J.D. Vance and Mar-a-Loco
Oct. 28, 2021
Credit...Ben Wiseman
By Frank Bruni
Mr. Bruni is a contributing Opinion writer who was on the staff of The Times for more than 25 years.
I seriously doubt that J.D. Vance has scraped the bottom of his barrel — it appears to be a roomy barrel, and he seems to be poised to sink lower and lower — but a tweet of his late last week will surely endure as one of the boldest markers of his descent.
It came shortly after Alec Baldwin’s apparently accidental shooting, with a prop gun, of a cinematographer. The cinematographer had died. And Vance, who identifies himself as “Christian” even before “husband” and “father” on his Twitter profile, appealed to the head of that social media platform to “let Trump back on” because “we need Alec Baldwin tweets.”
Interesting interpretation of “need.” Interesting interpretation of “Christian.” Interesting all around — but, more than that, sickening. Vance, who’s campaigning on his values as he seeks a Senate seat, uses a tragic killing as a timely calling to taunt a liberal actor and blow air kisses at a pathological ex-president. Never mind the loss of the cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins, 42, or the grief of her young son and others who loved her. Let’s mud wrestle.
Vance was hardly alone. Proving that the crab apple falls less than a millimeter from the tree, Donald Trump Jr. began using his website to sell, for $27.99, T-shirts with the message, “Guns don’t kill people, Alec Baldwin kills people.” What a wit. Which I mean as a suffix, with a nit just beforehand.
But Vance, the author of “Hillbilly Elegy,” is an especially sad story — an elegy all his own, though what has died isn’t a way of life but the dignity and decency that many politicians once felt compelled at least to pantomime.
He comes to politics as an outsider, the kind who usually pledges to liberate us from the muck. He comes from a period and a perch of acclaim, earned through the eloquence and empathy of “Hillbilly Elegy.”
But he has jettisoned eloquence and empathy to embrace the muck. His sequel to a distinctive best seller is a copycat narrative, the default Republican story these days, a tale of moral degeneration and flamboyant hypocrisy that has been told by Ted Cruz, by Kevin McCarthy, by almost too many members of Congress and would-be members of Congress to count.
Its theme: Whatever you said before, whatever you felt before and whoever you were before matter less than your fealty to Trump. Most Republicans have wagered that the road to office runs through Mar-a-Loco, where you must walk barefoot across the hot ashes of your incinerated pride to kneel at his throne and feed a bit of your soul to him.
Vance, to be sure, didn’t initially present himself as a liberal or Democrat or even any particular kind of Republican — not in his book, not in discussions of it. And the people whose estrangement from the American dream he focused on were, indeed, the people who found themselves courted by and drawn to Trump.
But he did express revulsion at Trump. “My god what an idiot,” he tweeted in October 2016, a month before the presidential election, in which he voted for a third-party candidate, Evan McMullin.
Also on Twitter, Vance called Trump “reprehensible.” And elsewhere he complained that Trump was encouraging white working-class voters to wallow in anger and resentment, and avoid personal responsibility by blaming others for their problems.
J.D. Vance announced his Senate run at a rally in July.
Then Senator Rob Portman, an Ohio Republican, decided not to run for re-election in 2022 and Vance joined a crowded field of contenders for the Republican nomination for Portman’s seat. He had to compete against the Trump-worshiping likes of Josh Mandel, who has foamed at the mouth about “Mexican gangbangers” and “Muslim terrorists.”
Surprise, surprise: Vance deleted his old Trump-insulting tweets. He made his pilgrimage of atonement to Mar-a-Loco. He groveled. And he explained all of this in terms of Trump’s admirable performance as president, which supposedly won him over. He was clearly watching a different movie than many of the rest of us were.
Matt Lewis, a conservative columnist for The Daily Beast, wrote several months ago that Vance’s transformation was an “example of how Trump has co-opted or corrupted an entire generation of potential young conservative stars.” Lewis also noted that what Vance “has flip-flopped on is more than just Trump, it’s also the politics of anger and grievance and victimhood.”
Vance has devolved further since that column. On Twitter he bizarrely lashed out at the Times columnist Paul Krugman as “one of many weird cat ladies who have too much power in our country,” then went after Baldwin in a tactless way at a tactless time. So I’ll update Lewis’s assessment. Vance has flip-flopped on the politics of adolescent mockery as well.
But he gets points for occasional honesty. Shortly after declaring his Senate candidacy on July 1, in an interview with Molly Ball for Time magazine, he acknowledged his past opposition to Trump and bluntly conceded that he needed “to just suck it up and support him.”
Suck it up he has — and how. If this politics thing doesn’t work out for him, he has a potentially huge career as a vacuum.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/28/opinion/jd...e9f650852d
Oct. 28, 2021
Credit...Ben Wiseman
By Frank Bruni
Mr. Bruni is a contributing Opinion writer who was on the staff of The Times for more than 25 years.
I seriously doubt that J.D. Vance has scraped the bottom of his barrel — it appears to be a roomy barrel, and he seems to be poised to sink lower and lower — but a tweet of his late last week will surely endure as one of the boldest markers of his descent.
It came shortly after Alec Baldwin’s apparently accidental shooting, with a prop gun, of a cinematographer. The cinematographer had died. And Vance, who identifies himself as “Christian” even before “husband” and “father” on his Twitter profile, appealed to the head of that social media platform to “let Trump back on” because “we need Alec Baldwin tweets.”
Interesting interpretation of “need.” Interesting interpretation of “Christian.” Interesting all around — but, more than that, sickening. Vance, who’s campaigning on his values as he seeks a Senate seat, uses a tragic killing as a timely calling to taunt a liberal actor and blow air kisses at a pathological ex-president. Never mind the loss of the cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins, 42, or the grief of her young son and others who loved her. Let’s mud wrestle.
Vance was hardly alone. Proving that the crab apple falls less than a millimeter from the tree, Donald Trump Jr. began using his website to sell, for $27.99, T-shirts with the message, “Guns don’t kill people, Alec Baldwin kills people.” What a wit. Which I mean as a suffix, with a nit just beforehand.
But Vance, the author of “Hillbilly Elegy,” is an especially sad story — an elegy all his own, though what has died isn’t a way of life but the dignity and decency that many politicians once felt compelled at least to pantomime.
He comes to politics as an outsider, the kind who usually pledges to liberate us from the muck. He comes from a period and a perch of acclaim, earned through the eloquence and empathy of “Hillbilly Elegy.”
But he has jettisoned eloquence and empathy to embrace the muck. His sequel to a distinctive best seller is a copycat narrative, the default Republican story these days, a tale of moral degeneration and flamboyant hypocrisy that has been told by Ted Cruz, by Kevin McCarthy, by almost too many members of Congress and would-be members of Congress to count.
Its theme: Whatever you said before, whatever you felt before and whoever you were before matter less than your fealty to Trump. Most Republicans have wagered that the road to office runs through Mar-a-Loco, where you must walk barefoot across the hot ashes of your incinerated pride to kneel at his throne and feed a bit of your soul to him.
Vance, to be sure, didn’t initially present himself as a liberal or Democrat or even any particular kind of Republican — not in his book, not in discussions of it. And the people whose estrangement from the American dream he focused on were, indeed, the people who found themselves courted by and drawn to Trump.
But he did express revulsion at Trump. “My god what an idiot,” he tweeted in October 2016, a month before the presidential election, in which he voted for a third-party candidate, Evan McMullin.
Also on Twitter, Vance called Trump “reprehensible.” And elsewhere he complained that Trump was encouraging white working-class voters to wallow in anger and resentment, and avoid personal responsibility by blaming others for their problems.
J.D. Vance announced his Senate run at a rally in July.
Then Senator Rob Portman, an Ohio Republican, decided not to run for re-election in 2022 and Vance joined a crowded field of contenders for the Republican nomination for Portman’s seat. He had to compete against the Trump-worshiping likes of Josh Mandel, who has foamed at the mouth about “Mexican gangbangers” and “Muslim terrorists.”
Surprise, surprise: Vance deleted his old Trump-insulting tweets. He made his pilgrimage of atonement to Mar-a-Loco. He groveled. And he explained all of this in terms of Trump’s admirable performance as president, which supposedly won him over. He was clearly watching a different movie than many of the rest of us were.
Matt Lewis, a conservative columnist for The Daily Beast, wrote several months ago that Vance’s transformation was an “example of how Trump has co-opted or corrupted an entire generation of potential young conservative stars.” Lewis also noted that what Vance “has flip-flopped on is more than just Trump, it’s also the politics of anger and grievance and victimhood.”
Vance has devolved further since that column. On Twitter he bizarrely lashed out at the Times columnist Paul Krugman as “one of many weird cat ladies who have too much power in our country,” then went after Baldwin in a tactless way at a tactless time. So I’ll update Lewis’s assessment. Vance has flip-flopped on the politics of adolescent mockery as well.
But he gets points for occasional honesty. Shortly after declaring his Senate candidacy on July 1, in an interview with Molly Ball for Time magazine, he acknowledged his past opposition to Trump and bluntly conceded that he needed “to just suck it up and support him.”
Suck it up he has — and how. If this politics thing doesn’t work out for him, he has a potentially huge career as a vacuum.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/28/opinion/jd...e9f650852d
