MaddowBlog-Vance's big-tent pitch is at odds with Trump's partisan purges [View all]

[LetMyPeopleVote]

The vice president doesn’t seem to have noticed that the president has already rejected his inclusive philosophy.

Link to tweet

https://www.ms.now/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/vances-big-tent-pitch-is-at-odds-with-trumps-partisan-purges

It was amid this turmoil that JD Vance headlined the event in Phoenix, saying early on in his remarks that he didn’t want to exclude any of the factions on the right, no matter how much they might oppose each other.

JD Vance: "When I say that I'm going to fight alongside of you, I mean all of you — each and every one. President Trump did not build the greatest coalition in politics by running his supporters through endless, self-defeating purity tests."

— The Bulwark (@thebulwark.com) 2025-12-21T20:05:49.481Z

....The remarks were seen by some as evidence of the vice president’s choice not to take sides in the intraparty dispute among ostensible MAGA loyalists. That’s not quite how I saw it. In fact, when Vance insisted that the United States is a “Christian nation,” endorsed the importance of far-right conspiracy theories and added that people “don’t have to apologize for being white anymore,” he left little doubt as to which contingents of the conservative movement he was aligned with.....

Just in recent weeks, Trump has done what he’s done repeatedly over the last decade: He announced which Republicans have failed to meet his standards and therefore deserve his condemnation. If Vance has any doubts about this, I’d refer him to Republicans in Indiana’s state Senate, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia (whom the president continues to refer to as “Marjorie Traitor Brown”), Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky and Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky — all ostensibly allies in the same party as Trump and his vice president.

“We have far more important work to do than canceling each other”? Perhaps, but Trump, fixated on retaliating against anyone who fails to satisfy his demand for obedience, has waged a long and unsubtle political war against members of his own party who’ve strayed from his partisan script.

Either Vance hasn’t paid close enough attention to recent events or he thought it’d be a good idea to advocate for an inclusive philosophy that the president has chosen fundamentally to reject