JD Vance Is the Future of MAGA

I filed this in mid-October, but the outcome of the 2024 election is expected to be known by the time you read these words. However, it is already clear how quickly Donald Trump’s Republican Party is speeding toward the tipping point when elections simply don’t matter anymore—the dream the authoritarian American right clings to as they fantasize about making America a greater a richly armed and financed version of Viktor Orbán’s Hungary.

That project, like much of the rest of MAGA’s agenda, went to the designated heir to the Trump movement, J.D. Vance. Ohio Senator Trump, his running mate, has made many stunning reversals and acts of intellectual self-abnegation in his new role as MAGA Czar of Ideology, but the most troubling of them all his appearance as an election refuser.

Keep in mind that Vance’s election denial is not the vulgar kind of bashing of the system promoted by Carian lakes and Tina Peterses the world. No, like his other works of demagogic indulgence — pet eating slander in SpringfieldOhio, or suggestions for domestic monitoring of the menstrual cycle— Vance’s attack on the conduct of our election takes the form of the “just ask questions” ploy of debate-trained podcasters.

It is remarkable that Vance rarely raised the subject himself, but he was often asked about it in a press interview after he failed to give a straight answer to a question during a vice presidential debate about the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. And in such conditions, he usually gets involved in another trick of podcasters – a weak demonstration of everyday life. During Vance’s infamous appearance on New York Times podcast The interviewhost Lulu Garcia-Navarro asked him five times if he believed Trump had lost the 2020 election. After a second investigation, he rebuffed the suggestion that big tech companies conspired to cover up the leak of Hunter Biden’s laptop, a favorite MAGA gripe that even if proven true, several universes lost relevance to the selective lies that prompted the attempt. coup d’état. Along with his various shenanigans, Vance returned to the robotic theme he made on the debate stage: that the obsession with voting in 2020 is a relic of the past and that he’s focused on “the future.” At the MAGA meetings, however, Vance was more candid: When a voter at a rally in Pennsylvania asked him if he believed Trump had lost in 2020, – he answered: “I think there are serious problems with 2020. So, Trump lost the election? Not the words I would use.’

However, the whole point of democratic elections is that they are not decided by the words you would use: the process is designed to produce a clear result, and anyone who rejects it based on a result they don’t like, as Trump and Vance did , does not fulfill the basic requirements of democratic governance. That’s why it would be a great service for interviewers who pressed Vance about the 2020 outcome to ask the important follow-up question: Would the general charge of voting also mean that Republican senators and representatives in the House of Representatives, along with governors and state legislators, also took office illegitimately? Or do the alleged fraud and malfeasance only apply if you lose?

This inability to follow the full logic of election denial is what allows Vance’s helpless anything-goes to thrive. Likewise, none of Vance’s press interlocutors asked him the equally obvious follow-up question after his empty statement that he only thinks about the future: does the claim that 2020 was rigged set the stage for rejecting the same caustic vigilance results future elections? In other words, the entire vile anti-democratic campaign of lies that led to the January 6th uprising is the future of any Republican Party with JD Vance in a leadership role.

The great irony is that Vance himself dismissed the brunt of the real-time J6 conspiracy theory in another podcast interview, CNN revealed. “I think if Biden is inaugurated, people will, you know, more or less accept it and it will be until the next fight,” Vance said.

This past heresy is probably why Vance constantly claims to be focused on the future. Like his long record as a die-hard “Never Trump” during the 2016 election cycle, this is a bad look for a MAGA political leader. It’s funny, though: Vance’s opposition to the man who would become his boss became the main line of analysis in Folder on 271 pages that Trump campaign officials collected on Vance when they were vetting him for the vice-presidential position. And if the investigative journalist (and ex Nation correspondent) Ken Klippenstein published this documentthe Trump-Vance campaign colluded with big tech mogul Elon Musk to suppress it. That is, when Vance is confronted with his story of election denial, his counterclaim (“Big Tech Censored Us!”) turns out to be something his own campaign has been doing for his own personal gain. Viktor Orbán could not have painted it better.