I want to comment on J. D. Vance as well as on President Trump. 

J.D. Vance always looked to me like a lightweight and a fake. There is his childhood in Ohio, when he was brought up by a stranger because his own mother was on drugs, to his Yale education, his time as a corporal in the Marines, his short law firm and venture capitalist stints, to his two years in the Senate and stressing the family burial plot in Kentucky. 

And his memoir, which he wrote in his 30s.

The main reason is that Vance, during his short career, changed his opinion on just about anything. For instance, he called President Trump “morally deranged” at one time, according to an email to his Yale classmate.

It is not that one cannot change his opinion when warranted. But somebody who changes his opinion on just about everything is by definition suspect. 

As a vice presidential candidate, J.D. Vance is certainly better than the TV talking head Tucker Carlson—who, for instance, praises the post-communist Hungarian dictator Viktor Orbán only because Orbán opposes the socialists of the European Union. 

But I think that by this selection President Trump may have shown again his propensity for selecting the wrong partners. We remember Giuliani, Cohen or even Bannon.

I voted for President Trump twice and will vote for him again. For he was the best American president of the modern era, mostly because of his economy—the lowest black unemployment in history, the lowest unemployment since 1959. The national economy started booming right after his inauguration because he canceled thousands of Obama-era regulations that were hamstringing business after the eight years of slow Obama recovery from the Great Recession of 2008.

I am fully cognizant of President Trump’s faults. The biggest one was the lasting insistence on a non-existent “stolen presidential election.” Yet, Trump has been prosecuted by the congressional Democrats unfairly—the biggest fallacy was his double impeachment, based on the fraudulent “dossier” claiming Trump was a Russian agent.

Yet, President Trump may be similar to Gen. George Patton, so to speak. Patton was named by the captured Nazi Feld Marshall Gerd von Rundstedt as the best American general of WW II, while many felt within reason that Gen. Patton was unsuitable for a peacetime duty.

J.D. Vance sent me an email asking, “As your VP candidate, what should I do first?” My reply was “If elected, sit tight at the Blair House or whatever your official residence is going to be, and wait for the President to tell you what to do.” It appears that J.D. Vance is prepared to do just that.

Ivan Orisek
Forestburgh, NY