Letter from Milwaukee, Day Two

It's the Trump-Vance party.

Jul 16, 2024

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

And, yet here we are.

The MegaMAGA ticket of Trump-Vance gives us a perfect snapshot of what the GOP has become and where it is going. “The old GOP is dead and buried without doubt now,” posted Damon Linker. “It's Viktor Orban as far as the eye can see.”

Happy Tuesday.

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Dogs first.

Our house is about 20 miles north of Downtown Milwaukee, so during the convention we can hear the military jets flying overhead to protect the airspace. While I fully appreciate their efforts, Eli is not a fan. He thinks the jets are thunder, so he makes frequent dashes to hide in the laundry room, where he has learned that if he scratches, I will turn on the dryer for him. He finds that soothing.

I wish it was as easy for the rest of us.

And yes, Auggie, I would also like a drink.

Trump-Vance

“These are my principles. If you don’t like them… I have others.” — Groucho Marx

Trump’s choice of J.D. Vance to be his running mate was not a safe pick. But it was a clarifying choice for a man who is now supremely confident that he will return to power. It is also a reminder to take Trump’s agenda even more seriously and literally than before.

Via Politico, nota bene: “The Trump-Vance Ticket is a Repudiation of Free-Market Conservatism.

But the clearest message of all? “The balance of power within the GOP has shifted. This is now an isolationist party. And if Republicans win this year’s presidential election, the first victim of this retreat from the world will be Ukraine,” writes Will Saletan.

But let’s talk about Vance, the best-selling author turned flagitious toady.

Even in our debased political culture, Vance distinguished himself by his willingness to jettison both decency and principle in the pursuit of the goal he achieved last night.

In that respect, it is not hard to see J.D. as the perfect avatar for the transformation and moral collapse of the GOP.

Vance has compared Donald Trump to Hitler and agreed that he was a serial sexual predator. But now, he’s okay with that — along with the rest of the ecstatic, delirious, cultish GOP we saw last night.

Naked opportunism is a helluva drug.

Long before Vance was even a gleam in Trump’s eye, my friend Tom Nichols was singling him out as one of America’s premier assholes. Three years ago, Nichols described The Moral Collapse of J. D. Vance in The Atlantic.

Nichols noted that Preet Bharara, the former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, described Vance as a “pathetic loser poser fake jerk.” But, wrote Nichols, “that is a lot of words. To distill the essence of Vance as a public figure, the word that enters my mind is an anatomical reference beginning with the letter a.”

Instead of a truth-teller in his own community, Vance as a candidate has become a contemptible and cringe-inducing clown.
His attempts at authenticity are so grating because they are so blatantly artificial. His recent tweets, for example, attempting to ingratiate himself with rural Ohioans by slagging New York City were embarrassingly amateurish; we can only wonder which social-media consultant thought them up. “Serious question,” Vance tweeted. “I have to go to New York soon and I’m trying to figure out where to stay. I have heard it’s disgusting and violent there. But is it like Walking Dead Season 1 or Season 4?”

Unfortunately, this was just the beginning of Vance’s mutation into a Trumpian mini-me. As Mona Charen recounted in The Bulwark: “Vance became not a voice for the voiceless but an echo of the loudmouth. Scroll through his Twitter feed and you will find retweets of Tucker Carlson, alarmist alerts about immigration, links to Vance’s appearances on the podcasts of Seb Gorka, Dinesh D’Souza, and the like, and even retweets of Mike Cernovich.”

He praised the loathsome conspiracist, Alex Jones.

Over time, he became an outspoken defender of January 6 rioters, freely peddling disinformation.

Vance has also become a useful shill for the world’s most vicious thugs, parroting Valdimir Putin’s talking points, and praising Hungary’s fascist-adjacent strongman, Viktor Orban. He is a bitter and adamant opponent of aid to Ukraine.

And of course, he has become a shameless sycophant for Trump himself. He showed up at the New York City courthouse during Trump’s criminal trial, and dutifully mimics his rhetoric.

But the key selling point for his VP ambition was his willingness to embrace the Big Lie about the 2020 election — and to trigger a constitutional crisis to keep Trump in power.

“If I had been vice president, I would have told the states, like Pennsylvania, Georgia and so many others, that we needed to have multiple slates of electors, and I think the U.S. Congress should have fought over it from there,” Vance said in a February interview with ABC News. “That is the legitimate way to deal with an election that a lot of folks, including me, think had a lot of problems in 2020.”

He repeated his “plan” to the NYT’s Ross Douthat, which led Andrew Egger to observe, “This might be the most impressive piece of election bullshitting I have ever seen.”

It’s a tour de force that does three things at once: It endorses the most aggressively abusive strategy for stealing the election Trump contemplated in 2020, it absolves Trump of the strategies that didn’t work, and it works in some sneering at libs who think that wielding naked political power to steal an election might qualify as a step toward dictatorship.

And, right up until the end, Vance demonstrated his willingness to engage in reckless demagoguery on Trump’s behalf. On Saturday, he directly (and baselessly) blamed Democrats for the failed assassination attempt. On Monday, he got his reward.