I’m happy Trump chose JD Vance as his VP

Here’s why

“I don’t know that I can disrespect someone more than J.D. Vance,” Mitt Romney in 2022

I’m actually happy JD Vance is the Republican VP candidate. 

The other option was Doug Burgum, North Dakota Governor and businessman. Doug would have perpetuated the lie that today’s Republican party is the same as that of Mitt Romney - a solid hand on the economic levers and not a cult pushing us towards patriarchal biblical rule. 

A major component of the Republican’s platform is lying to you and doing it very, very well I don’t say that glibly. 

I had several friends watch the convention last night and text me to say WOW, THE REPUBLICANS SAY ALL THE THINGS PEOPLE WANT TO HEAR.

They do. And then they throw in their bananas bat shit zingers with disturbing undertones, but they are good at pretending that they just want to give everyone jobs and safety and security and more money in their pockets.

We hear the lies from their influencers, from their candidates and from their underlying messages. And one of the biggest lies Trump is perpetuating is that he’s not ‘one of them’ (them being, eg: Project 2025). He continues to posture himself as an outsider who doesn’t support a national abortion ban. 

There was a point during the convention when Nikki Haley got up on stage and said the Republican party should not only be a unified party, but also open their arms to all. Fox News made sure to find the few diverse faces in the crowd to get on camera. It’s an amazingly gaslighty message to hear.

But JD isn’t pretending to sing Cumbaya. 

He puts it all on the table. His views. His alliances. There will still be lies, lots of them surely. But at least now there’s no more pretending that the Trump ticket is anything other than what we’ve always known it was. JD lays bare the plan and the future he will usher in for this country. 

JD Vance is a power hungry shapeshifter who has transformed from a prototypical bootstraps republican to full on Christian Nationalism.  I read Hillbilly Elegy when it came out, and if you haven’t, the conclusion of that book is that the poor people he waxes eloquently about are frankly, just too lazy to get themselves out if it like he did. This is the foundation of his political power and his opinions have only gotten worse. 

JD’s political rise was funded by billionaire Peter Thiel who is a comic book villain come to life. This essay that Vance wrote about their meeting and his conversion to Catholicism is fascinating, if not nausea inducing in its self-obsessed prose. In 2015, two years after graduating from law school he started working for Thiel’s Silicon Valley company, moving back to Ohio merely one year later ina blatant political move. (This is one of the things I talk about a lot, which is that conservatives are willing to pay for people with potential to build political careers, to mold them. While it’s survival of the fittest on the D side.) 

Vance claimed he moved to Ohio to start “Our Ohio Renewal” an organization to help disadvantaged children. The organization barely existed and did nearly nothing. Its former employees say they were lured there under the premise of helping people, but realize it was just an organization to help Vance’s political career. “During its brief life, Mr. Vance’s organization paid a political consultant who also advised Mr. Vance about entering the 2018 Senate race. It paid an assistant who helped schedule Mr. Vance’s political speeches. And it paid for a survey of “Ohio citizens” that several of the staff members said they had never seen.”  NYT

Vance was a never-trumper. I think, like a lot of the conservative elite, he thought that aligning with Trump would not help his career and since then his calculus has changed. He won his 2022 Ohio Senate Primary with a mere 32%, probably a margin from Trump’s endorsement.  Vance wrote this on July 4, 2016: “What Trump offers is an easy escape from the pain. To every complex problem, he promises a simple solution. He can bring jobs back simply by punishing offshoring companies into submission….He will spare the United States from humiliation and military defeat with indiscriminate bombing…He never offers details for how these plans will work, because he can’t. Trump’s promises are the needle in America’s collective vein.” Atlantic None of that has changed, but JD has changed. 

Vance fancies himself an intellectual, but in the most annoying sense possible. He is friends with philosophers like political philosopher Patrick Deneen who has said “I don’t want to violently overthrow the government …I want something far more revolutionary than that.” 

Vance could be our first pathological nihilist sociopath in the White House. “He is thoroughly illiberal in his instincts,” a friend of Vance’s from Yale said. “I don’t mean it as a slur. I mean it in a technical sense. He is skeptical of the political project of enlightenment liberalism, like, We’re all just autonomous individuals trying to self-actualize and maximize our own interests.”  

Uckkk, I’m having flashbacks to men saying things like this to me at parties in college and being sicker than after chugging jungle juice.

JD has said point blank exactly what we have all known to be true - the next Trump presidency will turn American upside down. He said on a podcast: “We are in a late republican period…If we’re going to push back against it, we’re going to have to get pretty wild, and pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.”

Here are some of his policy positions: 

• In 2021, when he was asked whether abortion laws should include exceptions for rape and incest he answered that “two wrongs don’t make a right.” In 2022 he said he thinks there should be “reasonable” exceptions. (this undoubtedly means death of the mother, as we’ve seen from the EMTALA case, sure death is the only ‘reasonable’ exception for the right.)

• Vance told anti-choice influencer Allie Beth Stuckey that abortion should be regulated from the moment of conception, which is shorthand for banning IVF and birth control. He says the exception he supports is for the life of the mother. (You should listen to this sound clip - where he talks about how we are an “anti baby culture").

• JD opposes gun regulations and wants to abolish the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which enforces federal gun laws.

• JD has pledged to finish  building the border wall and deport undocumented immigrants.

• JD has said that is  he had been in Mike Pence’s shoes in 2021, he would not have certified the results of the 2020 election

Vance is not about smoke and mirrors. He is about fully aligning with the malicious forces that want to reshape our country into the Handmaid’s Tale. Trump and Haley and DeSantis will all say what they need to say to capture as many votes from the people they will ultimately harm as possible, but JD has shown and will continue to show himself to be the nihilist that he is. He will burn down our liberal Democracy and I am grateful he is the VP because at least the curtain has been pulled back and the wizard is now naked as a newborn baby.