An illustration featuring a purple-tinted smiling Donald Trump looming over grayscale images of Donald Trump Jr., Ron DeSantis, JD Vance and Kari Lake

Illustration by Bill Kuchman/POLITICO (source images via Getty Images, AP)

By Calder McHugh

07/27/2024 07:00 AM EDT

Calder McHugh is deputy editor of POLITICO Nightly.

On Monday, in the midst of a speech in his hometown of Middletown, Ohio, one of JD Vance’s half-jokes landed with a thud.

“Democrats say that it is racist to believe — well, they say it’s racist to do anything,” he said. “I had a Diet Mountain Dew yesterday and one today, and I’m sure they’re going to call that racist too. But it’s good.”

The crowd was less than enthused. The people behind him looked confused, and as one solitary person appeared to cheer, Vance laughed at his own joke and said, “I love you guys.”

The internet pounced on the clip, mocking Vance for his awkwardness in his first days as Donald Trump’s running mate. But what’s striking about the moment — and much of the rest of the rally, in which Vance clumsily tried to joke about local Middletown hot spots before launching into various grievances against Democrats — is how much it sounded like a cheap imitation of a Trump rally.

Vance represents himself as the intellectual vanguard of the Republican Party. To his supporters, he contains the promise of something more radical than Trump, influenced by far-right thinkers who disagree with many of the fundamental premises of liberal democracy. But in style, he’s fallen into a common trap for far-right politicians in the Trump era: trying to sound like the guy at the top of the ticket.

Throughout the hundreds of rallies in the Trump era, the former president honed a style that is perfectly pitched to his supporters: a wink and a nod at some of his more outlandish ideas, sandwiched between humor and charisma to soften his rhetoric. Trump’s entertainer background — from his days on The Apprentice to his time in the wrestling ring with WWE — translated well as he built his own style of politics. POLITICO Magazine’s Michael Kruse, a veteran of the Trump beat, wrote earlier this year that the defining sound of his rallies is the laughter — which has only gotten louder as his rhetoric has trafficked further into conspiracy theories. Even many of his harshest critics will admit that he’s funny.

His imitators are not.

Take Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, hailed for years as the spiritual successor to Trump. When he hit the primary campaign trail, he fell flat on his face, aiming strangely loud fake laughter at voters and displaying a disconcerting inability to smile like a normal human on the debate stage. Or Blake Masters, who — while unsuccessfully running for Arizona Senate in 2022 — released one of the strangest and most unsettling political advertisements of all time, which included him walking alone in the desert outside Tucson, brandishing a handgun with a silencer attached to the barrel. “I’ve wanted this gun for a long time, ever since I was a kid,” he says in the video. Masters embarrassed Trump enough that when he decided to run again for a House seat this year, Trump endorsed his opponent in the Republican primary.

Then there’s fellow Arizonan Kari Lake, another 2022 loser, who has devoted years of her life to quixotic legal challenges to the outcome of that race — none of which are likely to go anywhere — just as Trump still pushes the “Big Lie” that the 2020 election was rigged. She has more natural ability on the stump than Vance, DeSantis or Masters. (Lake has an entertainment background as well, after all.) But she still managed to turn voters off, and fast, as she compared herself and her supporters to Jesus on the trail to an audience in a church that looked very confused.

Or how about Trump’s own son, Don Jr., whose attempts to emulate his father are the most obvious and also fall the most flat. In one of his more embarrassing moments, he told a clearly unsettled and confused audience at CPAC in 2021 that Texas was a political leader, but only sort of: “Texas has always led the charge,” he said, “well, until about like a couple months ago, when Austin kind of took over — you’re still top 25.” That joke is just one in a litany of unsteady attempts at humor.

Of course, politicians whose ideology dovetails with Trump are far from the only ones who have had trouble connecting with a crowd. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez commented on X that “Vance’s stump [speech] has got a nice Jeb Bush ring to it,” referring to Bush’s now infamous “please clap” moment from the 2016 primary. Not to mention the ur-example of tanking a campaign by being weird and out of touch from Howard Dean, whose bizarre “Byyyaaaah!” scream in the 2004 primary ended his chances of becoming the Democratic nominee.

But what’s distinct about the Trump imitators is that without the humor, all that’s left is the grievance politics, which turns off at least some voters. When Vance ran for Senate in Ohio, he ran a campaign ad while smirking toward the camera and asking, “Are you a racist? Do you hate Mexicans?” The gambit was meant to draw attention to what he said next, which was that this is how the media is attempting to paint Trump supporters. But the first part of the ad became a meme — his delivery was off, and the attempt at attention-grabbing comedy sounded much more like Rupert Pupkin than Donald Trump.
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Vance’s polling numbers reflect that failure to connect with people. Even though he won his seat in 2022, he ran behind Trump’s 2020 numbers in Ohio. According to averages from CNN election forecaster Harry Enten, Vance’s average net favorability immediately following the Republican Convention is now -6 points — making him the first nonincumbent vice presidential pick since 1980 to have a net negative favorability rating at this point in the campaign. The average for a nonincumbent vice presidential candidate since 2000 is +19.

Trump has the magic touch to juice turnout and excite Republicans in a way that his imitators do not. In 2018 and 2022, the two elections in the Trump era when the head honcho was not on the ballot, pro-Trump Republican candidates did poorly, running below expectations and losing winnable races. Meanwhile, even when Trump lost in 2020, he overperformed in public polling.

It’s an interesting puzzle: Many of Trump’s ideas are largely unpopular with voters; without his charisma, his ideological allies are left with policy positions like abortion bans that most Americans don’t really like. It’s Trump’s personality that keeps him happily ensconced at the head of the party.

The result is that candidates like Vance up and down state ballots try to build on Trump’s political legacy without being able to capture his personal one.

The situation calls to mind an old idiom that’s a favorite of another wrestling pro, fellow reviled-yet-entertaining iconoclast Ric Flair: “Often imitated, never duplicated.” Or, as Trump himself famously said back in 2016, “I alone can fix it.”

At his Middletown rally, Vance told a story of a hard-nosed math teacher that he had in high school named Ron Selby, who attended. Selby, Vance had heard, once had a student so opposed to taking final exams that they called a bomb threat in to the school. The students and teachers dutifully evacuated, but Selby, knowing his student, walked up to the kid’s locker, took what was allegedly the bomb, threw it in the trash and said, “I know this kid. He’s not smart enough to make a bomb.”

Vance passed it off like a fun old tale. But there’s also a lesson in there (beyond the fact that the audience nervously laughed out of obligation). Sometimes, when you try to pass yourself off as someone you’re not, everyone can tell. Very quickly.