The operating principle of JD Vance's life in politics seems to be as follows: How can I serve every powerful person while appealing to literally no normal person? There is no boot he won't lick, no special interest he won't kowtow to, no family member he won't throw under the bus, in order to advance his standing in the administration of a man he previously saw as "America's Hitler." He'll even take on the grimy work when necessary.
So when it was time for Donald Trump's administration to address and blindly defend last week's killing of Renee Good by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent Jonathan Ross, they must have been relieved to remember this readily available cretin. Someone servile and charmless, someone who could absorb the reputational damage that might follow reckless endorsement of a point-blank execution by an officer of the federal government ... where was that guy when you need some shit eaten?
The vice president made a rare appearance in the White House press briefing room on Jan. 8. The previous day, he was willing to characterize the event as "a tragedy," albeit, according to him, one of Good's own making. But in his televised remarks, he decided to stake out a more extreme position. Even his boss, shown a new angle of the video that same day by the New York Times, found more ambiguity: “It’s a terrible scene ... I think it’s horrible to watch. No, I hate to see it.” When you are trailing Donald Trump on issues of nuance and delicacy around a tragedy, you should drop everything and walk into the wilderness.
In his press briefing, Vance could have offered cautious blanket statements while hitting his regime-centric messaging. Instead he went above and beyond the call of duty; he was worse than a replacement-level cog in the Trumpist machine. He showed up with a sneer and an armful of broad, indefensible statements about a case still unfolding in real time. Vance claimed that Good was part of a "left-wing network to attack, to dox, to assault and to make it impossible for our ICE officers to do their job.” When a reporter asked who was responsible for such a network, he said, “Well, it’s one of the things we’re going to have to figure out." Another reporter asked Vance if he was "preempting a thorough investigation" by speaking so declaratively about the incident at such an early stage.
"The Department of Homeland Security is already investigating this. But the simple fact is, what you see is what you get in this case. You have a woman who is trying to obstruct a legitimate law enforcement operation. Nobody debates that," Vance said. He continued, "You have a woman who aimed her car at a law enforcement officer and pressed on the accelerator. Nobody debates that." These were already indefensible claims at the time, and his lies looked even more unhinged as more details and more video emerged. Then again, Vance has always been willing to "create stories" when it is politically expedient to do so, even if it means inventing pet-eating Haitians.
True to form, it was not the human stakes that inspired emotion in Vance most; he was aroused by the opportunity to scold the media, his voice teetering into the strident debate-kid register that is his version of passion. "Everybody who has been repeating the lie that this was some innocent woman who was out for a drive in Minneapolis when a law enforcement officer shot at her, you should be ashamed of yourselves, every single one of you," Vance said, of a woman who, at the time and in the days since, has been totally legible as an innocent woman out for a drive in Minneapolis.
Through it all, it has been impossible to ignore just how much the vice president of the United States has been shaped by the esoteric, idiotic culture wars that play out in that muck of social media. On top of the evils of imperialism and police violence, we suffer the indignity of an administration that spends too much time posting on whatever's left of Twitter. Outside of his official remarks at the press briefing, Vance has continued to deny reality, at tedious length, in his online posts. The vice president of the United States is a guy that you would mute because he is so flatly repellent as he tries to make his points. It would be difficult to improve upon the writer Esther Rosenfield's description of his overall communication style: "tumblr wokescold cadence with kkk ideology." Vance is the sort of politician who sees the death of a civilian and immediately thinks about how to score points with anime Nazis. One can only hope that this narrow, profoundly anti-human approach dooms him to a future of irrelevance, but I'm not so sure how things work anymore.
One horrifying video from last week captures Good's last words to Ross: "That's fine, dude, I'm not mad at you." A few gunshots later, her car is careening into a parked car, and Ross is muttering, "Fuckin' bitch." Vance took this video—perhaps the publicly available footage most damaging to any pro-ICE gloss of this killing—and presented it to the world as if it endorsed his version of reality. This is a man who used to cry while watching Garden State. Now he posts numbered lists in defense of fascism. This is the trough that lies before him. May this hog keep his snout buried deep in there, until his boss one day forgets who he even is.
