It was never clear what political assets J.D. Vance was supposed to bring to the Trump campaign, but whatever they were, no one has yet seen them. Even so, Vance could have turned out to be merely a bad choice (along the lines of a Dan Quayle or a Sarah Palin) and thus a missed political opportunity, a laughingstock but little more.
It is turning out to be much worse than that, however, because Vance has become a nonstop source of negative news cycles for Republicans. He is by far the most unpopular candidate on a national ticket, and he makes matters worse every day. As of this writing, it is even tempting to say that Vance is debasing the country’s political conversation more than Donald Trump does. And that, obviously, is saying a lot.
Those of us who hope that Trump will never again be President might well be cheered as we watch this train wreck—including Trump’s eagerness to disparage Vance by saying that running mates do not matter and that he never talked to Vance about a national abortion ban—but schadenfreude is too easy. The fact is that Vance’s candidacy offers with chilling clarity a view into what today’s Republican Party is willing to support.
Last week, my two–part Verdict column discussed how Trump, his fellow Republicans, and too many journalists and commentators do not know what it means to engage in a policy discussion. They apparently believe that invoking magic words like “the economy” or “border security” without offering or defending actual policies somehow counts as a policy discussion, which is fatuous. Earlier this week, I then published another two–part column noting that these people seem not even to understand what an argument is, or at least how to tell the difference between a defensible argument and a specious assertion.
I mentioned some of Vance’s bad acts in those recent columns, but they nonetheless paint an incomplete picture of the toxicity of his brand of politics. Even at this relatively early stage in Vance’s existence as a national figure, then, it is worth taking stock of some of the more important ways that Vance has further degraded what was already an ugly political culture in the United States.
When Is Enough Enough? A Political Stunt in Ohio Gets Wildly Out of Hand
We can start with the cruelty. In 2018, The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer made waves with a piece titled “The Cruelty is the Point,” the central thesis of which was nicely summed up by the article’s subtitle: “President Trump and his supporters find community by rejoicing in the suffering of those they hate and fear.” In 2021, Serwer published a book-length version of that argument in what became a bestseller.
Even by comparison to Trump and other Republicans, there is something uniquely bloodthirsty about Vance’s cruelty. As I discussed earlier this week, Vance has been the central figure in creating and worsening the horrible situation that the people in Springfield, Ohio, continue to face. Yet even though there cannot possibly be further advantage in pushing forward with this disastrous lie, the suffering that Vance created apparently leaves him unmoved.
There was understandable outrage when Vance glibly confessed in a CNN interview that he was making things up, but the deeper problem was even worse than that. I noted in my column that Vance’s justification for doing what he did was either nonsense or completely dishonest. Recall that he said this: “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.” Yet he has not in fact used his stories to bring attention to any of the suffering that the media supposedly was ignoring. He has only created suffering where there had been none.
But it gets worse, because Vance did not in fact create any stories in the first place. He took stories—that is, lies—that neo-Nazis had created, and he decided to make those lies his own. I am not using “neo-Nazi” figuratively here. There had been aggressive activity by self-identified neo-Nazi groups that targeted the Haitian immigrants in Springfield who were working hard at making new lives in the United States, and Vance knew both that the stories were false and who had invented the racist lies.
If Vance were to claim that he created those stories by using his celebrity to bring the lies to a larger audience, then I suppose we could redefine “create stories” to mean “bring attention to lies.” But the point is that even on its own terms, Vance knew what he was doing and decided that the ends justify the means.
Except that, as in Serwer’s insightful analysis, Vance’s ends and means are the same thing. That is, Vance is telling racist lies about legal immigrants not to serve some larger purpose but simply to tell racist lies that vilify those legal immigrants. Moreover, it does not appear to matter to Vance that his lies are also harming non-immigrants, including the children that he claims to want to defend.
At some point, one might hope that Vance would decide that he has done more than enough to victimize innocent people and move on to his next vile stratagem. To date, however, he seems not to have satisfied his thirst for harming vulnerable people.
Being on the Side of Violent Bullies as a Political Brand
Indeed, harming vulnerable people seems to be a feature of Vance’s politics. I have always believed that being a “real man” obviously included as a central virtue using whatever power a person has to help those who are being bullied and victimized, but Vance stands instead among a group of men (and some women) who by all evidence thrill to being the bully rather than defending people against bullies.
Back in July, I wrote a column in response to Vance’s first major controversy after he became Trump’s running mate, when his now-infamous “childless cat ladies” comments made the news. Perhaps I should not have been surprised that Vance pressed forward rather than walking back those comments, but that is certainly a Trumpian tactic.
The “cat ladies” comments and other outrageous statements from Vance that came out later in the summer showed a disturbing pattern, because his arguments were unmistakably “eugenics friendly,” to put it mildly. Writing last month in The New Yorker, Margaret Talbot accurately tagged Vance as a “pronatalist” and made this key point:
Pronatalism typically combines concerns about falling birth rates with anti-immigration and anti-feminist ideas. It champions not just having children but having many—large families for the sake of large families, reproduction for reproduction’s sake. Except that, in this world view, not all reproduction is equal. Pronatalism favors native-born baby makers.
It’s an old idea, with roots in early-twentieth-century eugenics and anxieties about national fitness, and, in this country, the spectre of native-born white populations being swamped by waves of immigrants. Now the idea has been newly branded, with inspiration from the right-wing great replacement theory.
Vance, after all, is not worried about falling population per se, because if he were, he would be leading the charge to increase immigration rates into the country. Instead, Vance is following Trump, who just two days ago said at a rally that immigrants are “changing the character of small towns and villages all over our country and changing them forever. They will never be the same. They will never be. Do you think Springfield will ever be the same? … I’ll say it now: You have to get ’em the hell out. You have to get them out. I’m sorry.” He does not seem sorry.
Vance’s “women should have more babies” imperative, then, is not about bringing in people who will revitalize America. It is about keeping “those people” out and making more American (read White Christian) babies.
And no, I do not think that Springfield will ever be the same, but as I noted above, the damage there is the handiwork of Vance and Trump, not of the immigrants who once thought they were lucky to have been invited to make America their home.
But this is all part of the pro-bully bias on Vance’s part, because it turns out that his “get the ladies to have more babies” idea comfortably coexists in his mind with his claim that women should not be allowed to get divorced, even women whose husbands are abusing and terrorizing them. Vance once said this:
This is one of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace. Which is this idea that like, well, OK, these marriages were fundamentally—you know, they were maybe even violent, but certainly they were unhappy. And so getting rid of them, and making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear, that’s going to make people happier in the long term.
Vance apparently now claims that those remarks were taken out of context to mean that the “maybe even violent” part was a statement that women should be prevented from leaving abusive husbands. I see no reason to give him the benefit of the doubt, but even if we were to do so, he still dismissed the extremely difficult emotional journey of divorce by saying that people are taking it too lightly. Even when no physical violence is involved, trying to force the weaker party in a miserable marriage to stay in that marriage is to use the power of the state to stand with the stronger party. That is, it is to stand with the bully while his victim suffers.
Naturally, Vance claims that this is for the good of the children, but that only means that he has no idea how damaging it is to children to grow up in homes where the parents are miserable—especially when the misery weighs most heavily on the powerless parent.
Trump, in his typical all-assertion-with-no-logic fashion, said this two days ago, apparently addressing all of the women in the United States:
I am your protector. I want to be your protector. As president, I have to be your protector. … You will no longer be abandoned, lonely or scared…You will no longer be in danger. You will no longer have anxiety from all of the problems our country has today. You will be protected, and I will be your protector. … Women will be happy, healthy, confident and free.
This is beyond creepy, but the point here is that while Trump is claiming to be able to make women happy, Vance clearly sees them as breeding stock whose needs and opinions do not matter. If Trump is ever in the White House again, however, there is every reason to think that it is Vance’s vision will prevail, both because Trump would have no idea how to make women feel protected and confident and because the Republican Party’s track record on women’s rights has gone from bad to worse.
Platitudes About Abortion and the Reality of “States’ Rights”
All of which brings us to the overwhelming importance of abortion and reproductive rights. Notably, Trump’s quote immediately above led to this punchline: “You will no longer be thinking about abortion.” And that, of course, is his real goal. Knowing that abortion rights are extremely popular but that he dares not anger the religious right by supporting abortion, Trump tried to tell women not to worry their pretty little heads, because he will make them so happy that they will not care that they have no bodily autonomy.
All of that is consistent with the cruelty theme that I have been exploring in this column, of course, because the abortion bans in the post-Roe world have involved preventing women and even young girls from getting abortions even after being the victims of rape and incest. Moreover, women who wanted to become pregnant but who have had medical complications and are dying or are being pushed to the brink of death (sometimes making it impossible to become pregnant ever again) are being brutalized by a political party driven by men like Vance who see women’s suffering as perhaps unfortunate—or perhaps not—but not to be taken seriously in any event.
And even the non-cruel part of the abortion story looks especially bad, in particular for Vance. Trump has repeatedly lied by claiming that everyone—legal scholars both on the left and right—wanted Roe overturned and the question of abortion turned over to the states. That was of course untethered from reality, but Vance managed to say something even more inane.
As I noted in my column two days ago, Vance came up with one of the most out-there claims of the entire campaign when he asserted that the Haitian immigrants in Ohio are not in the U.S. legally, even though they have legal status. He said: “[I]f Kamala Harris waves the wand illegally, and says these people are now here legally, I’m still going to call them an illegal alien. An illegal action from Kamala Harris does not make an alien legal.”
As I noted in that column, the Biden administration’s actions (not Harris’s actions) were legal, because the law says so. When Vance said that “[a]n illegal action from Kamala Harris does not make an alien legal,” then, he was simply asserting that legal actions were illegal because he did not like the results, not because they are in fact illegal.
I bring up that example here in part because that jaw-dropping claim from Vance deserves to be remembered and ridiculed, ready to be recalled whenever anyone says that Vance must be smart because has a law degree from a top school. But whatever else he might have learned in his life, he certainly has disqualified himself from discussing legal issues.
The other reason to recall that example of Vance’s illogic is because his comments on states’ rights and abortion are almost as vacuous. He recently said this:
If California wants to have a different abortion policy from Ohio, then Ohio has to respect California, and California has to respect Ohio. Donald Trump’s view is that we want the individual states and their individual cultures and their unique political sensibilities to make these decisions, because we don’t want to have a nonstop federal conflict over this issue.
No doubt Vance thinks that he scored a big rhetorical point there, but in fact he (apparently accidentally) exposed the key logical flaw in the states’ rights position. Vance believes that “nonstop federal conflict” would be bad, so he holds out the fairytale promise that there will be no conflict if the states apply “their individual cultures and their unique political sensibilities” to come to a happy consensus.
Like Vance, I grew up in Ohio. He grew up in a small rural town in the southwestern part of the state, and I spent my very happy childhood in a suburb of the industrial city of Toledo, in Northwest Ohio. Cleveland, Columbus, and Cincinnati are all vibrant urban centers that have the feel of other urban centers around the country. I happen to have young relatives who grew up in Springfield (and who have grown up and moved away, sparing them from the consequences of Vance’s cruelty), and I have seen that that small city is very much unlike the bigger cities but similar to many smaller cities and towns around the state.
The point is that there is no single “individual culture” in Ohio or any other state, including California. If Vance thinks it is a good idea to move the abortion decision to the states because he believes in respecting the wishes of people in smaller geographical areas, why would he not want that decision to be made at the regional level? Florida, for example, could have different abortion policies in the panhandle, on the Gulf coast, in Miami-Dade, in Orlando, and so on. Or in Texas, why should people in Austin or Dallas see their “unique political sensibilities” trampled by the very different sensibilities of the people in that state’s rural areas?
Indeed, why should we assume that even smaller cities like Kansas City, Missoula, or Grand Rapids have monolithic “individual cultures”? Do you know who has an individual culture? An individual. When it comes to taking away free people’s control over their bodies, it seems especially odd to stop at the state level to determine who gets to take away other people’s rights.
The law is full of slippery-slope arguments that do not work, but this is a leading example of one that is exactly right. There is no reason to empower any political subdivision, no matter how small, to take away people’s individual and very personal rights to control their reproductive lives.
Once again, therefore, Vance has exposed himself as being either a fool or liar. He cannot seriously carry forward the claim that state-level legislating makes sense on a fundamental question like this, so he merely smiles and spouts nonsense about “culture” and “sensibilities.” That does not even rise to the level of sophistry, because it is nothing more than a half-baked excuse to do to women what Vance wants to see done to them.
It once seemed unimaginable that someone could make even more nonsensical arguments than Donald Trump does, or that anyone would embrace cruelty as enthusiastically as Trump. J.D. Vance has shown himself to be more than up to the job, however, and because he is too dim or detached from reality to understand just how repellent his views are, he does not even bother to hide his affinity for racism, sexism, and seemingly every other type of bigotry.
The people—all of the people—in Springfield and everywhere else in the United States need this to stop. Vance and Trump will not stop themselves. Will enough voters do it for them?
