(July 17): Donald Trump’s pick of Senator JD Vance as his running mate on Monday hardens the Republican party’s shift towards trade protectionism, and positions a successor to entrench the viewpoint for years to come.

Trump’s selection of Vance, a rising populist star who is a vociferous critic of decades of bipartisan free trade deals, is a blow to a Republican establishment on Capitol Hill that remains dominated by free-trade supporters, and to retailers like Walmart that have thrived on selling cheap imports to US consumers.

The ticket diminishes chances that the US will shift back to the less restrictive approach to trade that dominated from Ronald Reagan through Barack Obama.

Trump already eschewed traditional trade agreements and in his previous term imposed tariffs on China that Democratic President Joe Biden has left in place.

Now, Trump is promising to escalate the trade war with 60% tariffs on goods from China and a 10% global tariff — the kind of policies not seen since the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 and the Great Depression.

Vance blames increased trade with China, Mexico and other low-wage countries for job losses that have devastated manufacturing communities in the industrial Rust Belt, including his home state of Ohio. In an interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity on Monday night, Vance pointed to trade policy as the crucial divide between Trump and Biden.

“Nafta (the North American Free Trade Agreement) destroyed the manufacturing economy in Pennsylvania and Michigan. A real estate developer from New York, Donald Trump, was actually right about that issue,” Vance said. “Letting China into the World Trade Organization, Joe Biden supported that. A real estate developer from Queens named Donald Trump opposed it.”

Politically, it’s a message aimed squarely at the “Blue Wall” states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin that Trump won in 2016 and lost in 2020, and which both parties see as the key to winning the White House in November.

Vance’s Ohio had long been an electoral battleground before Trump, who has put it out of reach with his populist appeal to the kind of White working-class communities Vance profiled in his “Hillbilly Elegy” memoir.

Vance “talks to that voter that has helped make Ohio red”, Alex Triantafilou, the chairman of the Ohio Republican Party, said.

Vance once was a “never Trumper” who criticised Trump as “noxious” and someone who is “leading the White working class to a very dark place”. But Vance has said he came to support Trump based on his policies in office, especially his stance against China on trade.

Vance talked during his 2022 Senate campaign about how trade deals crushed regions like his hometown of Middletown, Ohio, a former steel-making hub. And he’s been a leading foe of immigration, arguing the surge under Biden is depressing wages for workers.

In the Senate, Vance has backed trade restrictions on steel imports. He demanded Biden block the takeover of US Steel by Nippon Steel, and has talked up the benefits of a weaker dollar for exports.

“Vance is a standard bearer for the new, Trumpian version of the GOP, the one that threw away the country club, Chamber of Commerce, free trade, and foreign wars party embodied by the likes of Mitch McConnell and Nikki Haley to embrace economic protectionism, tariffs, vastly limited immigration, and a commitment to American workers over elite consumers,” wrote columnist Batya Ungar-Sargon at American Compass, a populist think tank.

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