The Brazen, Absurd, and Dangerous Hypocrisy of JD Vance

Republican vice presidential nominee Sen. JD Vance speaks at the Georgia Faith and Freedom Coalition dinner in Atlanta on September 16. Mike Stewart/AP

The below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial.

Hypocrisy is the fuel of MAGA. It decries “crooked” politicians, but its leader is a lying cheater and convicted felon who has flouted numerous ethics guidelines and been found to have engaged in fraud. It relies on the political support of conservative Christians who profess family values, but it worships a narcissist who has engaged in immoral and crass conduct (including sexual assault) that violates the core tenets of Christianity and who has demonstrated no sincere allegiance to faith. It claims to be a movement for hard-working, middle-class Americans, yet it embraces a politician and party that has provided whopping tax cuts for the wealthy elite and threatened to eliminate health care coverage for millions of Americans. Consequently, it’s no surprise that Donald Trump and JD Vance have plunged neck-deep into the muck of hypocrisy, as they exploit the two recent attempted assassinations of Trump to accuse the Democrats of debasing the public discourse with harsh rhetoric that casts Trump as a threat to democracy and of encouraging political violence.

This is particularly rich after Trump and Vance whipped up the phony and racist claim that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were purloining pets and turning them into meals. Their baseless demagoguery—in which the pair demonized legal migrants as illegal—led to bomb threats against schools and government agencies in that town. Yet, as I noted a while back, Trump, like any autocrat-wannabe, is a master of rubber-and-glue tactics. So now his line is: I’m not a threat to democracy. The people calling me a threat to democracy are the real threat to democracy. He knows that he doesn’t need to win this argument to defuse this line of criticism. Trump only has to muddy the waters and create a debate over who’s a danger in order to undercut this fundamental argument against his restoration. Debating this may seem absurd. After all, if a fellow who refused to accept legitimate election tallies, secretly schemed to overturn the results, and with his lies incited an insurrectionist mob to storm the Capitol to prevent the peaceful transfer of power isn’t a threat to democracy, who is? But this I’m-not/you-are bullshit could work, especially with low-engaged voters who might absorb the impression that there’s a fight to be had on this front.

Vance has taken point on this mission.

In a very long social media post, he slammed Democrats for degrading the national discourse by depicting Trump as a menace and blamed them for the assassination attempts: “The rhetoric is out of control…It nearly got Donald Trump killed twice…Kamala Harris has said that ‘Democracy is on the line’ in her race against President Trump…For years, Kamala Harris’s campaign surrogates have said things like ‘Trump has to be eliminated.’” And in the same breath, Vance defended his assaults on the Haitians and his circulation of the “the infamous pet stories—which, again, multiple people have spoken about (either on video or to me or my staff),” ignoring that these stories have repeatedly been proved false. He even had the chutzpah to suggest that criticism of his dissemination of this disinformation was the equivalent of censorship.

In a speech, he continued to try to claim the higher ground: “I do think that we should take this opportunity to call for a reduction in the ridiculous and inflammatory political rhetoric coming from too many corners of our politics…We can disagree with one another; we can debate one another. But you cannot tell the American people that one candidate is a fascist and if he’s elected it is going to be the end of American democracy.” (In response, CNN aired video of Trump on repeated instances decrying Harris as a “fascist” and a “communist.”)

And in another venue, Vance proclaimed, “We need to remember above and beyond that we must love our neighbors, that we must treat other people as we hope to be treated…We must love our God and let it motivate us in how we enact public policy.”

Vance doesn’t believe this. For years—long before his campaign to vilify the legal immigrants of Springfield—he has eagerly engaged in culture warring that involved dehumanizing and delegitimizing his fellow citizens. You’re familiar, no doubt, with his condescending disparagement of childless women who own cats. But that’s mild stuff for him.  

I’ve reported on instances when Vance has adopted harsh rhetoric and characterized the neighbors he doesn’t like as evildoers bent on destroying the United States. In September 2021, Vance, then a Senate candidate in Ohio, appeared on a podcast hosted by a fellow named Jack Murphy who ran a secretive men’s organization that claimed all major American institutions—universities, the media, the government, unions, professional organizations, nonprofits, and corporations—have been “infiltrated, corrupted, demoralized” and aim to “control you forever.” Murphy also once declared, “Feminists need rape.”

During this interview, Vance excoriated “elite culture” as corrupt and maintained that his success as an author and his stint as a venture capitalist had landed him in the middle of a “garbage liberal elite culture” that teaches citizens to hate America and that is dominated by wokeism, globalism, and social progressivism—the enemies of “traditional American culture.” He contended that the entire elite stratum of the United States was a subversive and malignant entity that plots to undermine the nation. His prescription: “Rip out like a tumor the current American leadership class and then reinstall some sense of American political religion, some sense of shared values.”

Vance called for a purge, and he had a plan: “One model is what happened to Germany after the Nazis lost or what happened to the Iraqis after Saddam Hussein, after we threw Saddam Hussein out. De-Nazification, de-Baathification.” Vance was comparing his political foes to the Nazis of Germany and the Baathists of Iraq—and the right had to go to war against them: “We need like a de-Baathification program but like a de-woke-ification program in the United States.” He even told Murphy that if Trump returned to the White House, Trump should ignore and contravene the law to mount an illegal effort to cleanse the civil service of anyone who was not loyal to the Trump cause: “When the courts stop you, stand before the country…and say the chief justice has made his ruling, now let him enforce it.” Vance cited Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orbán as a role model for a second Trump presidency. 

Vance was not toning anything down. His message to Murphy was that desperate times require desperate measures: “If we’re going to push back against it, we’re have to get pretty wild, pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.” This was no call for a reasonable debate over policy. It was a demand for vilification and vengeance.

This summer, as I reported, Vance went further. He endorsed a new book that dubbed progressives “unhumans” and claimed they are waging an “Irregular Communist Revolution” to annihilate American civilization. The volume, Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (and How to Crush Them), co-written by Jack Posobiec, a well-known alt-right agitator and conservative media personality who promoted the bonkers Pizzagate conspiracy theory, urged a crusade to wipe out the “unhumans.” The book termed them “people of anti-civilization” who are “ugly liars who hate and kill.”

This was hyper-othering of political rivals and rhetoric that certainly could provoke violence. The “unhumans,” the book maintained, were behind the Black Lives Matter movement, in charge of academia, and controlling corporations, the media, and even churches. “They just want an excuse to destroy everything,” Posobiec and co-author Joshua Lisec wrote. “They want an excuse to destroy you.”

Vance gave a thumbs-up to this hateful paranoia reminiscent of McCarthyism and provided a blurb that Posobiec and Lisec have used to peddle the book:

In the past, communists marched in the streets waving red flags. Today, they march through HR [Human Resources], college campuses, and courtrooms to wage lawfare against good, honest people. In Unhumans, Jack Posobiec and Joshua Lisec reveal their plans and show us what to do to fight back.

Repeating many of the assertions of the tinfoil-hat crowd, Posobiec (who was part of the fraudulent Stop the Steal movement) and Lisec insisted that the riot at the US Capitol was a “lawfare trap” sprung to “destroy” Trump’s followers and “make them an example to any other Republicans who want to get uppity in the future.” They maintained all was calm on Capitol Hill until guards “fired on the peaceful crowd with nonlethal munitions and flash-bangs.” They wrote, “It was all a trap” and the “insurrection hoax was used to begin a purge of Trump supporters from the military and from public life.” The rioters were “well-meaning patriots.”

The pair argued that the right must be vicious and adopt extreme and underhanded measures to defeat the “unhumans”: “Our study of history has brought us to this conclusion: Democracy has never worked to protect innocents from the unhumans. It is time to stop playing by rules they won’t.” As examples of those who successfully fought against “unhumans,” they cited Francisco Franco, Spain’s fascist dictator, and Augusto Pinochet, Chile’s fascist dictator. These two men they championed each waged brutal political violence. The Spanish government estimated that 114,000 Spanish civilians disappeared and were presumably killed by Franco forces during the Spanish civil war and his dictatorship. Pinochet disappeared and killed thousands. The book described Franco, who was backed by Nazi Germany, as “a great man of history.” And it justified the violence of Pinochet’s regime: “The story of tossing communists out of helicopter hails from Pinochet’s elimination of communism during the mid to late 1970s. Wherever Pinochet was, there was no communism.”

Ponder this: the Republican nominee for vice president commended a book that praised violent dictators and held them up as role models for the American right. By the way, this book was also extolled by Donald Trump Jr. (“teaches us how…to save the West”), Michael Flynn (“exposes their battle plans and offers a fifth-generation warfare system to fight back and win”), and Tucker Carlson (“Jack Posobiec sees the big picture and isn’t afraid to describe it.”)

Now Vance, who works for Trump, has the audacity to lecture others on the excesses of political rhetoric? He has demonized and demeaned his foes. He has called for purges. He has acclaimed a book that literally dehumanizes liberals and celebrates fascists who deployed horrific political violence. And there’s this: Not long ago, he told fellow conservatives, “The thing we have to take away from the last 10 years is that we really need be really ruthless when it comes to the exercise of power.”

With his calls for illegal and ruthless action, his backing of Trump’s lies about 2020, and his support for right-wingers who hail political violence and condemn progressives as “unhumans,” Vance is himself a threat to democracy. Which is why he, like Trump, huffs that the actual threat is posed by those who point out how he and Trump endanger the republic. This hypocrisy is a crucial element of a con concocted to conceal their extremism. Trump and Vance are claiming the mantle of champions of democracy so they can attain the power to subvert democracy. And if the media doesn’t cover this adequately—and if not enough voters see through their cynical ruse—they may get the chance to do so.

David Corn’s American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy, a New York Times bestseller, is available in an expanded paperback edition.