The emptiness of JD Vance

“[T]here have always been demagogues willing to exploit the people who believe crazy shit.”

Someone once explained that “there have always been demagogues willing to exploit the people who believe crazy shit.”

Then, he decided to become one and do so himself.

JD Vance, Ohio’s much-junior senator, is the emptiest vessel the Donald Trump could find when looking for a vice presidential nominee who could take the place of the one whose life Trump’s followers would eagerly have ended on January 6, 2021.

Vance is a model of the empty vessel that Trump himself proved to be. Vance’s emptiness, when combined with his will for power, makes him the perfect running mate for Trump — and makes all the more clear why neither man is fit for public office.

Both men are so focused on amassing power that I cannot think of a belief they hold that could not be tossed aside if their ability to obtain more power required them to do so.

The New York Times’s reporting on Vance’s long friendship with and conversations with a transgender law school classmate — and now-former friend — is a reminder of how Trump poisons all who come within his orbit but also a stark sign of just how eager Vance was to drink Trump’s hemlock.

Because it is the path, Vance has become an extremely anti-LGBTQ politician.

In his first year in the United States Senate, Vance introduced a bill to ban gender-affirming medical care for minors nationwide. He also introduced a bill to ban passports from being issued with “the unspecified (X) gender designation.”

These were priorities — messaging priorities, given that neither had more than two co-sponsors, but priorities nonetheless — that Vance decided he needed to do something about in his first year in the Senate.

This is the same man who, the Times tells us, once wished his friend, Sofia Nelson, a happy pride before heading out to attend San Francisco pride himself. That, though, was before he had to think otherwise.

Now, this empty vessel wants to be an old man’s vice president — the heir apparent to the MAGA movement.

There have “always been demagogues willing to exploit the people who believe crazy shit,” as Vance wrote on December 9, 2015. What he ignored, however, was those people the demagogues leave harmed in the wake of their destruction.

At the time, in discussion with Nelson, Vance criticized the fact that “the Republican Party offers nothing that’s as attractive as the demagogue.”

A little more than eight-and-a-half years later, Vance decided that’s just fine and is running to be vice demagogue.

The friend, Nelson, is a public defender in Michigan.

I’ll be back with the news on Monday, but, for now, go read about the empty vessel and the friendship he destroyed as a consequence of his efforts to get ahead.

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Elsewhere

In Venezuela, an authoritarian could lose.

[Update, 12:20 a.m. July 29: Authoritarian President Nicolás Maduro’s “electoral council said Maduro won with 51 percent of the vote to [opposition candidate Edmundo] González’s 44 percent,” despite exit polling that showed independent González with twice as many votes as Maduro.]