Vice President JD Vance offered Republicans a glimpse of what could be the party’s future on Thursday night, as he hammered home a midterm message with overtures to disaffected voters, a pro-family pitch in personal terms, and plenty of red-meat attacks on Democrats.
Then President Donald Trump stepped on stage.
And he stayed there, for more than 25 minutes, riffing about his favorite opera singers, how ugly he thinks Texas Republican Senate nominee Ken Paxton is and urging attendees at one point to “cheat like hell” to keep Republicans in control of Congress – all a night after he covered many of the same topics in a rollicking speech of his own.
It was a jarring end to the GOP’s unusual two-day midterm convention in Dallas, which came less than two months before Americans will decide whether the party will retain its House and Senate majorities or hand Democrats power for the last two years of Trump’s term.
Faced with an unpopular president, a war with Iran that has sent gas prices rising and historical headwinds, Republicans are seeking to make the midterm elections about the Democrats — casting even the party’s more moderate nominees in key races as beholden to its progressive insurgency.
“It’s about sending a message to the Democratic Party that if you send your crazies, we’re going to send you packing,” Vance said of the stakes of November’s elections.
But since Trump’s ascension a decade ago, Republicans have performed poorly in many elections when his name hasn’t been on the ballot. So even as some GOP candidates in competitive races seek to shift voters’ focus away from the president, Trump urged the party faithful on Thursday night to pretend he is on the ballot this year.
He led the crowd in an extended pledge to vote, asking them to promise to “go out with my family, my friends … I don’t care if I’m registered or not, I’m going to try and cheat like hell, like they (Democrats) do.”
“You know what happens if you don’t vote?” Trump said. “You go to hell.”
Here are key takeaways from the final night of the GOP’s midterm convention:
Just as important as what Vance said in his keynote speech closing Thursday night is that he was chosen to fill the most important slot on the schedule aside from Trump’s appearances.
The 2028 presidential race will kick into gear immediately after the midterms. Vance hasn’t yet said whether he will run, but he is viewed by many Republicans as Trump’s heir apparent.
It was on the crowd’s mind. At one point during his speech, some Republicans broke into a “48” chant. The president who succeeds Trump will be the nation’s 48th.
“We’ve got to take care of business this November. Then we’ll worry about what comes next,” a laughing Vance told them.
From the personal references Vance peppered about his wife, Usha, their children, and his grandfather, to the kinds of jokes he delivered, the stylistic differences between the vice president and Trump were obvious.
Like Trump, he waded eagerly into culture wars. But unlike Trump, he focused his message on faith and family values — detailing at length the nation he wants for his newborn son.
“What I want for my family, I want for your family, too,” Vance said.
One of the strongest crowd reactions to Vance came in an unscripted moment. A protester interrupted the vice president’s speech, and Vance told viewers at home that the protester was holding a Mexican flag.
“If you love Mexico so much, get your ass over there. I’ll buy you a plane ticket,” Vance said, as the crowd erupted in a “USA” chant.
Throughout the two-day convention, most Republican speakers skirted by the Trump administration’s most controversial moves, including the war with Iran, a failure to roll back high prices, and tariffs and mass deportation efforts that many voters say have gone too far.
Instead, they highlighted the ascendance of far-left progressives and democratic socialists, and ascribed some of their positions — including policies involving transgender people, calls to defund the police and efforts to disband US Immigration and Customs Enforcement — to the entire Democratic Party.
“Don’t give the country over to a bunch of crazy people because you happen to disagree with us on a policy issue here or there,” the vice president pleaded with those listening to his remarks. “I’m not asking anybody to agree on every single policy of the administration; what I am asking you to do is to recognize the contrast with the radicals and recognize the achievements of the last 18 months.”
The president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., highlighted the rise of democratic socialists who have won a handful of House primaries, mostly in deep-blue districts, as well as the Democratic Senate nomination in Florida.
“We should call it what it is: communism,” Trump Jr. said.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. drew on his family lineage as he argued Democrats have abandoned the values of his uncle, President John F. Kennedy, and his father, Robert Kennedy.
“I mourn the fact that neither my father nor my uncle would recognize the Democratic Party of today,” he said.
The most mentioned Democrat of the night Thursday was Abdul El-Sayed, the Michigan Senate nominee.
His prominence is no surprise: Democrats’ hopes of netting the four seats they need to take control of the Senate depend in part on El-Sayed retaining the seat of retiring Democratic Sen. Gary Peters. And as Republicans look to cast Democrats as too extreme, they’ve zeroed in on the progressive firebrand and strident Israel critic as their favorite example.
Repeatedly, Republicans linked El-Sayed to far-left Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, who has campaigned with El-Sayed, including appearing with him the day before Michigan’s Democratic primary.
Piker is a pro-Palestinian activist and one of the loudest critics of the Israeli government’s bombardment in Gaza following Hamas’ October 7, 2023, attacks. He once said the United States “deserved 9/11” – comments he later acknowledged as “inappropriate,” and said he was trying to make a more nuanced point about US foreign policy. El-Sayed has distanced himself from the streamer as his general election campaign has gotten underway.
The day before the 25th anniversary of the September 11, 2001, attacks, GOP speakers repeatedly invoked those remarks and linked El-Sayed to Piker.
“I never imagined that 25 years after 9/11, I would be running against somebody that campaigns with Hasan Piker, who thinks America deserved it,” said El-Sayed’s opponent, Republican former Rep. Mike Rogers.
“El-Sayed’s biggest booster, a man named Hasan Piker, he said, and I quote: ‘America deserved 9/11.’ Well, ladies and gentlemen, my mom has a saying: ‘You are who you hang with,’ and let me tell you, Hasan Piker is who Abdul El-Sayed hangs with,” said Michigan Rep. Lisa McClain.
Vance also dedicated several minutes of his remarks to an ongoing feud with El-Sayed.
The vice president had mused in a speech last month that he’d have difficulty going back in time and explaining the current Democratic Party to his late grandfather, who he called “Papaw.” Vance in the speech also falsely accused El-Sayed, a practicing Muslim, of wanting to impose Sharia law.
El-Sayed later responded to the speech on X, writing: “So do we think JD is taking Usha with him back in time to meet Papaw, or no?” in reference to Vance’s wife, who is Indian American and was raised in a Hindu household.
Vance on Thursday night detailed the back-and-forth and said that “that is what he thinks of my grandfather.”
“Abdul looks at him, sees the color of his skin, sees his background, and decides that he could never have loved my wife,” Vance said. “Abdul himself was raised by his own white step-grandparents. He knows exactly that kind of bond and what it looks like in a family, and he chose anyway to say that a man like my grandfather couldn’t have loved from the bottom of his heart someone who looks like Usha.”
El-Sayed previously addressed Vance’s response to his critique in an interview with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins.
“I believe in an America where any of us — me, his wife, any of us with different-colored skin or who pray different ways — can be just as American as JD and his papaw,” El-Sayed said. “But he’s not making that argument. He likes to dog-whistle about these things, but when you actually call him out on it, he acts like he would never bring anything like that into our political conversation, despite he and his boss doing that every single day.”
Trump on Thursday night re-upped the surprise pitch he included in Wednesday night’s speech — one that dominated news coverage of the convention: $5,000 for every American adult if Republicans retain their House and Senate majorities in November.
Perhaps more notable is that his vice president didn’t once mention the idea.
Nor did other Republican speakers throughout the convention’s second night — most of whom had likely prepared their remarks before Trump blindsided many of his administration’s own officials with his proposal.
Trump’s proposal ignited controversy for a number of reasons: Democrats decried it as a blatant attempt to buy votes. Economists warned it would cause inflation. Trump vacillated in interviews Thursday about whether or not the checks would need the approval of Congress. And no one knew how Trump would pay for the proposal. He said it would come from tariff revenue, but those revenues don’t come close to covering the $1 trillion bill for such checks.
“We can do that because our country has never done better. We are taking in trillions of dollars,” Trump said Thursday night, dramatically inflating tariff revenues.
Most of the two-day GOP convention was red meat — attacks on Democrats and pitches for Trump’s signature achievements, aimed at ginning up the party’s base for the sprint to November.
But New York Rep. Mike Lawler, one of three GOP House members who represents a district former Vice President Kamala Harris won in the 2024 election, had a much different target in mind: Independents and moderate Democrats.
Or, as Lawler put it, voters “who are deeply concerned about the rise of socialism and extremism on the left, but they aren’t exactly sold on Republicans either.”
He used his own public and private disagreements with Trump to make his case. He acknowledged that Trump had called him a “pain in the ass” and even did a convincing impersonation of Trump mocking him.
Lawler advocated for lifting the cap on the amount of state and local taxes residents could deduct on their federal income tax returns — an issue that matters to high-income states like New York. He threatened to oppose Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act if the measure was not included.
“The truth is that the president and I don’t always agree, and that’s OK. After all, we’re both New Yorkers. We argue. We tell each other what we think,” Lawler said. “There’s even some profanity.”
“What I learned about President Trump behind closed doors is that if you’re willing to make your case and fight for what you believe in, he’s willing to listen,” he said.
The speech stood out as a rare example of a Republican candidate even acknowledging any daylight between themselves and Trump at the convention. For the most part, speakers either lavished praise on the president or avoided mentioning him and attacked their own Democratic opponents in this year’s elections.
Thursday marked one year since a gunman shot and killed conservative activist Charlie Kirk during a Turning Point USA event on a college campus in Utah.
Trump paid tribute to Kirk’s widow, Erika Kirk, on Wednesday night. And several speakers acknowledged Kirk on Thursday.
“History will record that your father was a great man,” Vance said in a message aimed at Kirk’s children. He called Kirk a friend, and recalled him cheering Vance on when he last spoke at a Republican convention, after accepting the vice presidential nomination in 2024.
Trump Jr. said Kirk was a good friend, and said he “had already inspired hundreds of thousands of young people to take up the cause of liberty and to fight for it.”
Other speakers, including Kennedy and former White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, also remembered Kirk.
Leaders of the organization he co-founded vowed to continue with his mission.
“One year later there is something wonderfully defiant about the fact that his voice has not grown quieter — it has multiplied,” Lucas Miles, the vice president of Turning Point USA, said at the convention.
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