J.D. Vance, Donald Trump Jr., Elon Musk, and the Coming Far-Right Fascist Dynasty
J.D. Vance, Donald Trump Jr., Elon Musk, and the Coming Far-Right Fascist Dynasty
The MAGA agenda goes beyond a four-year second Trump term or a medium-term shift in how America does business. It’s a scheme to ensure your kids and grandkids don’t live in America as you’ve known it.
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Introduction
When Donald Trump chose Ohio senator J.D. Vance as his running mate, journalists took the news one of two ways. Either they harped on all the terrible things Vance has said about his new boss in the past—voluminous but essentially immaterial reportage, as Americans no longer care about hypocrisy unless it scores their “team” political points—or they focused on how little Vance brings to the 2024 Republican ticket.
Yes, Vance has said terrible things about Trump, and yes, he appeals only to the same voters Trump already appeals to and very few others, but is that really the worst that can be said about him? That he supports a national abortion ban, that like Trump he has no interest in keeping Europe free from Russian war crimes, and that much like his new political patron he’s a sort of rich author and entrepreneur with ties to the sketchiest billionaires in America, one who talks a good game about identifying with the American working class but doesn’t support any policies that would benefit them?
All this is true—and would be more surprising and troubling in a world where the 2024 Republican presidential nominee wasn’t a confirmed rapist, a 34-times-convicted felon, a serial sexual predator, a serial philanderer, a man who currently owes nearly half a billion in civil fines for the torts he’s committed, a traitor to the United States, a defendant in pending criminal cases in Georgia and D.C. and an unindicted criminal co-conspirator in at least three jurisdictions (New York, Arizona, and Michigan), a man who told over 30,500 provable lies when he was president, and… need we go on?
Must we add in all the middle-class contractors he screwed out the money he owed them after they’d done the work for him their contracts required? His admission that he won’t pay overtime, contrary to federal law? The six bankruptcies? All the foreign dictators he does business with? His historic two impeachments (I, II)? Violations of the Emoluments Clause? His injection of violent and racist rhetoric into U.S. politics to a degree not seen since the Civil Rights Era? The Trump University scam? How about his stealing from charities? Calling American soldiers “losers” and “suckers”?
The point is, these and other atrocities that were introduced to our national political discourse by Trump launching a political career—and this list is by no means close to exhaustive—positively dwarf anything that could be said about Trump’s running mate, so how much does the latter category of content move the political needle for anyone?
It’s all weaksauce—as clearly MAGA voters broadly writ, and a significant percentage of the white working class in American specifically, decided years ago (with the Tea Party) that Democrats supporting policies that benefit them is far less important than Republicans saying they do. Why? Because these voters have reasons for supporting Republicans that they simply don’t want to talk about. In some instances what’s in play are cultural debates or religious dogma, but often enough it’s something darker.
Is the mysterious missing piece here a swirling maelstrom of latent racism, misogyny, antisemitism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, ableism, and/or Islamophobia?
Sure, for some MAGAs it probably is.
Is it that these voters categorically do not read the mainstream news outlets governed by tried-and-tested journalistic ethics, digesting instead a steady diet of disinformation each day that perverts their understanding of our world? Sure, that’s definitely one of causes of the false consciousness the Republican establishment has engendered in the working class. Do some MAGAs vote against their interests because of peer pressure (including familial pressure), lack of any political news consumption at all, a nihilistic bent, the treatment of politics as entertainment rather than consequential policy, or another eldritch causal chain political scientists habitually miss? Surely a possibility.
But whatever the reason for nearly half of Americans being willing to vote for literally the least qualified presidential candidate in American history—yes, going back to the Founding—nothing media has been saying about J.D. Vance is going to change that, whether it’s his bizarre opining on “childless cat ladies” or his general stiffness in all social settings. Sure, these elements of Vance’s political persona could act as a GOTV (“Get Out the Vote”) goosing for the Democratic Party, but they’re not shifting votes.
Candidly, running-mate picks rarely do—even if Vance is one of the least popular ever.
Vance would, if he ever became President of the United States, do more or less exactly what Trump has and (if re-elected) will again: sell naked populism to the masses while spending his time in office blocking every Democratic bill intended to make life fairer and better for the non-rich. While Vance, unlike Trump, is a military veteran, his time in the Marines was spent in comms—so he wasn’t the Hollywood-style killing machine Trump cartoonishly likes to imagine all American soldiers as. Certainly, if Trump has never been hurt politically for being a notorious draft-dodger, and if he already has significant support in the military and law enforcement (which appears to be the case, though it makes no sense given that he has contempt for our troops and is a criminal), there’s no clear way in which Vance’s service significantly advantages the GOP ticket.
So if Mr. Trump didn’t need Vance on the ticket for what many journalists now oddly insist he helps with—the working-class vote in President Biden’s fabled “blue wall” of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, where any MAGA voters are already as sure Trump is in their corner as historians are that the man has no interest in helping them whatsoever—what, exactly, did Trump want Vance for? It certainly isn’t nothing.
The answer may surprise you. And it should certainly unnerve all of us. Because it has nothing to do with this election cycle, and everything to do with the future of America.