President Donald Trump’s party is furious over a Wall Street Journal op-ed comparing JD Vance to Barack Obama.
On Thursday, several prominent MAGA mouthpieces—including the president’s own son—decried a Wednesday piece from the Rupert Murdoch-owned publication that claimed Vance’s persona and career trajectory are reminiscent of his boss’s predecessor.
Columnist Barton Swaim drew similarities between Vance, 42, and Obama, 65, including their upbringings, their shared absence of a father, and their grandparents serving as primary caretakers. Both men, he noted, embarked on a rags-to-riches trajectory: Vance from rural Ohio to Yale Law School and Obama from Hawaii to Columbia University, then, later, Harvard Law School.
Swaim also argued that Vance, like Obama, chooses to use “caricature arguments.”
“I refer of course to Mr. Vance’s conviction that he, by the force of his personality, could turn Iran’s bloodthirsty, mendacious revolutionaries into practical men, ready to negotiate in good faith,” Swaim wrote.
The columnist also argued that although Vance enjoys touting “his youth,” he was plenty old enough to watch as “Obama attempted to turn U.S. policy away from Israel and draw Iran into the community of peaceable nations.”
“Mr. Obama, too, liked to contrast his practical and interest-based approach to that of his ideology-driven predecessors,” he wrote.
Needless to say, conservatives weren’t pleased with Swaim’s argument.
“Honestly, the globalist Wall Street Journal Editorial page attacking [Vance] is the best possible endorsement he could ask for,” first son and social media warrior Donald Trump Jr. wrote in a post on X on Thursday.
“They pulled the same c--p against my dad in 16 and 24. The more these open border RINOs smear him, the more obvious it is that he’s over the target.”
Alex Bruesewitz, a MAGA political operative, tried to reframe Swaim’s argument as a typical line of attack from “the establishment”—whatever “the establishment is”—as the Journal is widely regarded as the nation’s leading conservative publication. On X, the Trump adviser shared an excerpt from a 2016 Time article that compared Secretary of State Marco Rubio to “GOP Obama.”
“This is the same ‘attack line’ the establishment used against [Rubio] in 2016,” he wrote. “Really boring stuff.”
Conservative journalist Sean Davis, for his part, fought the comparison by lavishing praise on Vance.
“He’s going to be elected to the presidency in a walk, and then easily re-elected by winning states that haven’t gone red in years, all while delivering massive and transformative results for his side?” Davis wrote on X. “And then his VP will become president as well? Sounds awesome.”
