Defector

01/13/2026

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 needed some shit eaten?

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.