Don’t Make Me Look At J.D. Vance For 4 Years
I only have so much time left
Donald Trump, MAGA’s living martyr, has selected J.D. Vance as his next disposable running mate. That position was open because Trump’s previous vice president, Mike Pence, displeased him when he refused to help him commit crimes for which he’s currently indicted. If someone was let go from a job because they weren’t willing to perform a certain task, it’s safe to assume that their replacement won’t have a problem with that task. “Enthusiastic coup plotter” was likely the headline of Vance’s VP application. This is why former Republican Rep. Liz Cheney declared Vance unfit to serve:
JD Vance has pledged he would do what Mike Pence wouldn’t — overturn an election and illegally seize power. He says the president can ignore the rulings of our courts. He would capitulate to Russia and sacrifice the freedom of our allies in Ukraine. The Trump GOP is no longer the party of Lincoln, Reagan or the Constitution.
Vance is a born-again MAGA charlatan, but even if he were your normal terrible Republican (a vanishing breed), he is completely unqualified for this role — well, aside from being 35 and a U.S. native. The founders didn’t put much thought into specific qualifications because they were fairly certain women and minorities wouldn’t enter politics. White men just needed to master the secret handshakes, so they only bothered with qualifications that are overtly ageist and nativist.
However, women and minorities are actively involved in politics now, so some basic standards have emerged over the years. Vance meets few if any of them. He’s a year and a half into his first Senate term, and his political experience is roughly equal to anyone who’s watched the entire series Veep. He wrote a book that I won’t mention that was adapted into a movie whose poor critical response apparently completed Vance’s turn to the Dark Side:
When the “Hillbilly Elegy” movie came out on Netflix in 2020, it was not just critically panned but greeted with intense online mockery, and the tenuous cultural diplomacy achieved by the book seemed to unravel for good. (Rotten Tomatoes audience score: 83 percent. Critics’ score: 25 percent.) According to Vance’s best friend from Yale, Jamil Jivani, the wounding commentary was the “last straw” in his falling-out with elites.
Vance has no relevant foreign policy experience, either, unlike Nikki Haley, Tim Scott, or Marco Rubio, but he probably doesn’t need any when he’s arranging for Vladimir Putin to pick up Ukraine on Facebook Buy Nothing. However, a major U.S. ally is at war in the Middle East and that might require more complex diplomacy than choosing which beard trimmer to use that day.
It’s a good thing that Vance hasn’t murdered defenseless animals like South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, but he also lacks any true executive experience dealing with the border or natural disasters, aside from what’s on his face. You can’t respond to a hurricane or tornado with “just grow a beard over it and hope no one notices!”
Vance’s legislative achievements are obviously minimal, if not non-existent, considering he hasn’t served in the Senate long enough to update the office wi-fi from “Sharp-Dressed Portman.”
He’s not a celebrity or local football hero. If Herschel Walker had won his Senate race in Georgia — an actual swing state now compared to Ohio — he’d have offered more to the ticket than Vance, whose credentials suffer in comparison to the random idiot on a Fox News panel. (Yes, I was secretly rooting for Rachel Campos-Duffy. Gen Xers are due.)
Picking Vance instead of, well, almost anyone else who’s far-right and can stand upright seems like such a stupid idea it’s obvious that Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump were involved. NBC News reports that Trump was leaning toward another bland Pence choice — Governor Doug Burgum from the Dakota where they don’t execute puppies, but like any true populist man of the people, Vance’s biggest advocates are a pair of nepo brats who still work for their father.
“Don Jr. and Eric went bats--- crazy: ‘Why would you do something so stupid? He offers us nothing,’” a longtime Republican operative familiar with the discussion told NBC News.
“They were basically all like ‘JD, JD, JD,’” the operative said.
Those two fools are the only ones on Earth who’d passionately shout Vance’s name. (Yes, I know he’s married.) I can just picture the three working together in another Trump administration.
Sarah Palin without the charm or talent
There’s a lot to loathe about J.D. Vance. He’s attacked the so-called “ childless Left” and called half the country “scumbags.” After Donald Trump was shot, Vance immediately blamed the Biden campaign rather than urging calm and suggesting everyone wait until we actually knew the shooters’ motives. Liberals love to point out that Vance publicly criticized Trump until he decided he wanted to run for Senate, but his callow opportunism is both obvious and not that compelling. People change, often for the worse. However, like Elise Stefanik, it’s more likely that Vance hasn’t changed. He’s always wanted fame and power and will say and do whatever it takes to achieve it. Vance strikes me as the type of person who if you ask him, “What does it profit a man to gain the world but lose his soul?” he’d stare at you blankly and say, “Duh? THE WORLD!”
Vance is a genuinely dangerous man. He will actively harm women and queer people in the pursuit of power. There’s even reason to believe that he seeks power specifically to hurt everyone who’s different than he is. His impoverished background has not made him more empathetic but instead perversely cynical — he resents the “elites” but also wants to be part of them.
However, engaging Vance on his odious policy positions risks overlooking an objective fact: He is fundamentally unqualified to serve as the break-glass emergency to a 78-year-old running mate who was shot at less than a week ago. If you mocked Sarah Palin, you are duty bound to hit Vance on the same score.
Of course, Palin was more qualified than Vance in almost every way. She served on the Wasilla, Alaska, city council before becoming the town’s mayor in 1996. She was later appointed chair of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission and was elected governor in 2006. People act as if the late John McCain picked Palin’s name out of a hat, but on paper, she was a solid candidate. It’s just when she opened her mouth that she had troubles.
Dan Quayle was also an easy punchline during the 1988 presidential campaign, but he was elected to the House of Representatives in 1976 and the Senate in 1980. He defeated Democratic incumbent Sen. Birch Bayh and won re-election in a landslide (and Indiana was still somewhat competitive at the time). Vance more or less inherited a safe Republican seat but still managed to underperform every other Republican who ran that year.
Nikki Haley had wanted to make this election a proxy race between herself and Vice President Kamala Harris. “A President Kamala Harris should scare of all us,” she claimed. Of course, Harris is immensely qualified for the presidency. She’s the sitting vice president, which in practice is worth a participation trophy, but Harris served in the Senate for four years and was California’s attorney general while Vance was working as a venture capitalist in San Francisco. (Unfortunately, that was not technically a crime she could have prosecuted.)
The GOP is so openly a white male identity party that Trump doesn’t bother using Haley, Rubio, or Scott as a shield against the party’s bigotry. He doesn’t even bother picking a remotely qualified white guy. J.D. Vance is America’s legacy admission, boss’s nephew hire, and that’s the kind of “DEI” Republicans can support.
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"According to Vance’s best friend from Yale, Jamil Jivani, the wounding commentary was the “last straw” in his falling-out with elites."
I say everything more than once, and I've said the following before-
when Trump et al first darkened US politics, there was a lot of commentary about how petty a lot of the right wing's grievance-industrial complex stars were, and how their supervillain origin stories were all bafflingly small- Tucker not getting into the CIA, Kirk not getting into West Point, Shapiro not getting to be a big screenwriter in Hollywoo, Trump getting mocked by Obama- but after a while I realised this is consistent with being a supervillain.
Normal people get over those kinds of setbacks, they learn from them and they either improve so they can try again or give up and do something else. ONLY a supervillain would get this hung up on life's predictable set-backs. Only someone with the predisposition to become a supervillain could fixate so much on something to actually become one.
Vance is that, the evil Captain Pugwash. A simpering cheerleader for oligarchy and a prig whose vanity is very easily and very deeply wounded.
The film of your book was toss.
If you really can't accept that, then at least have the psychological wherewithal to blame it on the director.
‘People made fun of the movie Netflix made from my book’ seems to me about as pathetic a reason to join with a criminal mob out to turn the US all of the rest of the way to a broken racist kleptocracy as ‘they made fun of my bullshit role on a crap reality TV show at the press dinner’ was to do so.