Lone Star Turn

By Michael Warren

Friday, September 11, 2026

 

This week’s midterm convention in Dallas may have been conceived by and centered around Donald Trump, but Thursday night belonged to J.D. Vance. There were all kinds of indications that the 42-year-old vice president has reached a new level of popularity among the most faithful within his party.

 

It seemed that way when, during Vance’s keynote address, the crowd several times burst into chants of “J.D.”, which at one point shifted to chants of “48” (America’s next president will be the 48^th). “We’ve got to take care of business this November, then we’ll worry about what comes next,” Vance responded with a chuckle.

 

Vance’s stage presence felt markedly improved from when I saw him two years ago at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee after he got the vice presidential nomination. He now looks more confident and comfortable, suggesting that Trump’s own charisma may be rubbing off on his VP. (The president’s caustic style certainly has; in his speech, Vance adopted Trump’s insulting name for Senate candidate James Talarico, “Talafreako,” and suggested that the Texas Democrat had unsavory or even illegal web-browsing habits because Talarico is “obsessed” with “trans kids.”)

 

But there was one particular moment, about 15 minutes into his address, that appeared to elevate Vance’s position in real time. A protester began to walk down the aisle stairs, shouting and unfurling a Mexican flag and then a Palestinian flag. Vance paused his speech amid the commotion, and after the protester was quickly removed from the arena, he turned back to the crowd. “Well, my friend, if you love Mexico so much, get your ass over there. I’ll buy you the plane ticket,” he said as the crowd burst into the most deafening roar of the night. (A cynic might wonder whether the scene and Vance’s response were choreographed, given how perfectly it played in the room.)

 

If in two years Vance is back at a Republican convention accepting his party’s nomination, Dallas may be remembered as his true debut, his coming-out party as the next leader of the GOP and the MAGA movement. Indeed, the honorary delegates and superfans at the 2026 convention appeared quite willing to pass the torch to Vance and let him lead the party in its next evolution.

 

The week began with discussion of a New York Times report that the administration was considering adopting one of Vance’s top policy priorities, a change in how the federal childcare subsidy designed for single-parent households is administered. “Under the draft new rule, parents who stay home with their children could benefit from the program, which typically provides about $9,000 per child each year, potentially reshaping which families get federal child care money,” reported the Times, which also notes that Vance has “championed” the idea internally.

 

The idea to provide tax subsidies to stay-at-home moms isn’t inherently Trumpy, and it fits much more with the family-oriented welfare policy that Vance and his many acolytes are pushing their party to adopt. It’s also antithetical to the small-government approach that old-school conservative movement types would like to see reasserted in Republican policy priorities. But that’s a point in the proposal’s favor for Team Vance, since there’s nothing that pleases the party’s postliberals more than to see the zombie Reaganites hem and haw about right-wing big government proposals that the Vanceguard believe would be popular with a significant part of the GOP coalition.

 

The cadre of intellectuals, writers, and activists who make up the new right has greeted Vance’s subsidy idea with enthusiasm. In fact, many of them gathered on Wednesday in Irving, about 12 miles from the convention arena, at an event put on by Forum, a new group that organizes policy debates on the right. Forum was founded by Matthew J. Peterson, a longtime affiliate of the Claremont Institute, one of the leading institutions of the new right.

 

During one panel discussion, Terry Schilling—president of the American Principles Project, a pro-family advocacy group, and a leading voice among social conservatives—was effusive in his praise for the Vance-driven proposal, arguing the vice president is “reframing the debate” about the goals of tax policy when it comes to families.

 

“He’s making the argument that we shouldn’t be subsidizing corporations with childcare. We should be giving that money directly to families. Childcare subsidies are a direct subsidy for the biggest corporations in America,” Schilling said, referring to stakes that private equity has in some of the country’s largest daycare chains. “This is going to be a total realignment of the Republican Party and what its economic policies actually geared towards and should be working to support.”

 

In his speech, Vance offered rhetorical hints about how a Vance-led GOP might steer the party toward a more paternalistic conservatism that looks more like the Christian democratic parties of Western Europe. He offered a prescription for the life he would like his newborn son (the Vances’ fourth) to have, from eating “real food” to receiving a “real education” that teaches him to “love his country.” Then, he went a little further.

 

“What I want for my family, I want for your family too. That’s my job,” Vance said. “My job is to fight for every single person in this room, every person watching at home, as if they were my own family, as if they were my own kid.”

 

And a motif of Vance’s address was the “birthright” of every American child. By my count, he used the word eight times, always to describe a broad idea of what was owed to all of this country’s citizens. Americans were born, he said, with “the right to inherit the blessings of the greatest country on earth, not because of who their parents are, not because of what they look like or where they come from, but because they are Americans, and this is our country.”

 

But, he argued, under presidents of the past, rampant immigration, inflation, and misguided policies have wantonly spent down that birthright or worse—denied it to its rightful heirs. “Our nation became a place where you had to be rich to enjoy what used to be the birthright of every ordinary middle-class life,” Vance said. “It wasn’t just that things became more expensive; it’s that our country was stolen from us and then handed out to strangers.”

 

It’s a more sophisticated and more specific version of Trump’s own brand of populist critique of the political class in 2016. The country has been run into the ground not by fools and crooks, as the current president would put it, but by the corporations and libertarians who ran Washington and opened up trade and immigration at the expense of the American worker. Sen. Bernie Sanders might like a word with Vance about cribbing his ideas, but the vice president seems to be betting that this populist sentiment isn’t losing steam with his own side.

 

Among the MAGA loyalists in Dallas this week, that doesn’t seem to be a bad bet. Will the full Republican Party, let alone the country, be ready to double down on right-wing economic populism in two years? That’s a whole different game.