Despite post-debate polls saying otherwise, that’s what I keep reading in MAGA world. They say Vance was relaxed and well-spoken, unlike the nervous and unpolished Tim Walz. They say that “Vance was well-spoken!“. But being Trumpers, they don’t pay much attention to the lyrics anyway, just the stage show.
Sure, Vance is a lot more eloquent than the criminally-deranged motormouth at the top of his ticket but that’s a pretty low bar for comparison. Vance spoke like a guy who knows the answers to the questions but who’s had a lot of experience pivoting, dodging gotcha! questions and sticking to the company script.
Vance is a public relations shill, which in fact was his actual job in the Army in Iraq. He wasn’t a “journalist”, as he claims to have been. He was actually the nemesis of journalists. He was a US Army Public Information Officer. He worked in an air-conditioned office in Baghdad’s heavily-fortified Green Zone feeding shit to the mushrooms attending his press briefings. He was the Army’s liaison with an increasingly hostile international press pool. PIOs are slick as snot. Guys like Vance were the ones who covered up and tried to whitewash atrocities like CIA black sites, the My Lai and Nisour Square massacres, Abu Ghraib and Tail Hook despite the media already having incontrovertible evidence to the contrary. Guys like Vance are the point of the spear in the old cliche “The first casualty when war comes is Truth.“
He was an appropriate replacement for Mike Pence. Vance’s suitability to Trump depended on whether or not he would do what Pence refused to do: shit on the US Constitution and violate his oath of office. So of course he’s going to duck that question.
Those closing minutes of the VP debate weren’t an aberration. It was the curtain finally being lifted on the spineless, capricious hack that is JD Vance. Before Trump, he was the PR piss boy for Peter Thiel — a right wing billionaire who once wrote that “[I] no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible“. In fact, Vance is still in Thiel’s pocket. Vance’s loyalty to Thiel is well-documented as was Thiel contributing a record $15 million to Vance’s senatorial campaign. Thiel was also the guy who engineered the Mar A Lago meeting between Trump and Vance to smooth over their differences in preparation for his nomination. Thiel is the Man Behind The Scene playing the long game and the odds that Trump’s crumbling health won’t survive four years if he’s elected. Thiel is to Vance what Harlan Crow is to Clarence Thomas.
The 2024 GOP ticket is the Billionaire’s Boys Club: as corrupt as a banana republic and as populist as the Russian oligarchy.
Since that debate, the press has been all over Vance to get an answer to the question he refused to answer then: “Do you believe Trump lost the 2020 election?” We already know the answer to that because Vance is on the public record predicting way back in the summer of 2020 that Trump would lose and justifiably so. He followed it with an “I told you so” tour of the media after the election. He can’t run away from that. But back then he wasn’t in the batter’s box for the job of most powerful man in the world so he’s certainly trying to. He’s never shared his reasons for flip-flopping on his earlier comments, including that “Trump is America’s Hitler“. He does a jiggy dance to that question too.
I’ve since seen Vance do the same evasive pivot to a bizarre and unexplained rant about Harris and “censorship” on at least three subsequent interviews, the most damaging being with NY Times’ journalist, Lulu Garcia-Navarro, where she pressed him five times to stop gaslighting her and answer the friggin question. He slithered away from it every time.
Vance is the opposite of “transparency”. He’s a craven sock puppet willing to do or say anything for his shot at the big time and not being kicked off the ticket.
VOTE THESE BASTARDS OUT!