J.D. Vance: Not So Complex As He Thinks

Our Vice President does not in fact contain multitudes

Back during the presidential campaign last year, at least one journalist pressed then–VP hopeful J.D. Vance on the subject of how he had managed to go, in a handful of years, from denouncing Trump as a “demagogue,” who might yet prove to be “America’s Hitler”—to being the same man’s running mate.

Vance attributed the sudden reversal to his own emotional and intellectual “complexity.”

I once made the mistake of taking this comment almost seriously. I thought that indeed—in J.D.’s evolution from Never Trumper to top henchman—there was a mystery to be unraveled. Or, perhaps, a kind of Shakespearian tragedy. How could a person so completely betray their own stated principles and violate their moral selves? Vance’s fall from grace had an arc to it that I found interesting.

I realize now that I was wrong. It’s not interesting. It’s boring.

It’s not complex. It’s the simplest thing in the world.

I will explain. But first—a few illustrations.

We saw the New Vance on full display the last few weeks. At a press conference at the start of the shutdown, Vance was asked to explain how he could justify Trump’s decision to post an AI-generated deepfake of Democratic leadership wearing a cartoon mustache and sombrero. Vance said “the president’s joking and we’re having a good time.”

Journalists next asked Vance whether the cartoon meme was racist. “I don’t even know what that means,” Vance replied.

Of course, Vance knows perfectly well what that means. And yes, the video was racist—as Vance also knows. The administration’s primary talking point during the shutdown has been to press the bogus claim that undocumented immigrants will benefit from healthcare subsidies. It doesn’t take a degree from Yale to spot the meaning implied, then, by draping an image of Hakeem Jeffries in a cartoon poncho.

But Vance knows his role as Trump’s VP is not to say the truth—but to show he will say whatever it takes to demonstrate abject fealty to the president.

Last month, Vance similarly took to social media to defend the Trump administration’s claim that the—now 21, as of yesterday—people they have murdered so far in unprovoked drone strikes in the Caribbean all really deserved it. “Killing cartel members who poison our fellow citizens is the highest and best use of our military,” Vance said in a social media post at the time.

The administration has provided no evidence to support their contention that the people on these boats are “cartel members”—or to explain what gives them the right under U.S. or international law to kill criminal suspects summarily, without charge or trial, even if they are.

But Vance officially at least seemed to commit to the party line that the people being extrajudicially executed in this manner are all “terrorists” and “criminals.”

But then, last month—with a wink and a chuckle—Vance seemed to acknowledge that his administration might just be murdering totally innocent people on a whim. “I wouldn’t go fishing right now in that part of the world,” Vance “joked” at a rally in mid-September. (Trump has made similar remarks about terrorizing Venezuelan fishermen with the threat of random and arbitrary death.)

How are we to account for someone who—speaking in one mode—can tell journalists that he acknowledges why people might have “due process concerns” about executing people arbitrarily on the high seas—

—a person who can, when trying to impress a certain type of New York Times podcast audience, admit that maybe the U.S. government does have some moral or legal “obligations […] to people who in some ways are fleeing violence”—

—how are we to make sense of a person who can say stuff like that—but then, speaking to another audience, can crack a “joke” about murdering fishermen in the Caribbean Sea—just because they are poor; just because they are foreign; just because the U.S. thinks it can get away with it?

Is it because, as he insists, Vance is “complex”? Is it because he contains multitudes?

Or is it instead the oldest and tritest story ever told? The one in which a person sells their soul for money and power.

What could be more familiar from the pages of history? What could be less surprising? Alas, moral cowardice and corruption and opportunism have been more the rule than the exception in the annals of human experience.

Vance would be interesting—would have “complexity”—if he had ever balked at one of Trump’s unconstitutional demands. Someone like Mike Pence—who followed Trump almost every step of the way—but ultimately drew a line; who said he would go this far, but no further—he is genuinely interesting. He is a person who merits the title complex.

Whereas there’s nothing remotely complicated about a person like Vance. An insecure drip who would have remained a “Never Trumper” if it suited his interests, but who hopped onto the Trump train once he realized it was the only one leaving the station.

Someone who concocted a false self to present to the world; then mistook his own insincerity for complexity. Someone who confused wearing a perpetual mask with having layers of personality.

Someone who had been so long insincere himself that he projected his insincerity onto the world at large. “Isn’t that how most people are?” as he asked in a revealing moment in that New York Times interview. Evidently, he had become dimly aware that he was cosplaying his way through life—and so he concluded that the whole country must be doing it too. “Not I am a fake,but America’s phoney!” as a Vance-line character puts it in a poem by E.E. Cummings. (Don’t ever say Hoover gave nobody beer—counsels Cummings—nor Trump either.)

Hollowness and a moral void are not the same thing as complexity.

Lying to advance one’s personal interests and cling to the coattails of the powerful is not a mystery that needs explaining.

The motives behind such a cynical about-turn could be unraveled by any fifth grader. They don't require a Shakespeare to explain them.

The Trump administration is full of such types. People who have contradicted their own past statements in order to court Trump’s favor. People who have proven themselves willing to say and do anything if it will keep them in power. Marco Rubio. Pam Bondi. Kristi Noem. J.D. Vance. Pete Hegseth. They are all cut from the same cloth.

..A ruthless few

Claiming as their rights the wrongs they do,

Ready to advance themselves

And secure high posts and powers for which

No intrinsic merits qualify them

At no matter how great a cost

In the sacrifice of all human values

—A few whose only distinction

Is cowardice, cruelty, and greed

—as Hugh MacDiarmid wrote in the 1930s—of the types of faux-intellectuals who helped the fascists seize power in Spain, Italy, and Germany.

Is there anything to be learned from such people? Is there any great mystery or “complexity” they reveal?

MacDiarmid had an answer to that question too—writing elsewhere:

It is a God-damned lie to say that these

Saved, or knew, anything worth a man’s pride.

They were professional murderers and they took

Their blood money and impious risks […]

—like: bombing innocent fishermen from the skies, perhaps? Abducting innocent people from the streets and deporting them to torture prisons in El Salvador? Disappearing fathers and mothers to fetid swamps in the Everglades?

There is indeed nothing to be learned from such people. They disclose no mystic depths. The best that can be said of them was—MacDiarmid concluded—that:

In spite of all their kind some elements of worth

With difficulty persist here and there on earth.