Vice President JD Vance attributed President Donald Trump’s political success to prioritizing the Republican Party’s working-class voters over its “business elites” in a new memoir of his Catholic faith.If Vance runs for president in 2028, he is likely to find himself squaring off against some of his party’s own donors and traditional economic conservatives.The broadsides against big-business Republicans come in a chapter taking issue with professional economists more broadly, titled “A Dismal Science.”
“[A]s the decline in Christianity has left us without a shared moral language, economics has stepped into the vacuum,” Vance writes in Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith. “We pretend there are scientific answers to questions of values.”
Vance cites his stepmother, “a devout evangelical and committed Republican,” lamenting that she found herself voting for “the party of the rich.”
“And something happened in the 1990s, as Christian conservatives fused with the Republican Party, is that we were taken advantage of,” Vance, 41, continues. “Most Christians don’t care about lower taxes for global corporations or institutional investors. They may have been actively hostile to those things.”
