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This podcast uses government documents to illuminate the workings of the American government, and offer context around the effects of government agencies in your everyday life.
N. Rodgers: Hey, Aughie.
J. Aughenbaugh: Good morning, Nia. How are you?
N. Rodgers: I'm good. How are you? Vice President J. Aughenbaugh for Rogers ticket?
J. Aughenbaugh: I was about to say. I'm not doing as well, 'because quite obviously, neither of the two major political party candidates for President have deigned to pick me to be their vice president.
N. Rodgers: I have picked you.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes, you. You have picked me.
N. Rodgers: I've picked you. I don't know that that's all that great. In terms of chances or anything.
J. Aughenbaugh: Listeners, you can go ahead and begin to go ahead and craft the signage, the bumper stickers, Rodgers Aughenbaugh 2028. Nia has already gone on record. Publicly, we just heard that she's going to pick me to be her vice presidential candidate.
N. Rodgers: That's right. But actually, it will be Rogers Aughen.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Aughenbaugh too long to put on a nobody a bumper sticker. Have you noticed that?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Presidents with huge long names don't really Roosevelt, the last well, Eisenhower. Eisenhower was a long name. But you know what's a short short name?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Trump Vance. Yes. Trump. They're both five letters.
J. Aughenbaugh: Two syllables.
N. Rodgers: There's all kinds of.
J. Aughenbaugh: It's pretty hard to mispronounce Vance, like so many people have mispronounced my last name. That's it.
N. Rodgers: That's true.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's the other thing nobody will know.
N. Rodgers: They misspell mine. We would just be hopeless in terms of we can't figure out who they are on the ballot because we can't figure out how to spell their names. Like that's the biggest problem. But it's a Republican Convention?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: The suspense was real because nobody knew who Donald Trump was going to pick. I will tell you this. Donald Trump normally cannot keep a secret for more than five minutes. It's just not in his nature to keep things private. But man, they kept this locked down until the convention. We should, by the way, make a quick note that we are both very happy that Donald Trump was not injured beyond his ear. At the assassination attempt on his life, because you know what? That is neither civil nor discourse, and we are against anybody taking a violent measure against any candidate for any reason. Is never a reason to shoot a person rather than discuss something with them.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: That's just never going to be okay. With all the voices that are saying this is unacceptable.
J. Aughenbaugh: I wholeheartedly concur.
N. Rodgers: We're not going to talk about the assassination attempt, because, by the way, if you've turned on a television since the moment that it happened to current and potentially a month out, it's going to be the news story. If you want to see the video, it's disturbing. For some people, it was very disturbing, a person lost their life. In the course of all of this, I will tell you that I fell in love with the Secret Service all over again because they swarmed Donald Trump like. That's go to's amazing. They took him down so hard, they took a shoe off. Like they were seriously trying to protect the president, which is what they should do it's their job, and it's their passion. They'll be some questions later about how the heck did a guy get a gun on a roof and what the heck. They'll be a lot of that that comes out, and Aughie will eventually address that in an episode.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Of what happened with the once we have a report, because we'll get a report about the failings. Of all of that. But in the meantime, so then, like, the next day, God love him, Donald Trump showed up at the convention. He wasn't going to be deterred. He immediately stood up and raised his hand to let the crowd know that he was alive and that he was okay. Then he shows up at the convention, and he picks JD Vance to be his vice president.
J. Aughenbaugh: Listeners, today's episode is one of our in the news episodes. As Nia just mentioned, Donald Trump.
N. Rodgers: My mother said to me, after they announced JD Vance, she turned to me and said, Who? I said, Aughie will be doing an episode on this and I will play it for you in a little while.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Because a lot of people don't know JD Vance. Right?
J. Aughenbaugh: Correct. JD Vance is a first term Republican senator from the Fine State of Ohio.
N. Rodgers: Ohio?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Who's the other senator from Ohio? Is that Shard Brown?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: No. Is it? Okay.
J. Aughenbaugh: Who's running for re-election this fall?
N. Rodgers: Ohio's quite the split state then.
J. Aughenbaugh: Was until recently, both in 2016 and 2024 or excuse me, 2016 and 2020, Trump did quite well in Ohio.
N. Rodgers: Okay.
J. Aughenbaugh: The Ohio State Legislature is overwhelmingly Republican. The last two governors, I believe, in Ohio were also Republican.
N. Rodgers: Okay.
J. Aughenbaugh: But before Vance got elected to the Senate, he was known primarily because of a memoir he wrote entitled Hillbilly Elegy.
N. Rodgers: When did that come out?
J. Aughenbaugh: That came out maybe I want to say 2014, Nia is looking that up as we record to once again, the magical power of the Internet. All right. As I infamously say in my classes, the Google Machine.
N. Rodgers: May 1, 2018 Wait that can't be right. That's got to be a reprint.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's got to be the reprint.
N. Rodgers: 2010.
J. Aughenbaugh: 2010.
N. Rodgers: 2010 was the actual original.
J. Aughenbaugh: Full disclosure listeners. I have been assigning Hill Billy Elegy in my senior seminar class four years to highlight how culture in a state or a region can affect politics. I also have to admit that the book resonated with me because I grew up in a proud Hillbilly family, basically from the same part of the country as Vance grew up, which is Appalachia.
J. Aughenbaugh: But nevertheless, so what's really fascinating? There are a lot of fascinating elements listeners to Trump picking Vance. First of all, when Vance was running around the country doing interviews for his book, and he gave a lot of interviews.
N. Rodgers: For a lot of years.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. For a lot of years.
N. Rodgers: He also did a lot of reviews of other books from Appalachia.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. When we get to 2016, and Donald Trump it became apparent.
N. Rodgers: Comes down the gold escalator.
J. Aughenbaugh: When it becomes apparent that Trump is going to win the Republican Party nomination for president, and he's making a very populist appeal. He frequently talked about all of those Americans that have been ignored by the federal government, ignored by the Democratic Party. Hell, for that matter, even ignored by the Republican Party establishment. J. D Vance gets asked to comment on Trump's apparent nomination. J. D Vance had made it very clear when he was doing the interviews for his book, that he was a Republican. He was a conservative, but he was not a Trump supporter. He was very popular.
N. Rodgers: He was never Trump. He was anybody who votes for Trump is an idiot.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: That Trump is a horrible blah, blah, blah. Now, part of that, I suspect stems from the fact that J. D Vance has been married once. He has a by all accounts, very happy marriage.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: He has children with one wife.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: In some ways, he is personally antithetical to a lot of Donald Trump's. Donald Trump has been married four times. He's had children with all of his wives. He's kind of a playboy, I would say.
J. Aughenbaugh: Donald Trump was born into a wealthy family. J. D Vance was born into a very poor Ohio, rural family in Appalachia.
N. Rodgers: He goes into the Marines.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. Because when he graduated high school and he writes about this in the book, nobody was recruiting him to go to college. He goes into the Marines, gets out of the Marines, uses his GI bill benefits, goes to Ohio State, does extremely well at Ohio State so well that he applied to a number of top-tier law schools, got into a bunch of them, and decided to go to Yale. Graduates from Yale, but instead of clerking for a federal judge, which most Yale law school students are encouraged to do. He goes to work in a big corporate law firm and then eventually goes to work for a hedge fund firm run by Peter Phil. He was, in many ways, the stereotypical American Horatio Alger up from, pull yourself up by your bootstraps success story.
N. Rodgers: Up from nothing into financial success, into marital success, into business success. All of the parts of his life seemed to be in order and all that. I could see where in part, what he would be looking at when he's looking in [inaudible] Republican is the come up from your entrepreneurial spirit, come up from nothing. Build your own wealth. Build your family and stay with it a whole thing.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah.
N. Rodgers: I'm going to be biased here for a moment. Then he decided he wanted [inaudible] .
J. Aughenbaugh: He decided what Nia?
N. Rodgers: He wanted to be a senator.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah.
N. Rodgers: Once he decided he wanted to be a senator, he had started walking back some of his feelings about Trump, but he really walked them back. Some might say turning his back on his previous ideals, I would say being politically expedient because that's what politicians do.
J. Aughenbaugh: Vance has been criticized on that account, and he makes no bones about the fact that he saw the direction of the Republican Party. After Trump got elected, and even after Trump lost in 2020, the number of mainstream establishment Republican elected officials who threw their support behind Donald Trump. If you were going to run for office in that environment, you basically had a choice. Either you continue to rail against Donald Trump in what Trump did to the party, or you read the infamous T leaves, the proverbial T leaves, see which way the wind is, whatever old cliche you want to use and you're like I want to run for office. And the only way I'm going to run for national office and win is if I have Donald Trump's support.
N. Rodgers: You need his endorsement.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah.
N. Rodgers: In Vance's case, he actually stumped for Vance.
J. Aughenbaugh: Oh, yeah.
N. Rodgers: That was the beginning of their relationship in terms of coming to be closer and knowing each other more.
J. Aughenbaugh: In 2022, listeners, there were at least three if not four candidates for the Republican Party nomination to run for Senate in Ohio. J. D Vance actively courted Trump's endorsement, got it, and Trump campaign form, as Nia pointed out.
N. Rodgers: And he won.
J. Aughenbaugh: He won rather handily. He won by almost six percentage points.
N. Rodgers: Go to your point that Ohio was leaning Republican.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, was leaning Republican. Now, let's go ahead and talk. I wanted to segue here to what does Vance bring to the election.
N. Rodgers: That's exactly what I was going to say.
J. Aughenbaugh: Okay.
N. Rodgers: But his background is less important than what he brings to the table now. His background is important, but what's really important is what does he bring in? I personally think he brings youth.
J. Aughenbaugh: Youth? Hey, we can't ignore this.
N. Rodgers: What's the major complaint for everybody in this election?
J. Aughenbaugh: According to the public opinion of polls, it doesn't matter which Democrat, independent, undecided.
N. Rodgers: Republican, Democrat, independent, Green Party, everybody is peeved about the fact that all of their choices are ancient.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes, because Joe Biden is what? 81. Trump is 78.
N. Rodgers: The lady who runs for the Green Party, I can't remember her name, but she's getting on in years.
J. Aughenbaugh: What, Jill Stein?
N. Rodgers: Yeah.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah.
N. Rodgers: None of these people are anywhere close to being in danger of that you have to be 35 years old to be president in the Constitution.
J. Aughenbaugh: J. D Vance is 39. He turns 40 in early August.
N. Rodgers: He's the closest we come to a youthful.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Right.
J. Aughenbaugh: JD Vance is from the Rust Belt, right?
N. Rodgers: Yeah. You have in your note. He speaks Rust Belt. I think that's correct. He speaks honestly to people who have had to work their way up and who have seen a lot of the manufacturing leave. Who have seen all of that stuff. He speaks honestly to them because he's from that life. It's really hard for Donald Trump from New York City, who was born wealthy to come into those towns and say, I know what. He can't pull the, Clinton I feel your pain thing because he doesn't know what that's like. But JD Vance can, he can say, I know what it's like to not be able to send your kids to college, like I know what that feels like.
J. Aughenbaugh: Listeners, this election more than likely is going to come down to a handful of battleground states, and most of those battleground states are in the Rust Belt. Because you're going to be talking about Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, Indiana, Minnesota.
N. Rodgers: Michigan.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, Michigan. These are all going to be extremely important.
N. Rodgers: He speaks to those folks. He understands those folks.
J. Aughenbaugh: The other thing that Vance brings to the Trump campaign is the fact that JD Vance is well known within the conservative investment circles.
N. Rodgers: The money trusts him.
J. Aughenbaugh: Trust him.
N. Rodgers: The money is not so wild about Donald Trump. They trust JD Vance. He's one of them.
J. Aughenbaugh: He's one of them. He was their attorney. He made a busload of money in a short period of time after he finished law school. In many ways, I put this in our prep notes, Trump picked a younger version of himself, but without all of the baggage.
N. Rodgers: Terrible baggage. That's right. Without all the accusations of being a con man, the accusations about women, the accusations about all that stuff. JD Vance doesn't have any, by all accounts, even Democrats find his reputation to be clean. He does have a couple of drawbacks.
J. Aughenbaugh: Sure he does.
N. Rodgers: One of his drawbacks is that he has about as much time in the Senate as Kamala Harris had in the Senate when she was tapped to be Vice President, which is to say no time at all. Two years isn't even enough time to tie your shoes in the Capitol building. That is not enough time to have built relationships. See, she doesn't have relation. Joe Biden, when he was Vice President for Obama had built enormously long relationships with lots of people in the Capitol. He knew everybody.
J. Aughenbaugh: Including those in the Republican Party.
N. Rodgers: Including people who didn't like him, but knew that his word mattered for something to that. He had all those relationships.
J. Aughenbaugh: When Obama was trying to go ahead and get legislation or a budget bill passed, he would send Biden to the hill.
N. Rodgers: To shoes people.
J. Aughenbaugh: Biden would go ahead and get the necessary votes.
N. Rodgers: And work it up. Then Pence was not able to do that because Pence was a governor.
J. Aughenbaugh: Well, but also everybody knew that if you were going to get a deal done, you would have to negotiate with Trump because Trump didn't rely upon Pence for that. Biden has basically cut Kamala Harris out of almost anything of importance.
N. Rodgers: Aughie and I were trying to figure out whether it's because she's not very good at the job or because she's not been given anything to do to prove that she's good at the job. We can't figure out quite what the deal is with Vice President Harris. But he's going to eat her alive in debate. We both agree because JD Vance is extraordinarily well-spoken. He is very well-rehearsed. When he goes on a show, he knows what he wants to say. He sticks to the talking points, because he's a very good lawyer. I think he's probably going to beat up a little bit on, come on Harris, in the debate. However, I do think that he's going to have to be cautious about the charge of saying that he has any more experience than she does because he didn't.
J. Aughenbaugh: One criticism is he lacks experience. Kamala Harris has already extended an invitation that they debate. Neither one of them can go ahead and speak to a long legislative record, where they have worked with people across the aisle and have hammered out extensive. They can't say any of that.
N. Rodgers: They're not going to be able to say any of that.
J. Aughenbaugh: Second, Vance if he's not already tired, he will get tired of all those people who have said [inaudible].
N. Rodgers: Didn't you hate Trump just a few years ago? He's going to have to say, my position grew and changed. We're going to get so tired of hearing about how his position changed as he became more knowledgeable and understanding of blah blah blah. We're all going to get exhausted. He's going to get exhausted saying it, and we're going to get exhausted hearing it because that's a charge that's going to be made over and over and over.
J. Aughenbaugh: This is the classic flip-flopping weak spot. The other criticism is portrayal of Hillbillies, and for listeners, if you don't know, Hillbillies are not rednecks. Hillbillies are people who grew up in the mountainous area of Appalachia. They tend to be very inward. Looking or thinking. They distrust outsiders. They have a huge distrust of government.
N. Rodgers: Yet they regularly vote outsiders into office. They are not a monolith.
J. Aughenbaugh: His portrayal of Hillbillies in the book Hillbillology was criticized by liberals who believe that there are numerous federal government programs that help the rural poor and that the rural poor should be encouraged to believe in the government. But Vance, when he was running for the Senate, he even threw this in his book. I think it's one of the reasons why Trump feels some connection with him. Believes that many government programs and bureaucrats don't understand the rural poor and are very condescending towards them
N. Rodgers: The argument on the other side is there are people in those communities who are working for the government and do understand those people. That's going to be a natural argument to be had over his book. His book is not taken as gospel on either side. There's a lot to be discussed in his book.
J. Aughenbaugh: It's not an academic book. It doesn't draw upon sociological or policy or economic philosophy.
N. Rodgers: It's a memoir. It draws on his life, not all lives, and that's the other thing is that you have to be careful with taking. I think one of the liberal criticisms was that they were worried that people would say, oh, well, this is what all Hillbillies are like, and that is in fact not the case. This is what JD Vance's experience was, which would be vastly different, I assume, from other experiences. I assume that a poor black woman would have a very different experience than JD Vance had. People will bring up his book as if that is his current position. That's the first thing that will happen, which is unfortunate because it's 14 years old, and one would hope that people grow and change over the 14 years that they exist and learn more about themselves and the world. But they will also argue something that he's not trying to talk about Hillbillology. He's trying to talk about the current vice presidential race and who's the best candidate. There will be a lot of people who will try distraction, which is unfortunate. They will take away from what his current positions are, which is what we really should care about. What we really should care about is, this is what all voters should be doing, comparing the positions of the top people in the ticket and the second people in the ticket, and what you like and you don't like or what you can live with and you can't live with or whatever, and then making an informed voting choice. Good thing about JD Vance is that he will tell you what he thinks. He will go on the news shows, and he will tell you what he thinks he's not going to try to dodge. He's not going to say my people will get back to you with a pat answer later. I admire that about him. I admire about him that he's going to be upfront about who he is, and he's going to say, take it or leave it. This is who I am.
J. Aughenbaugh: For our listeners who are undecided, and we're perhaps hoping that Donald Trump would pick somebody who would rein in Donald Trump's worst impulses as the leader of the executive branch.
J. Aughenbaugh: JD Vance ain't going to be doing that, folks.
N. Rodgers: Well, Donald Trump was never going to pick that person. That would be unrealistic to dream that that was going to happen.
J. Aughenbaugh: After Trump's experience with Mike Pence, who many, including yours truly, thought would bring some order, stability.
N. Rodgers: That's what I had hoped Mike Pence would do. He was sidelined so much that is. Although God, love, one of the things he did do quite reasonably was certify the election, because that's his job. It won't be an issue this time. JD Vance will never be in the position of certifying a Donald Trump election, because if Donald Trump is elected, we have a two term women in the United States. Donald Trump cannot be elected again unless he changes the constitution, which point, there will be revolution. There will be such stress over the idea of the president being able to. Because after Roosevelt ran four times, we were like, hey, we can't be having this. Twenty years is too much, potentially 16 years. But it does position. Can we briefly talk about that it positions JD Vance pretty well even if he is not on the winning ticket this time, it positions him pretty well for 2028? He'll be 48-years-old. No. He'll be 44 years.
J. Aughenbaugh: Forty-four years old.
N. Rodgers: I can't do math. He'll be 44-years-old, which is very young. He will have had the experience of a presidential campaign and how to manage one of those, how to run one of those. He'll have been inside of one of those. He will have much more name recognition than he currently has.
J. Aughenbaugh: He will have another four years within the Senate because Ohio does not require somebody to step down from their current office.
N. Rodgers: I was going to ask you about that. Thank you for clarifying. He gets to do both. He gets to be a senator and run for president or vice president currently.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, he does not have to step down.
N. Rodgers: In 2028, could he run for both, or does he have to pick one?
J. Aughenbaugh: Technically, Ohio does not require.
N. Rodgers: He can run for both. JD for Senate or president depending on what you feel. He probably would pick one though just because it would help target the campaign.
J. Aughenbaugh: Also too, and I'm not entirely sure how Ohio does this. But if it becomes likely, he would become the Republican Party nominee for president. He could resign. If the governor is Republican, the Republican governor could appoint his replacement, which would give that person a leg up in 2028 running for the Ohio Senate seat. This is fascinating because why Trump picked Vance, actually, off recording led to a certain amount of disagreement between Nia and I.
N. Rodgers: Civil disagreement.
J. Aughenbaugh: Civil disagreement. Nia, this is a good, if you will, thought experiment. I'm going to characterize Nia's comments, and Nia is going to characterize mine. For those of you who get into political conversations with people who think differently, this is good practice to get into. Nia's perspective is, other individuals influenced Donald Trump to pick JD Vance. In particular, Donald Trump's oldest son, who has, by all accounts, a pretty good relationship with JD Vance. That's probably what was a very conclusive variable or a deciding variable in Trump picking somebody who may be lesser known in JD Vance. My argument, Nia, was what?
N. Rodgers: Aughie's argument was that Trump is looking towards his legacy. That he's thinking in terms of beyond this election because he knows he can only stand one more time. How can he set up the Republican Party to continue in the direction he wants it to continue in? JD Vance is a person who he believes will continue. Although I would put to Donald Trump that you got to be careful with that because hello, Supreme Court justices that you think will do one thing, and then they'll turn out to do something else. But by all accounts, JD Vance does seem to be a supporter of many of the Trump positions. If Donald Trump is looking to build out the Republican Party to the future, that he would pick someone like JD Vance. I, with all due respect, and I love Aughie dearly, say that is [inaudible] , because I don't think Donald Trump thinks that far ahead. But I do take the point that it is possible, and what is possible and probably pretty likely is that someone said, sir, what do you want your legacy to be? We would both be right because he might be pushed by the outside from the outside to think about his legacy. But then him looking inward and saying, What do I want my legacy to be? How do I want this to carry forward?
J. Aughenbaugh: Because let's be honest, Donald Trump's picks for other elected offices.
N. Rodgers: Not been as fabulous as one might think.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Let's put it that's, let's be generous.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes, right.
N. Rodgers: You know what Donald Trump does do really well? Whatever you think about Donald Trump, and I'm saying this as a person who's not a huge fan of Donald Trump, I certainly don't want to see him assassinated. That was obnoxious and horrible. But I think that Donald Trump is very good at the zeitgeist. He's very good at what in the moment is important to a lot of people. Frankly, age is huge with everyone in this election. He looked across the party and he found a young man. A young man that he believes that he can support and work with and who will carry on his legacy, but a young man. I think that is brilliant. I think that is exactly the thing that Donald Trump is excellent at. What right now do the people want and or need and, or are thinking about? I think he was like, they're thinking about age. They're worried that older people can't do this job. Let's find somebody young. Because a lot of his other choices, the common choices that we're being bandied about are all people in their late 50s, 60s, and 70s. But he went in a different direction. Good for Donald Trump, that he can read the tea leaves in that way. But time will tell. Somebody will write a book, and we'll find out how the decision was made, and then one of us will go, and the other one will say, I owe you a beer, and that will be the end of that.
J. Aughenbaugh: Our experience with Donald Trump so far is, and this was the basis of my argument was, there's very few people that seemingly influence his thinking.
N. Rodgers: That's a fair point. I will give you that.
J. Aughenbaugh: But Donald Trump thinking about his legacy would also be rather strange.
N. Rodgers: All of these are things outside of our experience with Donald Trump. But anyway, we look forward to seeing JD Vance on the stump. We look forward to hearing how he does this and what he does with the future, and we will see where the election takes us.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. Thanks, Nia, and once again, listeners, we strongly encourage you to pay attention to what's going on in both political parties and their national conventions. The Republican Party Convention is happening as we speak. The Democratic National Convention occurs in August.
N. Rodgers: Pay attention, and then vote.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. Thanks, Nia.
N. Rodgers: Cool. Thanks, Aughie.