum.

“The leaking here has been pretty extensive, focusing on those three,” Morris told host Rita Cosby.

And Morris seemed to be doing a bit of leaking himself, given that Vance was announced as Trump’s VP candidate a few days later at the Republican National Convention. Newsmax, of course, made sure to hype the heck out of it:

Newsmax also scored an interview with Vance at the RNC:

Morris returned to serve up a bookend, praising the choice of Vance in a July 17 column by invoking, of all people, Bill Clinton:

Former President Donald Trump’s decision to name Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio, as his vice presidential running mate reminds me very much of Bill Clinton’s decision in 1992 to put Al Gore on his ticket.

As Clinton approached the Democratic National Convention with the nomination in his pocket, he realized that very few Americans knew who he was or anything about him.

He was just a guy who had survived a sex scandal, ducked the draft, never inhaled, spoke vaguely of the need to reinvent the Democratic Party, and wanted to move the party to the center, “ending welfare as we know it” discarding the party’s left-adherent mentality.

To explain, and elaborate who he really was, Clinton chose to nominate a metaphor for himself as vice president in Al Gore.

Both were from border states, right next to each other — Arkansas and Tennessee.

They were moderate Democrats, and post-racial southerners.

Policy wonks, Ivy League and young.

Donald Trump has a similar need to define himself.

Who is he really?

Immensely wealthy, is he from the GOP elite, a real estate tycoon or as Don jr. assures us a “blue collar billionaire?”

[…]

But by wading into their waters to find a Yale-educated lawyer, Donald Trump is demonstrating his support for the upward mobility of men and women who are white, not handicapped, and English speaking.

Trump realizes that beneath the veneer of assimilation, millions of blue collar white working class sales people, auto mechanics, contractors, waitresses, and tradesmen are, at heart, like J.D. Vance, former hillbillies.

And so is Donald Trump.

Morris bizarrely concluded:

Had Vance simply lived in the region, his selection would be symbolic.

But, in choosing a man who brought their social pathology into national focus and put it on the best seller list for months, Trump is making a sociological statement in the language that is clearest for candidates — ignore them, mock them, look down on them at your peril.

Hillbillies are the new swing voters.

Now, Donald Trump, like Booker T. Washington, Harriet Tubman, and the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. is leading them out of invisibility, into rightful recognition.

Donald Trump is not just an advocate for them.

He is a genuine leader for them, and the rest of us.

Trump may be a lot of things, but the second coming of Harriet Tubman or MLK is not one of them.