Why the "vetting" of JD Vance was a spectacular failure
The Trump campaign focused on exactly the wrong things.
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More evidence came to light last week confirming that the Trump campaign was blindsided by JD Vance’s recent history of expressing misogynist, homophobic, xenophobic, and often racist views, exemplified by his attack on “childless cat ladies.”
But instead of pressuring Vance to make a course correction after reports of his extremism came to light, the Trump campaign and its standard bearer have embraced Vance’s previously fringe views and made them centerpieces of their messaging.
The “Research Dossier” on JD Vance — which Ken Klippenstein published last week after a lengthy press embargo, despite “free speech” advocate Elon Musk’s suppression efforts — explains why the Trump campaign seemed initially unprepared for the avalanche of clips of Vance expressing the extremist views he’s been advancing over the past several years, in particular his obsession with the declining birthrates of “native born” Americans.
Despite engaging in an apparently exhaustive opposition research effort, the 176-page document’s authors paid relatively little attention to their subject’s current views. They instead focused heavily on Vance’s previous identity as a Trump critic — one he dropped around 2020, when he began actively planning to run for office in Ohio as an avid Trumper.
In any remotely conventional presidential campaign, the dossier would be viewed as a massive failure of research, particularly given that Vance rapidly became a historically unpopular vice presidential candidate as soon as his wacked out views came to light. But the 2024 Trump campaign is not conventional.
After initially being knocked for a loop by the revelations of Vance’s extremism, Trump and his campaign enthusiastically embraced it. In fact, they’ve actively encouraged the previously largely unknown Vance to set many of the themes for the campaign in its closing weeks, which are shaping up to feature a parade of rightwing conspiracizing that looks and sounds much like the previously fringe podcasts Vance frequented.
A bungled anti-Vance advocacy effort
The unnamed authors of the JD Vance “Research Dossier” were clearly not fans of him, and their document is far from a neutral recitation of the then-potential running mate’s potential vulnerabilities.
Much of the lengthy memo has a clear and unmistakable message: Vance has been a disloyal Trump critic and is a closet socialist who should not be on the GOP ticket. The authors do a good job supporting that thesis, even if much of their evidence is dated.
The dossier indicts Vance for stating, in 2016, that Trump has “obvious character flaws.” It devotes pages to detailing Vance’s biting attacks on Trump’s character during the 2016 campaign, including his description of Trump as “cultural heroin” for the working class, Vance’s statements that he believed women who accused Trump of sexual assault, and his contention that Trump was pandering to racism and xenophobia.
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In an obvious play to Trump’s hatred of past political opponents, the dossier devotes pages to a discussion of Vance’s purported sympathy for the Clintons and Barack Obama. It also dwells on Vance’s past criticisms of Trump’s response to the 2017 white supremacist riot in Charlottesville, soon after which Vance took Trump to task for failing to criticize neo-Nazis.
One of the largest portions of the dossier is devoted to demonstrating Vance’s allegedly suspiciously liberal economic views, including his criticisms of the benefits for the wealthy in Trump’s tax bill, which Vance contended would alienate blue collar voters. It also highlights Vance’s highly public opposition to Trump’s plan to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which he claimed was a betrayal of white working class citizens, including during his appearance on CNN and in a New York Times op-ed (as Greg Sargent recently detailed).
The authors of the Dossier went so far as to highlight Vance’s (apparently unsupported) claim that he lost an opportunity to join the Jeb Bush campaign because he was too opposed to tax cuts for the rich, apparently believing that Vance’s alleged rejection by Jeb would somehow be a red flag for Trump.
For Trump, however, the fact Vance once reviled him wasn’t a dealbreaker. Vance long ago supplicated himself, and there’s nothing Trump likes more than someone who grovels before him — the more complete the abandonment of prior principles such groveling requires, the better.
Accordingly, the dossier quite predictably failed as advocacy piece against Vance.
The curious gaps in the dossier
But the dossier’s failure as a work of opposition research was even more profound, because its authors failed to cogently present the most toxic, and recent, material about their subject — his conversion into the deeply xenophobic and openly misogynist crank who described Pete Buttigieg as a “childless cat lady” to Tucker Carlson in 2021.
It’s not as if the authors had no reason for concern. The dossier does include a discussion of Vance’s widely circulated remarks during 2022 that women should be pressured, if not forced, to remain married to physically abusive husbands, because — in Vance’s twisted mind — it’s better for their children. But the authors apparently failed to take the time to search out the vast bulk of the readily available material in which Vance exhibited his increasingly wacky and extremist views.
Since 2020, Vance has become among the most extreme “culture warriors” in the GOP mainstream, combining virulent misogyny and obsessive homophobia and transphobia with an abiding and paranoid strain of xenophobia — much of which has come together in his targeting of childless women (targeting that often also entails lightly coded attacks on gay people).
Evidence of Vance’s increasing extremism over past several years is hardly difficult to find. One merely needs to log on to YouTube or one of many social media sites to find the often fringe podcasts, rightwing conferences, and other platforms from which the voluble Vance has extemporized about his increasingly bizarre views on culture, gender, and fertility. Yet the dossier’s authors seem not to have reviewed much of this material and to have largely missed its significance when they did.
For example, while the dossier briefly mentions that some leftwing critics contended that Vance’s obsession with low rates of reproduction echoed views of white supremacists, the document fails to discuss much of the ample evidence supporting that contention.
The dossier does discuss Vance’s statement during a 2021 appearance with rightwing extremist Charlie Kirk that couples with children should be rewarded with lower taxes. But it presents the statement as an indication that Vance may be too liberal and wants to soak childless people with higher taxes.
Vance becomes Trump’s prophet of extremism
Had a research team for a remotely normal presidential candidate failed to perform such elemental due diligence, their deficient work would have been viewed a disaster. In such a scenario, Vance would have been forced to walk back his extremist rhetoric and might even have been forced from the ticket, particularly given his unpopularity.
But instead of backing away from Vance in the face of his toxicity, Trump has let his new sidekick help fashion the campaign’s messaging and themes in his own image.
With the apparent blessing of Trump and his cronies, Vance has recently doubled down on his offensive and bigoted views. He’s continued to highlight the purported dangers of ever smaller cohorts of white children being overcome by the offspring of immigrants, while deriding the morality of women who have the audacity to pursue careers at the potential cost of reproducing during their peak years of fertility.
This phenomenon was demonstrated most strikingly during the last presidential debate, when Trump chose to repeat a vile defamation Vance had been promoting — that Haitian residents of Springfield, Ohio, are kidnapping, killing, and eating their neighbors’ pets — despite the fact that the claim had already been widely debunked, as a moderator explained.
Far from being chagrined, Vance entered the spin room immediately after the debate and began further promoting the falsehood, presumably with the blessing of the campaign. And during the ensuing weeks, Trump and Vance have made the lie a centerpiece of their messaging, including defaming Haitian residents of other small towns.
Furthermore, Vance himself has recently been associating and even campaigning with some of the very same fringe characters with whom he’s spent the past several years ranting on the internet about topics like the danger of infertile white women and lesbian teachers.
Vance followed up a recent appearance with Tucker Carlson — who, since his exile from Fox News, has taken to popularizing Holocaust “revisionism” — by participating in a town hall together with a Christian nationalist who describes Kamala Harris as “the devil,” echoing views Vance, in his prior incarnation as a Trump critic, once ruefully recalled advancing himself as a teenage rightwing extremist.
So while the strikingly incomplete and otherwise deficient Vance dossier calls into question the competence of Trump’s purportedly highly skilled 2024 campaign, the weeks since Trump chose Vance as his running mate have confirmed how ultimately irrelevant the skills of the campaign’s professionals may turn out to be.
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If you happened to catch Rachel Maddow last night, you might have a different take on this story. The xenophobic, misogynistic, racist remarks align perfectly with a radical, right wing guy named Curtis Yarvin who literally said we need to get rid of all government and install a CEO, which he equates to a dictator. The vetting didn’t matter. This guy was handpicked to be Trump’s VP, though he would never be electable on his own. My theory is that Peter Thiel and other tech bros wanted to slide him into the White House alongside Trump, then once there, do something that would get Trump out of office, thereby installing Vance as President/CEO/dictator. This Yarvin guy said we need to get over our “dictator phobia.” Vance is the chosen CEO of America, not Trump who is just a stepping stone on the path to full integration of Project 2025. All conjecture on my part, obviously, but damn, it makes sense to me. And it’s terrifying.
Heather Cox Richardson isnt conspiracy minded. She thinks Vance was picked for vp by the heritage foundation to push project 2025 through the house & senate.