We gotta beat this nerd

The one benefit to a Trump win would be Vance becoming a national embarrassment rather than one that can solely be blamed on Ohio.

As an Ohioian with politics to the left of Ronald Reagan’s corpse, I’m somewhat inured to my state government being a self-hating clique of grifters, charlatans, right-wing lizards, and drunken doomsday cultists.

But something about J.D. Vance, whom President Business Deals selected as his vice presidential running mate, currently puts him in a league of his own.

The vibes can best be surmised by this nearly three-year-old tweet that finally got the props it deserved yesterday:

A tweet from the illustrious Samuel, whom you should follow on Twitter.

Vance certainly had a meteoric rise in the American political system. But can he even play ball? Sure, the Hillbilly Cosplayer loves going on TV or speaking at a cocktail party in the swanky backyard of some Botox-addicted suburbanite who wants to abolish the Department of Education.

That’s not where the election will be decided, and Vance hates campaigning. His book, Hillbilly Elegy, seethes with disgust for the types of rural, working-class voters that became a critical cog in the Trump coalition.

Vance is only in office because billionaire Peter Thiel funded Vance as another pawn in his quest for political power through elected proxies.

And even without having to fundraise, Vance’s campaign was on life support before President Business Deals descended from the Heavens and touched him on the shoulder in the closing days before the election.

In retrospect, Vance wasn’t bullied enough as a child.

Vance once remarked that Trump might be America’s Hitler. It’s a quote you’ll probably be hearing a lot about between now and November. But a politician being a hypocritical worm isn’t shocking to most Americans.

It’s more important to stay focused on Vance’s fanatical views, like his wish for a national abortion ban with zero exceptions for rape or incest.

Or his willingness to fire anyone in the federal government that isn’t a right-wing freak:

"I think Trump is going to run again in 2024,” Vance said. “I think that what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people."

"And when the courts stop you,” he went on, “stand before the country, and say—" he quoted Andrew Jackson, giving a challenge to the entire constitutional order—“the chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.”

This is a description, essentially, of a coup.

"We are in a late republican period,” Vance said later, evoking the common New Right view of America as Rome awaiting its Caesar. "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.”

And this is the stuff he’s willing to say on podcasts! You probably don’t have to think too hard about what Vance says in his text groups with far-right teenagers, which is a normal thing for a normal 39-year-old man to spend his time doing.

There’s also his remarkable talent for sounding like a weird reactionary freak who should be sent to a re-education camp:

A since-deleted tweet in which Vance dabbled in Great Replacement Theory while partly blaming low fertility of (white) Americans on Daylight Savings Time.

Vance is also rated as an A+ candidate by Ohioans for Medical Freedom, which is an anti-vaccine lobbyist group that won’t be satisfied until infectious diseases from The Oregon Trail are back in vogue. In their world, it’s better to have died of polio at age seven than been aborted as a cluster of cells.

Vance’s defenders will claim he’s actually pro-worker, which might be true in contrast to the average Republican Senator who is some sort of industrialist baron who doesn’t think there should be a federal minimum wage.

But it’s impossible for Vance to actually be pro-worker when he’s a venture capitalist indebted to an even more repulsive venture capitalist in Thiel. And even if it were some great defender of the working class, he obviously doesn’t have the juice to carry those ideas within his party.

Vance couldn’t even convince the Republican Senate Caucus to give a damn about his Rail Safety Bill, co-sponsored with Senator Sherrod Brown, after Norfolk Southern nuked East Palestine. Vance’s pro-worker talk is tripe to dupe rubes into thinking he gives a damn about anyone outside his tax bracket or the next one he hopes to join.

Honestly, I don’t see how the selection helps Trump other than the obvious, but it’s not like Vance is the only middle-aged white guy willing to do whatever it takes for another political promotion. Vance barely won his Senate primary even with the help of President Business Deals, and then he underperformed compared to other statewide Republican candidates.

It’s not like Ohio will be a battleground state, either. Especially if the Democrats keep Joe Biden’s catatonic ass atop the ticket.

Trump’s pick ultimately came down to wanting a shameless vassal. And through that lens, it’s easy to see why Ohio’s most-prominent hillbilly cosplayer got the nod.

THOSE WMDs. How to survive three years in North Korea as a foreigner… The quiz shows scandals of the 1950s (and how they altered American television)… The disappearing of Rose Hanbury… How to properly archive digital files… You can buy this $5,500 home in Japan—and there are millions like them.