As a vice presidential pick, JD Vance has been a huge mistake, as even some of Donald Trump's friends in the Mar-a-Lago mob and media have shown. grant.
Vance, a younger version of Trump, is not bringing new voters to the Republican side; his formula is MAGA squared. He has probably lost more than a few votes by smearing millions of people. “Childless cat ladies”“—not least of which are pop icons Taylor Swift and Jennifer Aniston. He spends much of his time on the defensive over past comments, even as he creates new controversies on his rounds of right-wing podcasts, radio shows and conservative conferences. Rather than clean up his messes, he doubles down, allergic (like Trump) to apologies. And Trump, confronted more than once about something Vance has said, dismissively notes that he hasn’t spoken to his potential vice president. Ouch.
Opinion columnist
Jackie Calmes
Jackie Calmes brings a critical eye to the national political scene. She has decades of experience covering the White House and Congress.
However, as rotten as Vance is, he is a complete disaster at his day job: US senator from Ohio.
Most public officials pride themselves on delivering good constituent service, especially in tough times. Vance, oddly, is suddenly the undisputed master of constituent service. thisservice, to the point of putting lives at risk.
The problems he has created lately for tens of thousands of his constituents in Springfield, Ohio (all to demagogue the issue of immigration) constitute political malpractice like we have never seen before, as Trump loves to say things about almost anything. Only this time it is true.
For weeks, Vance has pointed to Springfield as the epitome of a (white) American community overrun by people of color from another country — in this case, Haitians who fled their nation’s epic poverty and violence to settle legally in Ohio, taken in by employers desperate for hard workers. Vance, who once wrote so movingly about “hillbilly” families like his own coming to Ohio from Kentucky seeking opportunity but enduring hostility, is so intent on political advancement that he is now the hostile one.
And once Trump picked up on Vance's lies about Haitian immigrants stealing and eating Springfield residents' cats and dogs, ducks and geese —transmitting the conspiracy talk to 67 million people For those who watched him debate Kamala Harris on Tuesday last week, all hell broke loose for Vance's voters.
Despite assurances from local officials early on that the reports were nonsense generated on social media, more than 30 bomb threats shut down City Hall, two elementary schools, two hospitals and two universities for a time. The threats, which have continued this week, turned out to be false. But the fear and disruption in Springfield were real. By Tuesday, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine had sent The girl’s father sent state police to Springfield schools to encourage frightened parents to send their children to school, while warning of hate groups coming to Springfield. “It makes me sad that we have to get to this point,” one mother told the local newspaper.
Indeed. But your senator wasn't sad, just angry, because he's getting bad press. Consider this kind of arrogant and selfish person. tweet From Vance on Tuesday: “I am still waiting for a correction and an apology from left-wing journalists. They lied about these bomb threats to silence us. Why? Because they don’t want to talk about Kamala Harris’s border policies that make housing unaffordable for American citizens.”
Apologies? The journalists did not lie; there were bomb threats. Those trying to silence Vance’s alarmism are not journalists, but Springfield’s police chief, school superintendent, mayor and governor, all Republicans. Springfield Mayor Rob Rue has repeatedly said: implored Vance and Trump must stop: “All these federal politicians who have harmed our city must know that they are hurting it and that it was their words that did it.”
And “left-wing journalists” aren’t the only ones checking out Vance’s falsehoods. Conservative commentator Kevin D. Williamson this week had the best carry In a Dispatch article subtitled “A rather long story about something that didn’t happen”: “You can send little JD to Yale to become cultured, you can send him to Silicon Valley to become rich, and you can send him to the Senate to become powerful, but you can’t stop him from being what he apparently wants to be: Cleetus, the toothless Twitter troll.”
Speaking of apologies, Vance has yet to offer one to Nathan Clark, the father of an 11-year-old boy who died last year in a bus crash. Clark publicly asked Vance to apologize for exploiting his son's death as if it were a murder committed by a Haitian immigrant.
Meanwhile, DeWine has been on television fact-checking Vance's lies. Far from being pet eaters, Haitian residents are valued employees at Springfield businesses that have boosted the local economy, the governor said. saying On Sunday, on ABC's “This Week,” he acknowledged that “when you go from a population of 58,000 to adding 15,000 people, you're going to have some challenges” — housing, health care, language and cultural differences. “And we're addressing those issues.”
He is not the junior senator from Ohio. “If I have to create stories to get the American media to actually pay attention to the suffering of the American people, then that is what I am going to do,” he said defiantly. said CNN on Sunday.
The cardinal rule for those choosing a vice president is to do no harm. Vance is doing plenty. That's why he's a terrible candidate and an even worse senator.
@jackiekcalmes
