When labor champion Theodore Roosevelt became president after William McKinley succumbed to an assassin’s bullets, establishment kingmakers such as Sen. Mark Hanna, R-Ohio, went into shock. Equally threatened when Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016, the monied class suffered another coronary after the former president named Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio, his running mate three weeks ago, sealing his commitment to remake the GOP into a working-class coalition.
Fearful of losing their grip on the party, the editors of The Wall Street Journal (along with anonymous GOP-establishment backbiters) joined the corporate media and Kamala Harris’ desperate campaign in smearing Ohio’s junior senator the last two weeks. The latter two manufactured chattering-class outrage over his 2021 observation that certain high-profile Democratic officeholders, whom he deemed “childless cat ladies,” did not have a direct physical stake in the country, claiming the remark offended American women.
The Journal admonished the combat Marine for disrespecting “people who make different life choices,” even as his admitted sarcasm was limited to a few Democrats currently running the country, surely fair game during election season. Indeed, as Vance explicitly clarified in another venue at the same time, he was not disparaging childless women in general, including those who may not long to wed and bear children, or those who struggle to conceive.
Yet Vance’s real offense, per the Wall Street-K Street axis of power: his belief that the tax burden should be lighter on young parents but relatively heavier on their peers who are not rearing the next generation of social capital, a position that free-market fundamentalists find appalling. Family considerations, the Journal fears, create “complications that add distortions” to the tax code. Steeped in discredited supply-side economic theories, Rupert Murdoch’s newspaper of record has for decades claimed the popular child tax credit, which Vance wants to expand and make permanent, also smacks of social engineering, and now adds the bipartisan provision is “bad politics.”
Family-Centered Economics
Longing for a return to pre-Trump days, these skeptics conveniently forget that the Midwesterner’s instincts find root in American policy. It was President Ronald Reagan’s appointees to the National Commission on Children that persuaded the bipartisan panel chaired by Sen. John Rockefeller IV, D-W.Va., to recommend the creation of a $1,000 per-child tax credit for all youngsters through age 18, which a Republican Congress scaled back but nonetheless adopted under Bill Clinton.
Just as the same Beltway conservative groupthink ignores that the Party of Lincoln was founded on tariffs and industrial policies that made America great, it likewise overlooks that Theodore Roosevelt went further than Vance’s family-centered economics. In his last book, The Foes of Our Own Household, the 26th president argued: “In taxation, the rate should be immensely heavier on the childless and on the families with one or two children, while an equally heavy discrimination should lie in favor of the family with over three children.”
Inspired by the father of six, the 1948 Congress upped an already progressive tax code not in terms of income but by marital and parental status. Overriding President Harry S. Truman’s veto, the GOP delivered tax reforms for working- and middle-class families by favoring wedlock over divorce and singleness, fertility over childlessness, and married households over all other living arrangements via full-income splitting and generous personal and dependent exemptions. While the Journal recently dismissed such statecraft as mean-spirited culture warring, TR and the GOP in its better days championed winning policies that helped spur the Baby Boom and create Henry Luce’s American Century.
The destructive and treacherous backbiting from party insiders is not new. The slandering of Vance started at least a month ago, as Murdoch and his newspapers’ editors lobbied Trump to pick anyone but the Buckeye native; they recognized the veep selection would signal the party’s future. What surprises is the convergence of the Journal and the Democrats’ standard-bearer on social and economic issues.
The Establishment’s Agenda
In attacking Vance, the Harris campaign has now effectively called for repealing the child tax credit, while gaining the financial backing of billionaires who want Harris, if she wins, to fire Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan for restoring antitrust enforcement and to cease the Biden’s administration continuation of Trump’s tariffs. Sounds strikingly similar to the GOP’s old-guard agenda.
It’s almost as if Murdoch and his minions secretly want Trump-Vance to go down in flames. Their trashing of the national ticket suggests they would prefer to lose an election on terms they set rather than win one under priorities championed by Trump. It’s all about control of conservative institutions and the party structure going forward.
No wonder the GOP remains the Stupid Party, like the Conservative Party across the pond. As former Trump speechwriter Frank Buckley laments, it’s “legal fiction” to think elected Republicans share “the same political party.” Per his accounting, we’ve got Trump’s national or presidential party (broadcast from Milwaukee two weeks ago), representing the voting class, vying against congressional party factions — from the Main Street Partnership and Freedom Caucus to maverick senators making a name for themselves — captive to the donor class.
Unlike the unified Democrats, who quickly circled the wagons around a vulnerable Harris, and whose raison d’être is social liberalism or cultural Marxism, the GOP doesn’t know what to stand for, with insiders piling on Vance, afraid of being consigned to the dust heap of political history.
But if the Trump-Vance team can break through the all-out media war against the ticket, a full-court press being cheered on by GOP saboteurs, the Republicans will not only win back the White House but also ensure a future for the party and country that would make Theodore Roosevelt proud.
Mr. Patterson was an associate commissioner for communications at the Social Security Administration, 2017–19. He also served as a speechwriter at the Department of Health and Human Services and the Small Business Administration under President George W. Bush. Bracketing his service to President Trump, Patterson was the 2016 Republican nominee in New Jersey’s first congressional district and a 2020 GOP candidate in New Jersey’s second congressional district.
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