by Jack Windsor
Former President Donald Trump announced his endorsement of J.D. Vance Saturday during a Save America rally at Delaware County Fairgrounds, a location known for the annual Little Brown Jug—one of the two most coveted races in the country for Standardbred horses.
Likewise, a Trump endorsement is one of the most coveted validations among the two ruling political parties.
The nod from the 45th president was vigorously pursued by five of the seven grand old party contenders in the 2022 U.S. Senate race to replace retiring U.S. Sen. Rob Portman, including Mike Gibbons, Josh Mandel, Bernie Moreno and Jane Timken.
Trump: “He said some bad shit about me”
Trump’s horse in the race, J.D. Vance, took the stage Saturday about two hours before Trump’s 90-minute speech. Vance initially received a tepid response, but cheers built to a hearty level by the time he finished.
Trump called him back to the stage to speak with the former president by his side and, by then, the energy and ovation was much higher.
“I’m very pleased to introduce the man with by far the best chance to defeat the radical Democrat nominee for the U.S. Senate this November. And you know what? He’s a guy who said some bad shit about me. He did. He did. But you know what? Every one of the others did also. In fact, if I went by that standard, I don’t think I would have ever endorsed anybody in the country,” Trump said right before asking Vance to join him on stage.
The surprise in Trump’s move to endorse Vance—a celebrity of sorts who penned “Hillbilly Elegy,” a memoir of a Middletown, Ohio-raised kid and the societal problems he and his family faced—was tamped-down a bit when Donald Trump Jr. defended Vance against attacks from his opponents in late March.
Despite the foreshadowing from Trump Jr, response to his dad’s endorsement included shock and disapproval with some accusing Trump of abandoning his early grassroots supporters in the Buckeye State.
One letter, sources said, was commissioned by Ohio Republican Party (ORP) Chairman Bob Paduchik, who purportedly directed ORP Treasurer Dave Johnson to gather protest signatures from GOP Party leaders around the state.
A former Trump White House aide said the initial pushback directed by the ORP chairman was likely inconsequential to the former president and his insiders, saying Trump was “annoyed” with Paduchik’s past efforts to get #45 to endorse Paduchik’s candidate, Jane Timken.
The aide confirmed a story another Trump insider told about Paduchik driving to New Jersey to visit Trump so he could talk with him one-on-one to pitch Timken: “If you call Trump, you’re likely on speaker, and [Paduchik] didn’t want that risk.” According to both sources, that move caused Trump to pause and question Paduchik’s advice on the U.S. Senate race in Ohio.
That made for another surprise during Trump’s talk—he gave Paduchik a mention from stage, a move that drew groans and boos from the crowd.
The ORP effort to get Trump to reverse his support for Vance was followed by resistance from Ohio Value Voters (OVV), a conservative, Christian voter-education group that claims to reach over 1 million Ohio electors. Rob Scott, state director for Trump’s 2016 campaign in Ohio, also advised against giving Vance the seal of approval. OVV and Scott back Mandel.
“Within the last week, President Trump has endorsed two statewide candidates which were the leaders in derogatory comments against our former president,” said John Stover, president of OVV. “Secretary of State Frank LaRose called Trump a ‘racist’ and J.D. Vance referred to him as ‘America’s Hitler.’ Trump made a poor decision in the endorsement of LaRose and Vance. Ohio Value Voters stands firmly in our endorsement of Josh Mandel for Senate.”
Opposition also came from We The People Convention and President Tom Zawistowski, the Portage County Tea Party founder and popular conservative grassroots activist. Zawistowski’s organization endorsed Gibbons.
Despite the efforts from supporters of Gibbons, Mandel and Timken to undo the approval, the endorsement sticks.
Vance told The Ohio Press Network (OPN) before the rally started Saturday, “I feel like we’ve got momentum. The hardest part is definitely still ahead. A lot of people are going to make up their mind in the next 10 days, and the president’s endorsement helps but we can’t be lazy about it—we have to work hard. I’m definitely happy, I’m having a good time but definitely the hardest part is ahead.”
According to the Trafalgar poll released on April 15, Vance is correct; the heavy lifting is ahead. That survey showed Mandel with a 5.4% lead with 13.1% undecided. Despite the projected result that 55% of respondents would support the Trump-endorsed candidate, even that uptick for Vance would make the race in the final week one which he could win or lose, narrowly.
A Vance internal poll from Trump-favorite Fabrizio released last week showed Vance with a 7-point margin above Mandel.
“He’s very good at convincing. Prior to today I wasn’t a big Vance fan just because of his take on Trump,” said Mike Urban of Columbus. “I really appreciate Mr. Vance taking accountability for his actions, acknowledging those and giving voters reasons he felt the way he did in the beginning.”
Urban continued, “I think that Americans who vote for and love the Constitution have to take a step back from the name—for me it’s not about a Trump policy, but what does that policy do for America? Trump has proven results of an America First agenda. He has earned my trust as a voter. I don’t feel that Trump would put his stamp on somebody if they didn’t share the same vision. Once again, the fact that he is endorsed by Trump makes me feel that he will take an America First agenda to Washington. I think J.D. Vance won me over today, so he would have my vote.”
Ian Crowley of Newark shared similar sentiments, “I just feel that everything [Vance] said was right on the money. We need something better.”
Trump’s Ohio visit was originally planned to support the MAGA-endorsed candidate in Ohio’s 7th Congressional District, Max Miller. However, site availability issues in Northern Ohio prohibited a rally in Miller’s district.
Miller, who is running to replace retiring Congressman Anthony Gonzalez, was spotlighted early in the program and then brought back on stage to stand and talk with Trump by his side. Trump called Miller a “natural.”
During his first trip to the stage Saturday, Vance said he would fight big-tech censorship and call public-health bureaucrats to accountability but received what seemed like his loudest support when he asked rhetorically, “Why is it that the FBI, who we know—even the New York Times, the fake news New York Times, I guarantee they’re probably here tonight, even they admit that the FBI illegally spied on Donald Trump—why haven’t a single one of them gone to prison?”
More than a handful of times during his speech on Saturday, Trump mentioned Vance—“How about that, J.D.?” One of those shout-outs was tied to commentary on the 2020 election being rigged.
Vance called his Trump criticisms “one of the most poorly kept secrets in this race” but the revelation of more vitriol for Trump got personal last week when Georgia State Representative Josh McLaurin, Vance’s roommate at Yale, tweeted a screengrab of a private message from Vance in 2016.
The screenshot below is @JDVance1’s unfiltered explanation from 2016 of the breakdown in Republican politics that he now personally is trying to exploit.
The “America’s Hitler” bit is at the end.
The public deserves to know the magnitude of this guy’s bad faith. pic.twitter.com/79Z0qSWFWF
— Josh McLaurin (@JoshforGeorgia) April 18, 2022
McLaurin wrote, “The public deserves to know the magnitude of this guy’s bad faith.”
Vance’s message reads: “But I’m not surprised by Trump’s rise, and I think the entire party has only itself to blame. We are, whether we like it or not, the party of lower-income, lower-education white people, and I have been saying for a long time that we need to offer those people SOMETHING (and hell, maybe even expand our appeal to working class black people in the process) or a demagogue would. We are now at that point. Trump is the fruit of the party’s collective neglect…I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler.”
Rumor has it
Whispers began last week that even though Trump wouldn’t reverse his endorsement decision for Vance, he and his team wanted to counter critics by gathering more support from Ohio elected officials for his bet on Vance.
Rumor had it if anyone stepped forward to back Vance that Trump would, in turn, endorse that candidate. By Saturday morning, the scuttlebutt was that Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose would announce a Vance endorsement and, in turn, be blessed by Trump.
That’s precisely what appeared to happen.
Before the rally officially started, a press release from Vance’s campaign unveiled that LaRose was endorsing Vance. A few hours later Trump made his backing of LaRose official from the stage.
LaRose was part of Trump’s inauguration team in 2017 despite being a #NeverTrump and John Kasich operative.
But in 2019 when asked if he would endorse in the presidential election, LaRose said, “I’m not endorsing candidates or showing up at campaign rallies, because … when the eyes of the world are on Ohio next year, the people of Ohio need to know that their chief elections officer is calling balls and strikes, and running fair elections.”
Although Ohio law makes it illegal for a secretary to serve as a campaign official, it does not outlaw endorsing; but the move does go against LaRose’s previous position.
“It would be the stance I would take regardless of who’s running,” LaRose said to a Cleveland newspaper about the 2020 race. “I’ve made the decision that as the chief elections officer, that this … is how I should conduct my work.”
The Republican secretary of state has also touted the 2020 election cycle as Ohio’s safest and most fair and said that claims of widespread voter fraud, especially those involving the allegation that voting equipment is connected to the internet, are conspiracies. LaRose has, prior to his 2022 election, assigned blame to both Democrats and Republicans for potentially thwarting the will of the electorate to vote by overhyping voter suppression and voter fraud.
Bob Meydam traveled to Delaware from Wisconsin to celebrate his birthday at the rally. Meydam is like many Trump supporters who believe the 2020 Presidential Election was stolen.
“In Wisconsin they had this wonderful little scam called Democracy in the Park that was held in Madison and Milwaukee. People could stop at one park bench and pick up an absentee ballot and then deliver it to someone else at a different park bench, completely circumventing the state law. All of those ballots were allowed to stay in. It was estimated there were about 20,000 of them, which is about the margin Joe Biden won by in Wisconsin,” said Meydam.
Just a couple of comments on election theft from the 45th president during his Saturday stump included:
- “Look at all those cameras from the fake news. They always turn the cameras off when we talk about the rigged election, that’s what they don’t want to talk about—they don’t want to talk about the rigged election.”
- “You remember and I think you just saw that Truth to Vote did a ballot-harvesting operation, the likes of which has never been done in this country, took them almost a year and they found corruption in the 2020 election, the likes of which no one has ever seen. They have found millions and millions of totally corrupt votes. And it’s determinative.”
Consequently, on the surface Trump and LaRose seem like a political odd couple in 2022 where endorsements and rallies are concerned, even considering LaRose’s recent comments—which have been chalked up by some to his reelection bid—where he appears to support Trump election fraud claims, saying they may be true in states with weaker election leaders and election safeguards.
But Trump’s right-hand purveyor of massive election fraud claims is Mike Lindell, who said Saturday that Ohio votes for Trump were undercounted by as many as 500,000. Trump himself said at the top of his talk, “In 2016 and 2020 we won Ohio in a landslide. We won it with a lot of votes; probably should have won it by more than that.”
Nonetheless Trump endorsed LaRose, and the announcement was met with a mix of applause, groans and noticeable boos.
“I don’t understand how Trump can claim the election was rigged and endorse LaRose,” said MAGA rally attendee Anna Petersheim, a Knox County resident.
LaRose was the first secretary of state in America to get behind Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan in their doling out of over $300 million in “election infrastructure” funds—a move by the far-left tech mogul that precipitated legislation in Ohio and other states prohibiting money from outside sources for elections.
“Quid pro quo”
“QUID PRO QUO,” was the beginning of a text from Bryan Williams, ORP vice chairman, when Vance’s communications team released a statement Saturday that LaRose had just endorsed Vance.
Williams is a staunch critic of LaRose. The two had a tussle involving the Ohio Supreme Court after LaRose rejected Williams’ appointment to the Summit County Board of Elections last year. The high court ruled that the move by LaRose was not valid and “he abused his discretion.”
“Both candidates show a lack of character in swapping endorsements at the instruction of Team Trump,” Williams wrote in his text.
OPN sent a message to a Trump communications director asking for comment, clarification on, or confirmation of, the Williams quid pro quo claim. The Trump team did not respond before this article published.
Williams said in an interview earlier in the week that ORP Chairman Bob Paduchik asked him to resign as vice chairman of the ORP after Williams spoke out against LaRose during a February State Central Committee Meeting—a meeting to which the chairman barred news outlets that he surmised wouldn’t give the ORP the coverage he wanted, including Sinclair Broadcast Group’s WKRC-TV in Cincinnati.
Paduchik is the defendant in a lawsuit brought by members of the ORP State Central Committee for, among other things, retaliating and removing them from their committee assignments after they began inquiring about ORP financial statement irregularities and opposed giving money to unendorsed candidates and endorsing in the primary election.
LaRose’s primary contender John Adams said, “After watching the rally with Frank LaRose’s endorsement, I would have to say that he would have to adopt virtually everything in my campaign platform to satisfy that endorsement. I see trouble ahead for Frank.”
After the event, LaRose invited OPN to the “war room,” as he called it, for a simulation of the Ohio election process as the May 3 primary nears. “Election integrity is imperative, and Ohio has established the gold-standard and other states should emulate us.”
Silent on the gubernatorial race
Ever since Trump tweeted about the Ohio gubernatorial race on the heels of Gov. Mike DeWine urging Ohioans to consider Joe Biden the president-elect in November 2020, anticipation has built that Trump would either endorse or criticize DeWine before the May 3 primary.
Rumors swirled last week that neither DeWine nor his challengers, former U.S. Congressman Jim Renacci and farmer Joe Blystone, would earn an endorsement, but many speculated DeWine would be the bearer of harsh criticism from Trump.
That never happened.
The only negative comment Trump made about an Ohio governor referred to circa 2017 and then-Gov. John Kasich, who had opposed Trump in the Republican presidential primary.
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Jack is also an investigative reporter for The Ohio Press Network and a Statehouse correspondent for WHK AM1420 in Cleveland.
Photo “JD Vance” by JD Vance. Background Photo “Save America Rally” by Gage Skidmore. CC BY-SA 2.0.
