More in the Mean-Spirited Transition in the Name of God (Part 2)

   

More in the Mean-Spirited Transition in the Name of God

Part 2 – Senator J.D. Vance (MAGA R, Ohio, Trump’s VP Choice)

“I’m a ‘Never Trump’ guy… I never liked him.”

“My god what an idiot.”

“Mr. Trump is unfit for our nation’s highest office.”

“I can’t stomach Trump… I think that he’s noxious and is leading the white working class to a very dark place.”

“Trump makes people I care about afraid. Immigrants, Muslims, etc. Because of this I find him reprehensible. God wants better of us.”

“I think there’s a chance, if I feel like Trump has a really good chance of winning, that I might have to hold my nose and vote for Hillary Clinton.”

"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 ... Trump is cultural heroin. He makes some feel better for a bit. But he cannot fix what ails them, and one day they’ll realize it."

"I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical a------ like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler."

AND NOW THIS: “Like a lot of people, I criticized Trump back in 2016… And I ask folks not to judge me based on what I said in 2016, because I’ve been very open that I did say those critical things and I regret them, and I regret being wrong about the guy.”

“We’re effectively run in this country, via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too… It’s just a basic fact: You look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC, the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children. And how does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people that don’t have a direct stake in it.”

You know, JD, you were right the first time. In 2022, you saw the wisdom of abandoning your values, when you sought a U.S. Senate seat as a Trump-worshiping xenophobe. You clearly defined yourself: ambition justifies anything. Today, you admire Trump’s record in office, support his dramatic misogyny and white supremacist subtext, even though he has pretty much doubled down in his current run for a second term as president. You can’t really embrace his racist message – particularly since your wife, Usha, a fellow Yale Law grad whose parents are Indian immigrants – is a woman of color. And despite getting the blessing for your marriage from a Hindu holy man, you and your wife now conveniently attend an evangelical church these days.

If Trump thought you would expand the ticket, a common man who wrote Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, based on your childhood and later summer visits to Eastern Kentucky (from Ohio) years, that may have been based on a Trump vs Biden assumption. It’s now very old and physically very large forgetful Trump against Kamala “childless cat lady” (JD’s words) Harris. As Democratic Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear notes: “He ain’t from here.”

“Vance acknowledges that his actual hometown – before he moved to California and became a high-flying venture capitalist – was Middletown, Ohio, a historic industrial city with a population of more than 50,000. But he plays the Kentucky card hard when telling his story, and that doesn’t sit well with Beshear… Beshear makes that argument for all the usual reasons that serious observers do when discussing Vance’s wildly cynical journey from Trump critic to Trump running mate… ‘Listen, J.D. Vance is a phony,’ says Beshear. ‘He’s fake.’… Recalling Vance’s 2016 fretting about the prospect that Trump might become “America’s Hitler,” Beshear said on CNN Monday [7/22], “I mean, he first says that Donald Trump is like Hitler, and now he’s acting like he’s Lincoln.’” The Nation, July 24th.

Los Angeles Times writer, Lorrain Berry, lays on the truth in her July 17th contribution: “Vance portrayed this group — 35% of Americans, by the way — as tragic victims of alcoholism, drug abuse, laziness and their own self-destructive moral failings. Journalists ran with that, bringing their own stereotypes to depict the working class as angry, uneducated white men driven by economic insecurity and racist nostalgia to support Trump’s retrogressive campaign… This distortion, in turn, widened a real divide by alienating many Americans, fueling support for Trump and even veneration of Vance.” Beshear excoriated Vance for denigrating the heartland, Kentucky coal miners whose efforts fueled the industrial revolution and America’s rise to economic greatness.

Writing for the same issue of the LA Times, under the heading Senator, you’re no hillbilly: Where J.D. Vance falls short, Gustavo Arellano adds: “He was a Yale Law graduate and venture capitalist, while I’m a community college kid who chose a dying profession. He was far removed from his roots, while I experience mine nearly every other weekend at family parties. More important, Vance cast himself as an extraordinary exception to others from Appalachia, describing ’billies as encased in a toxic amber that kept them from improving their lot and left them embittered with a country that has moved on without them.”

In the end, JD Vance’s nomination as Trump’s VP did not add anything other than a virulent anti-abortionist as well as an anti-immigration bigot (his wife’s OK, since she’s educated and got a Yale Law degree like JD), which must have made Mar-a-Lago-Trump’s base very happy… but it did not seem to address those voters Trump still needed to maximize his probability of victory. Adding his belief that voters with children should have more say, no fault divorce needs to go, and woman crossing state lines to get an abortion should be prosecuted won’t get him a lot of new women voters. More of the same did not add incremental qualities that might have swayed some independents. Indeed, Trump’s and Vance’s resort to name calling and personal attacks evidenced a lack of well-thought-out campaign that just might address the new Democratic candidate, who was out raising record levels of political contributions. We’re still months away from the actual election, but the momentum and the excitement coefficient went quickly to Harris. Disgruntled younger voters and minorities of color also rallied back to the Democratic Party. Go, childless cat ladies, go!

I’m Peter Dekom, and given the closeness of this presidential race, JD Vance just might have been a very bad Trump miscalculation.