The crowd at the American Airlines Center in Dallas started chanting "JD 48" on Wednesday night — the number of the next president — while Vice President JD Vance was supposed to be talking about midterm elections. His response: "We gotta take care of business this November and then we'll worry about what comes next."
Two years ago, every cable news panel in America was workshopping the word "weird" to describe this guy.
Vance delivered a roughly 40-minute keynote address on the final night of the Republican National Committee's first-ever midterm convention, a two-day event on September 9-10 that drew over 100 speakers to Dallas. The speech was nominally about November. It landed as something closer to a coronation. Ericka Kirk, the widow of Turning Point USA co-founder Charlie Kirk, made the subtext explicit when she told the convention crowd, "We are going to get my husband's friend JD Vance elected for 48 in the most resounding way possible."
Kirk got no pushback whatsoever.
The convention fell on the one-year anniversary of Charlie Kirk's assassination on September 10, 2025, and Vance leaned into the tribute — mentioning Kirk by name 13 times during the speech, compared to just six mentions of President Trump. Vance recalled Kirk's presence at the 2024 Republican National Convention and framed his legacy as a call to unity despite policy disagreements. "Do not throw the baby out with the bathwater," Vance told the crowd. "Don't give the country over to a bunch of crazy people because you happen to disagree with us on a policy issue."
The vice president used the balance of the speech to draw a line between the Republican Party and what he described as a Democratic Party that has abandoned the country. "The Democrats are the party of hatred," Vance said. "They're the party that despises America and the people who built it." He targeted specific Democratic candidates by name — Michigan Senate hopeful Abdul El-Sayed and Texas Senate candidate James Talarico, whom he mocked using President Trump's nickname "Talafreako." He framed November as a binary: "the party of common sense" versus "the party of the crazies."
Vance also touted the administration's record on prescription drug prices, citing a 3.1% year-over-year decline in July — the steepest drop since 1963. He hit immigration, housing costs, and crime, all while weaving in personal stories about his four children and what he called the "birthright" of American families.
The DNC dispatched rapid response director Kendall Witmer to push back, claiming "every stop on the White House's midterm campaign tour reminds Americans of how Republicans have made life harder." That's the best they had — a press release nobody read while 20,000 people were chanting a number.
It was clear to everyone who attended that the VP has become the heir apparent to President Trump for 2028. Other marquee speakers at the convention included Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Attorney General Todd Blanche, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz, Texas Governor Greg Abbott, and Senator Ted Cruz — and none of them generated the kind of spontaneous "48" chant that Vance drew without trying.
Vance closed with a rallying cry that sounded like it was aimed past November: "We got to send a message this November that the country does not belong to the radicals. It does not belong to the bureaucrats. It does not belong to the highest bidder."
Radicals. Bureaucrats. Highest bidder. Three enemies, one sentence, zero ambiguity about who's running in 2028.
The only people who didn't see this coming were the ones still workshopping "weird."
