The “Truth” about JD Vance
Before the Vice Presidential debate last night, I tested a hypothesis.
Hypothesis: Like Trump, JD is a sociopath.
Unlike Trump, JD is not a narcissist.
It’s a lot harder to work that to your advantage in a debate.
By that I meant that JD lies as much as Trump does, but because his ego is not as fragile as Trump’s, he would bulldoze through the same lies Trump wanted to tell without getting distracted by his own ego.
That prediction held up. JD smoothly lied over and over again. This is a man who — by description — came naturally to pitching the Iraq invasion. Occasionally (such as when Walz noted that Trump built just 2% of his wall and Mexico didn’t pay for it), Vance seemed to visibly wince about how bad the product he’s selling is. But otherwise he smoothly pitched policies that only work when they come packaged in fear-mongering and hatred. He smoothly claimed that censorship by private companies was a bigger threat to democracy than Donald Trump siccing a mob on Mike Pence.
Earlier in the day before the Vice Presidential debate, I suggested one should read Amanda Marcotte and John Ganz’ columns of the day in tandem. The columns provide a useful background to the debate.
Marcotte observed that JD Vance routinely whines about press coverage not just because he’s thin-skinned, but because that whining is viewed as strength.
In the dull world of the extremely online right, where “cat lady” is forever the sickest of burns, it is also common to mistake throwing a tantrum for strength. “Free speech” is defined as “we speak, you listen — and faint in adoration.” Live in that space long enough and you start to think that yelling at a reporter for asking a question isn’t embarrassing behavior. No, in the online MAGA world, sputtering “How dare you!” at a journalist for doing their job is regarded as a feat of strength on par with storming the beach at Normandy. It’s tempting to see Vance whining yet again and assume that he’s sorely in need of therapy. That may be so, but it’s also true that his online space is a culture where whimpering like a spoiled child is mistaken for toughness, and he’s forgotten that most people are rightfully grossed out by it.
But in a piece explaining why there’s such a real risk Trump will still win, John Ganz raised another reason why, I think, JD whines so much about the media. Ganz noted that consensus media has collapsed in America — and Donald Trump has stepped into that void, cultivating rabid support from the fragmented world of disaffected conspiracy theorists left behind.
We are accustomed still to thinking of the country at its post-War self, dominated by mass media, mass politics, the mass movement, the struggle for political and cultural hegemony, that is to say, the struggle over the definition of common sense and what is “normal.” Prime Time. Must See TV. The water cooler. That’s all gone now. We should think of the United States today as being more like the country Gilbert Seldes portrays in his classic on 1800s America, The Stammering Century, where he documents not unified nation, but a patchwork of small movements lead by “fanatics, and radicals and mountebanks,” a country of “diet-faddists and the dealers in mail-order Personality; the play censors and the Fundamentalists; the free-lovers and eugenists; the cranks and possibly the saints…Sects, cults, manias, movements, fads, religious excitements…” Trump knows how to reach those people. Democrats today, much less so. Maybe they shouldn’t even try. I certainly think pandering to that tendency in American culture isn’t good. But maybe that’s not a tendency in American culture at all, it just is American culture.
Trump and Vance thrive on the fragmentation of America created by the collapse of the media. And so they treat the media as a performance of power.
Vance attacked experts and the media over and over in yesterday’s debate, appealing instead to “common sense.” He appealed to and encouraged distrust in government. His attack on what he falsely termed “censorship” was a defense of the crackpots Trump mobilized to attack the Capitol on January 6 (and he made two implicit defenses of Russian disinformation along the way).
The second most notable moment in the debate came when Vance complained that, “The rules were you weren’t going to fact check,” when he falsely claimed the Haitians in Springfield were undocumented. It was a tell. Vance and Trump need these false claims to sow division. They need these false claims to attack rationality.
Shortly before the debate, 60 Minutes announced that Trump was going to forgo their traditional pre-election interview. After 60 Minutes made the announcement, Trump’s bouncer-spox Steven Cheung tried to spin it in a way that didn’t amount to Trump chickening out again:
Here’s what Cheung said:
- Hunter Biden’s laptop
- Nothing was scheduled
- CBS was going to commit the “unprecedented” sin of fact-checking Trump
There’s a tiny bit more substance on the laptop comment than the normal invocation of “Hunter Biden’s laptop” as foundational moment in Trump’s cult than there normally is. Trump is complaining that he is owed an apology because Lesley Stahl refused to report on its contents in 2020 — ignoring the question of newsworthiness! — only after she could verify it.
Trump, 78, was referring to “60 Minutes” reporter Lesley Stahl admitting to him in a 2020 sitdown that she refused to cover The Post’s bombshell Hunter Biden laptop story in 2020 because “it can’t be verified.”
I learned that from NYPost, which didn’t wait to verify the hard drive of a laptop before it misrepresented what an email said, which used a copy of the hard drive copy that had at least one email added to it after it left John Paul Mac Isaac’s custody, and which itself was based on a copying process that resulted in 62% bigger copy (measured in page size — blame prosecutors for doing that!) than the underlying laptop.
Even as Xitter, Google, and Facebook censor the JD Vance dossier stolen from a Trump staffer far more aggressively than anyone ever throttled NYPost stories about the Hunter Biden hard drive (outlets besides Xitter are fairly invoking a policy against foreign malign influence campaigns; Xitter claims it’s about Vance’s privacy), Trump is claiming he was injured because news outlets didn’t chase a laptop copy to which they were not granted access by Trump’s own lawyer.
But the function of his invocation of a hard drive that even the FBI never validated serves as the same marker it always does: Four years later, four years in which media outlets have still never found anything more than dick pics and completely legal influence peddling, merely the invocation of the hard drive serves as the foundation of an object of faith for Trump’s mob. One must believe in it even if one cannot validate it. Goodness knows, that’s what got Hunter Biden convicted on gun crimes.
Relatedly, on Monday, Judge Robert Richardson finally ruled on John Paul Mac Isaac’s defamation claims: none of his defamation claims held up (partly because he was a limited public figure, partly because most of his defamation claims never even mentioned him. Hunter Biden’s counterclaim was dismissed on statute of limitation grounds. Along with Judge Rudy Contreras’ decision, last Friday, that the disgruntled IRS agents can’t intervene in Hunter’s lawsuit against the IRS, he can include their lawyers in his claims, but cannot sue for a Privacy Act violation, the rulings close off much of what we might learn from these lawsuits.
The Hunter Biden hard drive and its aftermath will continue to serve as an untethered article of faith among those who need to believe the Bidens are more corrupt than Trump and his son-in-law.
And in that same world of faith, neither Donald Trump nor JD Vance are going to willingly participate in a venue where their false narrative of fear might be disturbed by facts.
Most people treat debate as a draw. Virtually all agree that, like almost all VP debates, it won’t make an ounce of difference in the race, because they never do. Even after admitting the latter point, though, Bulwark’s Jonathan Last assessed JD’s success in smoothly delivering those lies differently.
Vance was so good that I wonder if this debate might become a case of catastrophic success. Because tomorrow a whole bunch of people in Conservatism Inc. are going to be talking about how Vance is the post-Trump savior they’ve been waiting for.
I wonder what Donald Trump will think about that?
That’s the question I kept coming back to, all night long.
[snip]
I doubt Vance did anything meaningful to help Trump’s electoral prospects. But he absolutely helped his own prospects for 2028, or 2032, or whenever Trump leaves the scene.
Or gets pushed.
Donald Trump created his own fictional character, the successful tycoon who gets things done by firing people and exacting revenge.
JD has no such persona. He has, instead, a flawless ingratiating ability to deliver lies credibly.
The debate is not going to affect the election.
But I think JD did what he needed, for his own wildly ambitious goals: He doubled down on undermining democracy, and ratcheted up the professionalism of Trump’s attack on truth.
Update: Added the ad that Harris did of the JD non-answer.
The “truth”, as you put it in the headline, is an apt phrase.
To me, your final paragraph was hit hard when Walz asked Vance directly about who won the last election. When Vance tap danced — “I’m focused on the future” — Walz hit him hard. “That’s a damning non-answer.”
It is indeed.
Walz struck me as a teacher faced with a smug little high schooler who is lying his ass off in class. He was caught between shock at the straight-up lies Vance told and trying to maintain his professionalism in the face of it all. Kids can act up and act out, but the teacher has to remain in control of his emotions and not lash out.
The use of “damning” is as close as Walz came to letting go.
It will be interesting, down the road, to learn precisely what the thinking was. Because there were several times when Walz was staring boggle eyed at what JD was saying.
JD is a shrewd slick deflector. Walz took the high road – civility.
I was very impressed with the responses given by Walz. I found them to be informative and tied to his first-hand experience as a governor. Like when he was talking about housing and challenged Vance on which regulations should be removed, because many are state and local that pertain to safety. Although it wasn’t overly obvious, Walz systematically displayed his wealth of experience and J D Vance’s lack of experience.
There is nothing to keep Walz from going back over those moments and laser focus on those now to address Vance’s lies because we now know, fact checking would have sunk JD’s boat of lies. He as much as admitted that in real time.
I just wish I could have been on that mic mute switch. Oh that would have been a joy!
“But I think JD did what he needed, for his own wildly ambitious goals: He doubled down on undermining democracy, and ratcheted up the professionalism of Trump’s attack on truth.”
I would go further, and add that the components of Vance’s professionalism is a greater capacity for discipline, calculation and focus in his cynicism
And what he does for Trump in this campaign, and was particularly evident throughout the debate was to flagrantly repackage Trump’s fictional persona
Marcy was right to point out
“ Donald Trump created his own fictional character, the successful tycoon who gets things done by firing people and exacting revenge”
And everyone knows it including MAGA loyalists, who don’t really care. But what they do care about is battling cynics who burnish the credentials of their heroes, especially to own the libs.
If one tracks Vance’s revisionist version of Trump through the debate — at every turn he presented him as an exemplar of statecraft.
This was cynical not only with respect to Trump, but also as the means to present himself as Trump’s loyal sidekick. And I think he did it with a calculated fluency which few others manage.
I have come to reconsider Vance’s body language as Walz finally berated Vance at the end of the debate – I thought initially that it betrayed a hint of resignation, that his cynicism had been called out; but now I think it was even more cynical than that — a glint of furtive triumph.
Vance has in fact skilfully played his hand since even before becoming VP — repacking the border as the locus for immigration conflict and refocusing it on Springfield as AnyTown Middle America, and relentlessly trolling the libs unapologetically on this and other topics. He has seemingly bumbled around in small venues, deliberately being the most second of second fiddles. His favorability in the tank.
It’s not now.
Vance’s figures will improve considerably after that debate, even though pundits will argue the toss about who won
And if Trump’s figures tick up too (against an otherwise dwindling performance by him) then whisper it quietly —-Vance is a certified success win lose or draw.
Vance has in fact skilfully played his hand since even before becoming VP
I know we’ve discussed this before, but for others who may be interested, I want to link to my comment re: VANCE’s senate news releases leading up to the time TRUMP chose him.
The second comment begins with “VANCE hit ALL of TRUMP’s sweet spots.”:
https://www.emptywheel.net/2024/09/13/the-midway-point-of-kamala-harris-campaign/#comment-1070302
Someone was trying very hard to sell VANCE to TRUMP.
Yes indeed.
I very much had this in mind,
and certainly I owe a hat-tip to you to foregrounding for me the extent of Vance’s malice aforethought on Springfield “issues”
And the difference between how Vance and Trump have used the elements of this strategy is a microcosm between the disciplined and calculated cynicism of Vance compared to the spiteful but unfocused and unhinged Trump.
Yes. Like Trump, Vance seems to go through life checking boxes and treating everything and everyone around him as a prop.
A smart kid from nowhere needs institutional stature, so, join the Marines. Make up for being the fat kid in school, but be a PR guy and stay away from the front lines. Check. Do well at a state school, but get into that Ivy League grad school. Check. Marry another Ivy Leaguer, whose family has status and money, but not someone in the Social Register. Check. Forget the multi-year law firm slog. Make contacts and money in private equity, instead. Check.
PE is too much like work, so be a front man for your billionaire private equity guru and go into politics. Billionaires can always use one more courtier, to bend govt their way. Check. Use a whistle stop in the Senate as a stepping stone to the White House. Check.
Vance picked the perfect patron. If he wins, Trump is unlikely to last a full term, owing to his age, infirmities, and McD’s diet. Enter the White House without winning an election. Commercialize the Presidency and use its power in ways Donald Trump never dreamed of. Tbd.
If Trump loses (or wins) it’s Vance who may inherit the GOP’s infrastructure too…if it doesn’t combusted and collapse of course.
Best observation I’ve seen on Vance’s damning non-answer was from original never-Trumper Republican, Stewart Stevens, on xitter:
That’s a good assessment, as usual, but I don’t necessarily agree that the debate will not affect the election…if the Harris team uses the Vance soundbites therefrom adeptly.
E.g., Vance’s dissembling on several issues, like Springfield, abortion, J6, etc (the list is as long as his answers were) can be set up in campaign ads opposite actual video clips and blockquotes that he an Trump have spouted over the last days, months and years.
I’ll be very disappointed if they don’t do that post haste, going forward. Sometimes I wish they’d hire the Colbert crew for that kind of purpose, but without the laugh lines, just for the way they’re so good at highlighting that dichotomy between Trumpist rhetoric and reality — and doing it in record time . Maybe the Lincoln folks will pitch in, as well as the Harris team this month, and hopefully it will be a swift, prolific effort. The material from last night is staring them in the face and it isn’t hard to sort through, certainly.
They have one on Jan6.
https://x.com/Tim_Walz/status/1841446025325601010
Yow! That was hyper-quick and damn effective. And the time stamp was 5 minutes before my post above! They were up all night for that one! Colbert, eat your heart out!
Ok, let’s hope they keep ’em comin’! If so, the VP debate goes from a wash to a Harris blowout.
That is really good!
How Walz introduces that segment in the Xeet this morning:
Exactly.
harpie:
Gonna leave a scar, I think.
EXCELLENT!
And here’s another one, just released by Harris, not about the debate per se, but hitting on the exact points being made in the comments here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_HKKc2xx-Ag
I love the ending, making Vance look like he’s banking on Trump’s demise (which he certainly must be).
Great ad! Vance’s devilsh laugh at the end says it all.
And if using Vance soundbites, be emphatic in mentioning age and apparent health of Trump as the intro. Get that in!
The NY Post could not even accurately report on which model of laptop Hunter allegedly dropped off.
In real time, regular people could use the reported Apple serial number to see that the laptop has a removable hard drive that prevents Mac Isaac’s drag-and-drop-and-accudentally-invade-privacy technique to notice the files relevant to news about Hunter and Burisma, and oddly later get all worked up about Kolomoisky.
Even in Miranda Devine’s new book, she quotes Mac Isaac saying it was a “thirteen-inch 2016 MacBook Pro, had power problems and kept shutting down.”
Later, when describing the trial in Delaware, she describes “prosecutor Derek Hines held aloft the silver MacBook Pro 13”, without mentioning the year.
This is a slight of hand the Devine does many, many times. Because she knows it’s a 2017 model, Mac Isaac knows it’s a 2017 model. He’s admitted to going to the websites to enter in the serial number.
It’s stunning that no reporters and journalists fact check on something so basic and call them out on this lie, which causes the whole cover story to fall apart.
A couple of points worth documenting for people interest in these narratives
Devine’s new book about Biden-Ukraine makes a grand finale demonstration that Hunter is CIA and that’s why he’s been protected from criminal justice. She also goes out of her way to claim that Kolomoisky was a CIA asset, and went on secret flights, had mercenary army, his role perfectly aligning with US national security interests in Ukraine in 2014.
Rudy has ranted about Kolomoisky and Emptywheel has pointed out Mac Isaac’s unaccounted obsession with Kolomoisky and his lies that the laptop sparked his interests in Kolomoisky, as there is scant mention in emails.
This suggests that the same network behind Mac Isaac, could either be the same network, or closely connected with, whatever network is behind Devine.
Devine said she came to the NY Post in July 2019 to cover the 2020 election. But scrolling through her articles during that time, her beat looks like regular culture war nonsense.
So, the intelligence analysis she claims to be making herself in her book, are inconsistent with her lane of reporting. Just seems far fetched that she chased down this story herself.
As an anecdote showing her intelligence analysis, Jordan Peterson asked her a surprisingly good question: national security agencies are notoriously conservative, why are the CIA and FBI in bed with the Democrats protecting them from their crimes?
Devine’s explanation: because Washington DC is where the CIA is, and they are like 90% Democrat
There’s a level of being disingenuous.
In her book about Biden-Ukraine, she does not mention the following at all: Patel, Nunes, Parnas, Harvey, Firtash. She barely mentions Solomon, but includes him in a Special Thanks in the back of the book.
So, there’s reason to suspect Devine may been tapped on the shoulder to write on Biden-Ukraine, similar to Solomon saying he was tapped on the shoulder by “they”.
That Devine allowed an interview by Jordan Peterson tells anyone who hasn’t read her book all they need to know — Peterson’s a one-man far-right influence operation.
Another peculiarity in the book, is Devine mentioning Zlochevsky’s FBI Kleptocracy investigation going away in December 2019, after being opened by the Obama Administration in 2016. I have only seen this reported by Emptywheel, and in connection with the Brady operation created days later to ingest Rudy’s info, which led to finding the Smirnov needle in the haystack.
Devine, however, cites this December 2019 case closing in relationship to Trump defending himself during impeachment. Without writing so directly, she seems to be implying for the reader that the Zlochevsky case was closed by the Deep State, FBI in collusion with CIA, in order to prevent Trump from getting Biden-Ukraine material for his defense.
With the many oddities and cover stories about Devine explaining her own timeline and role in her reporting, I suspect that she was originally brought to the NY Post in July 2019 to specifically report on the Biden-Ukraine story and/or the Hunter Biden laptop ahead of the 2020 election. However, she got cold feet, likely due to reports of Rudy being under investigation and his ties to Russian agents, so didn’t report on either until later on.
She is clearly agenda driven, and not driven by following the facts.
Also, it should not be lost to historical record, the fitting timing of events.
As Hunter’s legal ecourse against Mac Isaac is terminated due to statute of limitations, there is a major escalation in Israel -Iran conflict. With Netanyahu warning that change in Iranian leadership will come sooner than expected and that a hot war with Iran may break out. Said in English of course because the audience is Americans, not the Iranian people addressed in the message. A man whose goal appears to be to get the United States to fight a war with Iran on his behalf.
Then followed by Iranian missiles fired at Israel that involved American support to defend.
Klippenstein even writes headline “We’re at War With Iran”.
https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/were-at-war-with-iran
When Trump, Vance, and their right-wing zealots complain about fact-checking, what they’re really complaining about is the facts themselves.
Case in point:
https://thehill.com/homenews/house/4901624-boebert-interview-climate-change/
I can’t help thinking that JD Vance is the billionaires’ choice to replace Trump. He’s ambitious, a smooth liar, and knows who his daddy is. He also seems to be a true believer in the goals of Project 2025.
If Trump weren’t such a stupid narcissist, he’d be looking over his shoulder to make sure that Vance isn’t researching the 25th Amendment.
Well it is Project 20″25″, after all.
With someone in Trump’s age and physical shape, a sudden health event is easy to arrange, and might not even be necessary to arrange. I just flashed on a related possibility: if a meme gets out there that that’s just what Vance is up to, Trump’s natural paranoia will change the whole dynamic between them. Maybe just floating that Project 2025 is indeed about the Amendment, not the year. He’s that stupid — not that Vance isn’t that Machiavellian, of course.
The scariest line for me last night was Vance saying he’s only 40 years old. This fucker will haunt us for a long time if he isn’t made politically redundant in relatively short order.
Yes. I believe VANCE has been groomed for that purpose.
I have seen a Future
And it smirks,
If that was an oblique Prince reference, well done.
Oh he believes in Project 2025 and was actively signaling to that crowd. He wants the taxpayer to fund catholic daycare. I hope the Dems make fun of JD “side eye Vance as that tell should be exploited as he clearly was educated by Walz on that stage.
JD Vance also embraced the fever dream of Western Republicans by offering to sell our public lands to solve the housing crisis. Walz rightly recognized that Minnesota protects the headwaters of the Mississippi, which can directly be tied to US western public lands protecting the water in the west. Republicans want to sell those lands and control those water rights.
Republicans like Vance are locusts striving to eat up the earth then asking god to save them went that plan goes wrong.
In March 2023, I started a THREAD on an Ed Walker post with:
https://www.emptywheel.net/2023/03/10/conclusion-to-series-on-the-dawn-of-everything/#comment-984263
The next bit:
From the Propublica piece:
Both HAWLEY and VANCE are associated with TENEO.
Marcy mentions these two this morning as
“January 6 guys with Yale Law credentials [along with Stuart RHODES]”.
Link: https://bsky.app/profile/emptywheel.bsky.social/post/3l5jnmsmcb62i October 2, 2024 at 7:39 AM
Wow! I was just reading through that ProPublica piece again and look at this:
Last year, this quote was just a head scratcher…but NOW…
They live in a fantasy universe of their own, and should never ever get power.
Many of them already do have quite a bit of power…
BAEHR was working for Peter THIEL when “he had the epiphany to create a conservative counter-effort” that became TENEO.
et tu, Brutus?
I don’t know about looking over his shoulder.
25th Amendment is the only way he gets a legit pardon, and quickly.
Trump and Vance are correct, round up all who have crossed the border, unhouse them, and the housing prices should decline per Econ 101 supply/demand.
NOBODY asked, yet, how will you implement mass deportations, how will it be financed, what will it cost, and who’s going to take the deported people into their nation. Moderators asked, what if parents and children are separated? That is a question. It is not the question. It has a sentimental dimension. There is much more of a reality dimension. Trump has no real plan for the real dimensions of what he says he’d do.
It is fantasy. Fund it via tariffs? That is hitting price of goods, big time, at each step of the supply chain, and that is more a burden on those with less money. And do you propose tariffs on mideast oil? Tariffs are a disguised retro tax, not a progressive tax like income tax with growing tranches. An indirect tax in that the people pay, via higher costs and prices, while foreign goods will cost more and there will be ordinary tariff results. Again supply/demand.
And the moderators. Ask hard questions. Then let them say what-the-fuck they want to say, actual questions/answers be damned. It was a show. Entertainment. Walz took notes, looking down as he scribed. JD went without notes, looking sociopathicly sincere into the camera full time.
Vance conveyed an aura of self-confidence. His voicing of things had an edge, to me a turn-off, and when he spoke of not trusting expertise, Walz did not jump, “What, trust you and Trump instead? I’d rather trust all the Project 2025 stuff, your willing excuse for anything resembling expertise. And, I don’t trust your Justices, not a one of them. They killed Roe with hand waving. How can a liar like you, in fact, be trusted? Haitians eating pets in Ohio. Round up millions of people without any plan or way to pay for it or place to put them. Who takes them if they are sent off?”
Everybody has an opinion. That’s mine. It was a non-debate. It showed either of the two speaks well enough to be President when talking about anything they choose. There was little else. Walz stayed closer to what was asked. Vance made every question an immigration answer.
Your final sentence was the point – endless War
Worked for Big Brother in 1984.
With the cost of buying a house (and the current paperwork and process of buying a house)- illegal immigrants are not buying houses to the point of driving up competition and prices. This is Trump/Vance fear/hate migrants nonsense talk.
Housing and the housing market has become a get-rich/stay-rich commodity that is manipulated by those with the power to do so just like other commodities are manipulated to benefit those with power.
Marcy, in response to nycsouthpaw who said
“CBS news presenting ethnic cleansing as housing policy”:
https://bsky.app/profile/emptywheel.bsky.social/post/3l5jt5jivj227
October 2, 2024 at 9:18 AM
Rather more complicated than that. Around 1947. a veteran could get an 800-square-foot house on a 30-year mortgage for $22/mo PITI. That vet was making, maybe, $70 week.
The population was around 140 million, and millions of acres of abandoned farms surrounded every city and town. Hence the land acquisition cost to a developer was close to zero.
Today, 330 million population with no cheap land near where people want to live.
Similar upward pressure on costs from regulations.
With new upward pressure from the customers, who do not want to buy 800-sq-ft houses.
In 1973, when housing prices took a big leap forward, I wrote a story about the cheapest new construction house where I was reporting (Tidewater Virginia). The builder was an ambitious journeyman who had bet everything he had on the cheapest lot he could find. The result was a small (about 1,100 sq ft) place that he priced at $30,000.
He told me that he could have delivered the house for $25,000 without appliances (air conditioning was the big item) but then he wouldn’t be able to find a buyer.
There are people with power trying to manipulate housing but a lot of them have gone broke.
“Similar upward pressure on costs from regulations.”
Bah. You know what one change in regulations — in this case, the removal of regulations — may have caused much of prohibitively expensive land and rent prices?
The end of Glass-Steagall permitting comingling of previously firewalled commercial banking separated from investment banking. Now land and rents can be traded on the market with the same performance expected as all other investments, while wages have stagnated for decades.
New from the American Immigration Council:
“A mass deportation operation would cost the US government an estimated $315 billion.”
https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/mass-deportation
“”Starting” at 1 million deported/year? That’s $88 billion annually.
It’d cut GDP by 4.2-6.8%. That’s the Great Recession on the LOW end.”
Originally posted by Dara Lind on Bluesky.
https://bsky.app/profile/daralind.bsky.social
I think it’s naive to indulge in examination of expense to government to conduct mass deportations when the guy who is exhorting this as his platform has already invited mass violence by his followers.
If they were willing to attack the Capitol, nothing would stop them from hunting down and killing anyone they believed to be illegally in the country.
Let me emphasize the word believe, because Vance’s refusal to accept Haitian immigrants legal status is a huge red flag.
That federal agencies have been swamped with FOIA requests demanding information about staffing also tells us they will purge the federal government to ensure there are no repercussions for executing the targets of Trump-Vance policies.
(Note I’ve only posted 1-2x & don’t recall under what username but I’ll use this one now)…Thank you Rayne for pointing this out. I haven’t forgotten the Trump admin lawyers threatening to revoke citizenship of naturalized immigrants like my spouse if they found “lies” in their application materials. I don’t doubt a Trump-Vance administration would make that reality & “find” lots of “lies” in brown & Black folks’ citizenship applications, *in addition to* giving permission to bigots among the public to attack anyone perceived as immigrants, legal or not. Surely keeping non-white immigrants in constant fear is as much a goal of theirs as any actual deportations, & I don’t think enough people get that.
And Vance induces the belief that Haitians are illegal immigrants, not by ignoring their legal status, or pretending that they have not been given such a status, but, when challenged, Vance responds by openly asserting that their ‘purported’ legal status granted to them is an unlawful and illegitimate contrivance by federal authorities on the direction of the Administration.
So according to Vance, this is not just incompetence by the feds, but a deep state conspiracy to manage the illegal immigration crisis by manipulating the law and foisting unwanted aliens on a suffering communities without their knowledge or consent and to their detriment.
Not much of an extension, then, to claim that all people of color are illegitimate.
Reply to earlofhuntingdon
October 2, 2024 at 2:34 pm
Nope. How can you distinguish a Haitian American from any other Black American — especially when they’re folks who look like basketball star Stephen Curry?
The “committees of safety” will shoot first, ask questions later.
I am terrified by the lack of recognition among the nice white people I know who don’t feel the undertow building across the right. They’re what I imagine good Germans to have been like in 1939, just going about their day.
Not only those who they believe are here “illegally”, but also those who are not “really” Americans.
I have an in-house Q who keeps telling me that I should be careful of what I say in neighborhood social media because I might be getting people upset.
Reply to Fraud Guy
October 2, 2024 at 4:08 pm
My dad’s a brown dude whose birth certificate was issued in the same city as Obama’s. I am wholly aware of the “not really American” bullshit as are nearly all Asian and Pacific Islander Americans. The “China flu” bullshit Trump propagated resulted in hate crimes and deaths of Asian Americans during the early COVID pandemic.
I can’t think of an Asian American acquaintance, even those who have been here for generations, who haven’t been asked “Where are you from?”
PBS had a couple series about Asian Americans — one was “Becoming American” (2003) which addressed this stupid white supremacist belief that Chinese Americans are never really American.
https://www.pbs.org/becomingamerican/
The dudes with Trump signs and guns don’t care about legal status — only if others look cis-het white and sufficiently servile if female.
“A recent investigation revealed that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has been operating a secretive program to train civilian volunteers in firearms, surveillance, and tactics used in raids against immigrants and the use of lethal force against people.
“The program, known as ‘Citizens Academies’, was revealed through thousands of internal ICE documents obtained by the Immigrant Defense Project and Organized Communities Against Deportations via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.
“The whistleblower group has legal support from Beyond Legal Aid, Latino Justice, and the Center for Constitutional Rights.
“Published on October 1, 2024, these documents detail the scope and operations of ICE’s ‘Citizens Academies’, which began in Puerto Rico in 2014 and expanded nationally in 2019.”
Source: https://www.trtworld.com/us-and-canada/us-secretive-program-training-civilians-in-firearms-exposed-18215231
That should bring the costs down.
“Citizens Acadmies” is yet another step in the evolution of “committees of safety” which have acted to preserve white supremacy since the American Revolution.
Re: CBS TRUMP interview:
6:00 PM CBS makes announcement
[before] 7:30 PM TRUMP’s Sumo-Guy spins
8:22 PM Brian Stelter reports:
Via Heather Cox Richardson:
https://x.com/brianstelter/status/1841272468696092705 8:22 PM · Oct 1, 2024
To be clear…Sumo [something] is TRUMP’s nickname for Cheung.
WHAT The WHAT
As if all Asian and Asian heritage people are the same — no problem using a Japanese word as a nickname for a Chinese American??
JFC another example of Trump’s racist bullshit.
See also calling the head of the Taliban “Abdul” [“Slave/servant (of)”]
Yep. Cliches are all he has. All martial arts are karate, and all Asian food is La Choy chop suey.
Marc in Denver
October 2, 2024 at 1:12 pm
The accurate account of Trump’s interaction with Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar
the chief Taliban negotiator is here https://newlinesmag.com/reportage/the-real-story-of-donald-trumps-mysterious-abdul/
Needless to say the recent account from Trump was a confused mangled and confabulated distortion.
They spoke on the phone once, and Trump did not threaten him. The Mullah was in Qatar at the time 3/3/20 a few days after signing the Doha Peace Accord with Pompeo
https://bsky.app/profile/jamellebouie.net/post/3l5jorhr2jp2u
October 2, 2024 at 8:00 AM [my take in the times debate round up]
“Sell the benefits of asbestos” “with a smile”?
That’s exactly what VANCE’s sugar daddies groomed him for.
Like Elizabeth Anne Holmes and Theranos. Another person who may be a sociopath.
Not sure that means Vance won the debate, but he did deliver the messages he meant to. He’s a smooth, persuasive, reliable shill, not easily rattled, who can sell tobacco on a lung cancer ward. Unlike Trump, he can modulate his self-regard – Marcy’s point – sufficiently to be persuasive to many, in short doses.
When he’s on his own, though, and not selling someone else’s message, he lets down. His deep unlikeability shows through. Witness his intense discomfort at out of the way doughnut shops and Pittsburgh sandwich joints. The sort of place in which a politician like Tim Walz, who cares about what govt can and does do for people, shines.
Hmmm…if outlets like MSNBC are starting to use the word “sanewash” in relation to coverage of Trump, I think the phrase “smoothwash” should soon be in currency in relation to Vance. “A lot of people” seem to be impressed with the fact that JD can cosplay “civil” and “smooth” so well…
Jamelle Bouie is the best — and only — thing that the NYT has going for it these days, aside from the crossword.
Which means he better watch out calling Vance’s obvious lies for what they are!
Van Jordan on Vance who he states is someone who will say anything, do anything to get ahead:
“That is a dangerous person for a good man to debate.”
https://x.com/VanJones68/status/1841273951412211971
Van Jones! Ugh! I have a Van Jordan in my contacts and I oops’d!
Also, it would be great to produce a full fact-checking vid of Vance.
My thought also. Do the thing that Vance fears the most. Show him up for the effortless and shameless snake oil merchant that he is.
And bookend it with his protest at fact-checking.
greenwashing
sportswashing
sanewashing (newly minted to commemorate the 2024 Trump campaign)
And now, assholewashing. All those theater critics passing themselves off as political pundits are so, so impressed with how smooth and professional a liar Vance proved to be in the clutch. That is their takeaway. Period. And it is not that Vance was especially convincing in wearing this kinder, gentler persona. No, it is just that the craft on display in portraying a character meant to obscure his real-life odiousness – in service to a play so flawed it was not worth mentioning – was unmissable to people, indifferent to substance, who value the performance above all. Entertaining Ourselves to Death, indeed.
And let’s be real here — for anyone, if you knew you could spew whatever BS you wanted and no one was going to push back on it, we all would be much more polished sounding. If CBS had not been such cowards and actually fact checked Vance, he would have gotten frustrated and that smooth veneer would have cracked. He would have started sounding like a whiny child, complaining that he’s being “censored”.
Many of us see Trump as early/middle stage. Thiel, Musk, et al aren’t missing this; Vance is their man, their president. Trump can’t fire Vance — else, bye, bye $Millions from these two fine examples.
Couch Boy: I hate censorship!
Walz: Did Trump lose 2020 election?
Couch Boy: I’m censoring my answer.
Good post/piece as always!
Vance is a narcissist. A narcissistic trait is whining on a regular basis in order to convince others the whiner is a victim.
Vance is also a bully. He’s not as old as Trump, so he hasn’t been a bully as long as Trump; nevertheless, he is a bully.
I chose not to watch the public event last night (These are not debates.) because I knew CBS coveted a “shit show” and would not fact check Vance’s lies in real time.
Both whining narcissistic bullies, Trump and Vance, wouldn’t have made it past the fourth grade in my elementary school without getting their faces bashed in enough to send them both to the hospital. Both are incorrigible.
Walz is a civil and decent human being and can, it appears, control his anger better than many people, including me. He has the temperament and integrity to be a great VP and President someday.
Myself I though Walz was brilliant just being himself & I think in the construct of garnering in voters from states like Nebraska where he was born & raised, there are very good possibilities. It won’t surprise me that on election day, a wave starts on the East Coast. I think that the loss of lives & devastation in hurricane Helene will be a huge factor in peoples choice also. Democrats provide. This is HUGE, the devastation of this hurricane & the scientific relation to the warming waters. It’s not like people are not noticing the heat waves. I hope we stay focused.
The more I think about it. The Democrats could do a commercial with examples of the highest temps (ever recorded) everywhere this year ending in hurricane Helene with a text “Climate change is not a HOAX ! “
edit: Myself I thought
Kind of like it actually : )
There’s a saying that the true will set you free. But when it comes to oration, the truth limits you. Lying is much easier: you can say whatever you think will resonate with your audience, whether it’s accurate or not.
Last night Vance was free and untethered. Walz, by contrast, had to think before he spoke, keep his cool, and try to articulate things carefully. It’s not really a fair fight if it’s all about style points.
Trump lies whenever it’s convenient. But his buffoonery and shallowness makes his appeal self-limiting. A smooth-talking demagogue like Vance worries me more. If he can ever overcome his inability to speak with and relate to normal human beings (see all his gaffes on the campaign trail), he will be much more dangerous.
Agreed!
It’s impossible to discuss anything with a narcissist and sociopath like Vance or Trump.
It was impossible to discuss anything with Charlie Manson for the same reasons.
The late Manson and now, Trump and Vance, use the lack of fact-checking and any subsequent penalties for lying, to ambush and overwhelm the opposition who was, likely, raised to respect people’s right to speak and was taught civility as a child.
He already is more dangerous. If Trump fails in Nov., Vance will very likely displace the loser and take over the Trump-GOP party. There will be no recovery to anything like it used to be, since it will be locked in to passive servitude to shameless grifting as long as it remains addicted to malleable low-info MAGA turnout.
It’s a potentially self-sustaining devil’s compact between the oligarchs’ chosen shill and their/his marks. For which everyone else also has to pay.
Vance — and his billionaire patron(s) — will take over the Trump-GOP party.
I don’t see Vance being able to take the baton from Trump. A slick liar is not nearly as engaging as someone who believes his own lies. Different acts. Different audiences.
“he can ever overcome his inability to speak with and relate to normal human beings (see all his gaffes on the campaign trail), he will be much more dangerous”
While Vance’s sociopathy shares some characteristics with Trump’s narcissism, albeit Trump is spiralling, but Vance is more calculating disciplined and focused in his cynicism, and despite his unease in certain social situations, he has a far greater facility to mimic human emotions and present a display of emotional intelligence in controlled environments.
Vance chose to wear a normie skin last night. And for those who know his shape shifting, his schtick was evident. But IMHO even Harris would have had difficulty picking apart that facade.
While we all wanted the smug bastard to have been dismantled, Walz was better off being authentically himself.
There were perhaps a few occasions when some passive aggressive take down s could have worked – but it takes skill and prep to pull that off, and Vance playing the nice guy was deliberately disarming.
Vance is no fool.
His normy skin sloughs off readily, but it stayed on for a couple of hours last night.
Vance is no fool, but he seems to have vulnerabilities that an expert like Putin or Thiel could manipulate. It would just take more work than it does with Trump.
The collapse of the mainstream media is real, but I can’t for the life of me understand why they don’t adapt to current trends of media consumption. The consumer attention span is now ridiculously low and has devolved to only reading tweet headlines of whatever 5 second video clip captures their attention (TikTok). The media needs to adapt.
Some people are happy CBS moderators chimed in with a single fact check that Haitian immigrants have legal status. No, that was infuriating, because they left out the most important fact check – ZERO EVIDENCE OF HAITIANS EATING PETS.
Why does today’s media allow professional liars to steamroll them? It can’t be for ratings if legacy media is failing. A simple, quick statement a la pop-up video bubbles would provide better fact-checking. Why isn’t the media shifting more to Twitter and social media type tactics to debunk these lies? People don’t need an hour long segment or 2000 word column to debunk this garbage. Just post a big, red letter statement on the TV during the debate. Every clip of that moment shared on social media would show the written fact check, like a watermark.
Lies are tearing this country apart. The msm media is letting it happen. I don’t know all the solutions, but media networks need better adaptation to the times, low-attention span consumers, and better methods to align with social media.
“A liar should have a good memory.” Quintilian
Trump and Vance are well matched liars.
I went to bed vaguely annoyed that Vance had peddled his lies far more fluidly, then woke up realizing that the problem with Vance doing well is that it makes Trump look worse. If anything, I think it should be emphasized just how much better Vance did than Trump at pushing their (horrible) agenda. If nothing else, maybe it will goad Trump into accepting the Oct 23 debate.
The cardinal sin of the Trump ticket is that you cannot make Trump look bad. Be a good attack dog. If you outshine him, though, that’s almost worse, in Trumpland.
Vance being able to lie effortlessly worries me. Because if Trump loses, what’s to stop the GOP (including the never Trumpers) from rallying around Vance when he inevitably blames Trump for the loss and convinces everyone that Trump was the lead belt on the ticket. Will Cheney still call him out on it? Will the other Republicans supporting Harris?
Or will they pivot to attack the Dems and a putative Harris administration and embrace Vance as a new standard bearer, claiming that it was just the cult of Trump that was the problem, not the unchecked thirst for power and the latent fascistic tendencies that are just obvious for the world to see?
Me too. Very creepy. But the Harris campaign seems to be on top of things, thank goodness. Hope it works.
JD Vance’s Old Yale Law Classmates Raise Money for Springfield’s Haitian Residents
Some donors said they were seeking to repair damage the Trump-Vance campaign, and Mr. Vance himself, had caused by spreading bogus rumors that migrants were harming pets. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/02/us/politics/jd-vance-yale-classmates-haitian-migrants.html Oct. 2, 2024, 12:48 p.m. ET
Beautiful…there’s still hope for humanity.
As Judge McBurney wrote “it is not for a legislator, a judge, or a Commander from The Handmaid’s Tale to tell these women what to do with their bodies during this period when the fetus cannot survive outside the womb any more so than society could — or should — force them to serve as a human tissue bank or to give up a kidney for the benefit of another”.
JD Vance is a Commander wannabe, who is right wing but also a Christian Nationalist in cahoots with Opus Dei and the Seven Mountains evangelical fanatics. Hence his appearance at Lance Wallnau’s town hall. Misogyny and anti-LGTBQ bigotry underly their big goal to transform the government into a Christian theocracy.
Wallnau is vile and described Kamala Harris as using witchcraft to win the debate against Trump saying she has the “spirit of Jezebel.” Wallnau wrote—“When I say ‘witchcraft,’ I am talking about what happened tonight. Occult-empowered deception, manipulation, and domination. . . She can look presidential. That’s the seduction of what I would say is witchcraft. That’s the manipulation of imagery that creates an impression contrary to the truth, but it seduces you into seeing it. So that spirit, that occult spirit, I believe is operating on her and through her.”
Vance’s conversion to Catholicism seems to be his positioning with Opus Dei and its illiberal mission. This puts him in alliance with Josh Hawley, Sam Alito and Bill Barr. I think Vance sees the future as Dominionist not just “conservative.” There are big plans amongst the Project 2025 Heritage people, Leonard Leo judicial activists, and the Christian Right which find Vance to be their true warrior.
Vance won’t be on t-shirts or a personality cult. He’s not a grifter. He is 40 years old with his own deliberate and guileful agenda of becoming Commander Vance.
O/T Judge Tanya Chutkan unsealed the filing that Jack Smith made against former President Donald Trump
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.258148/gov.uscourts.dcd.258148.252.0.pdf
(apologies to Rayne if I messed my name up, couldn’t remember how it was spelled)
Thank you!
I apologize in advance if I have overlooked it, but I haven’t seen a link to Tim Dickinson’s article J.D. Vance’s Stolen Valor: ‘He Puts on Poverty Like You Put on Makeup’ published by RollingStone the day before the debate. The subheading reads: There’s a hollow core at the center of J.D. Vance’s origin story — his claim that he “grew up poor”.
I found it pretty revealing, especially since Vance mentioned his upbringing in poverty again in his closing statement.
Here’s the link: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/jd-vance-hillbilly-elegy-grew-up-poor-trump-1235116331/
That’s a great piece. Too bad nobody of note bothered to scrutinize his shitty book at the time it was published.
Vance’s non-answer about January 6th seems a great set-up for Jack Smith:
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/25182568-usa-v-trump-unsealed-govt-immunity-motion-1022024
Thanks, klynn! I hope all Special Counsel’s work pays off. Defendant needs an overdue dose of FAFO.
My Bad, Klynn beat me to it.
Old orange gaseous maximus is going apeshit.
Thank you Jack Smith.
OT, also apologies.
The merits of various answers/non-answers don’t count. Vance came away as smooth, civil, and calm. Walz stumbled in his delivery at the beginning. Got better, yes, but stumbled out of the gate. Walz also looked angry/pugnacious when Vance was talking.
Therefore, the man on the street will think that Vance did better. Remember, after the 1960 Nixon/Kennedy debate, radio listeners thought Nixon had won, TV viewers, Kennedy.
If you think that was Tim Walz looking “angry/pugnacious,” you’ve never been in a half-time locker room when the team is behind two touchdowns and a field goal.
Vance won, in the sense that he credibly wore his normy face for two hours. But Walz won whenever Vance was directly confronted with his endless string of Trumpian lies and half-truths.
Yes, I’ve been in that locker room. He looked pugnacious.
We’ll have to disagree, then, that that was an especially aggressive or pugnacious look.
There was one thing that Vance said in the debate that I wish Walz had noticed and had jumped on. In realtime had a very Walzian response to it in my head. It had to do when they were talking about Trump’s tax cuts. Vance twice referred to “putting more in people’s paychecks.”
Walz, looking directly into the camera (in my imagination):
“Ah yes. I think there are millions of people watching who remember getting more in their paychecks. Only it wasn’t because Trump reduced their taxes, it was because Trump reduced their witholding. A lot of Americans actually believed they got a tax cut, only to be shocked and dismayed the following April when they did their taxes. They went in wanting to know how big their tax refund would be, only to find out they had a big bill to pay instead. If you want to brag about Trump bamboozling all those folks at home right now and making them scramble to find the money to pay those bills, well… you go right ahead.”
When I watched JD Vance, I could not help but see how history is repeating itself. And how the observations of Bob Altemeyer’s research are playing out.
JD Vance is a social dominator. Social dominator’s think (and often say) the most important skill to have is to be able to lie effortlessly on demand. Social dominators also want to be at the seat of power to manipulate power. JD Vance is a younger Dick Cheney. Vance is going to sit at the convicted felon’s side and pull the levers he needs to pull to run things. I have not yet seen evidence that Vance is more capable than Dick Cheney, but Vance’s rise has been faster.
The tragedy of the social dominators is that they rarely learn their limits and behave. They take and manipulate until they are fired or removed.
One of the more curious aspects of the VP debate last night was Vance’ repeated invocation of “the Harris administration…”. He must’ve done so at least a dozen or more times and each time it seemed as if he were baiting a trap. Fortunately (?), Walz didn’t bite but I’m left wondering: What would have been the punchline?
“….But he absolutely helped his own prospects for 2028, or 2032, or whenever Trump leaves the scene.
“Or gets pushed.”
So.. I’ve thought about defenestration wrt Trump and his putative VP. Not sure what scares me more — a Trump 47 or a JD presidency.
Best online navel gazing over who showed what in the debate: Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/oct/02/jd-vance-debate-performance — titled, JD Vance’s debate lines were so polished you could forget they made no sense
– by Moira Donegan