The Establishment Campaigned To Spike JD Vance, They Lost

“Every bad person I've ever met in a lifetime in Washington was aligned against JD Vance.” Tucker Carlson

Addressing a crowd Monday at the Heritage Foundation's Policy Fest at the Republican National Convention, Tucker Carlson prefaced his remarks with a condemnation of the political class and the type of people he regards as its predominant constituents.

"I spent the whole day dealing with politics — this day, starting at 5 a.m. — and I ... forgot how repulsive a process it is, and how feline and ruthless the players are. It was a reminder why I don't like politicians," said Carlson according to a Blaze Media transcript of his remarks. Tucker later suggested that "deception is at the core, actually, of who they are.”

"There's this job. One person makes the decision, and whoever gets the job immediately has a lot of power. And it really is like waving a flank steak over an alligator," said Carlson.

While disgusted by the process and some of the prospects vying for the steak in question, Carlson intimated that Vance stood apart from the others.

"Now JD Vance is the VP pick, and I think every person who pays close attention has gotta be thrilled by that," continued Carlson. "And if you don't know much about JD Vance, I'm not even going to make a case for JD Vance. I'm going to tell you what I just saw, which is that every bad person I've ever met in a lifetime in Washington was aligned against JD Vance."

While various deep-pocketed Republican donors were actively demeaning the Appalachian populist, Rupert Murdoch reportedly launched a massive lobbying campaign to dissuade Trump from picking Vance. A source in the Trump camp apparently told NOTUS that Murdoch had been calling Trump multiple times a day to instead choose North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum for his running mate — the would-be VP pick Republican strategist Karl Rove also tried to boost over Vance.

Murdoch's personal campaign against Vance spread to two of his publications, namely the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, which both ran multiple editorials hammering Vance, Blaze Media reported.

The New York Times confirmed Blaze Media’s reporting, claiming Vance’s selection was “uncertain down to the final hours, with a frantic lobbying effort until the last possible moment by anti-Vance forces, including Rupert Murdoch and his allies, with some of it playing out in public.” Trump, the outlet noted, “seemed uncertain right until the end, privately raising some of the negative comments Mr. Vance had made about him in the past.”

And a long list of the usual malefactors fell into line to try to spike the Vance nomination.

"Having turned the Republican Party into the Trump Party, [Trump is] now turning a Trumpist party into a Trumpist movement. Indeed, the selection of Vance marks the completion of the transformation of a conservative political party into an authoritarian movement," wrote Bill Kristol. "Vance has been more consistently and fervently America First in foreign policy than Trump. He's more committed to ethno-nationalism and anti-'elite' populism than Trump. He's been more committed to destroying any non-political civil service than Trump. He's more contemptuous of the norms, institutions, and mores of liberal democracy than Trump."

"I know who those people are, and their odor is so powerful that I can smell one when he walks in the room. And every single one of those people, in a line that would extend from Milwaukee to Chicago, was lined up last week to knife JD Vance," said Tucker in response.

Vanity Fair reported that on the flip side, allies of the Ohio senator “ran a counter campaign to reassure Mr. Trump about” picking Vance. Elon Musk reportedly “told Mr. Trump directly that he should choose Mr. Vance as his running mate, describing the Trump-Vance pairing as ‘beautiful’.” Donald Trump Jr., who has grown close with Vance over the last several years “pushed…most insistently” in both public and private.

According to Carlson, this enmity toward Vance was not because of who he is as a person, noting he is a nice guy and one of the few in Washington with a happy marriage. Instead, the attacks were launched because "they thought he would be harder to manipulate and slightly less enthusiastic about killing people. That's it — that he would be an impediment to their exercising power and, boy, they went after him in a way I've just kind of never seen."

Carlson went on to note that the attacks on Vance and the assassination attempt on Saturday have underscored for him that the battles underway are not simply political but spiritual.

In that regard we find ourselves in complete accord with Tucker Carlson – we are in a spiritual civil war – and from our perspective JD Vance is one of the few in the highest levels of American politics who understands that civil war and is on the right side in it.

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