Will JD Vance Inevitably Fall Victim to the MAGA Conspiracy Culture?

His best use to the ticket might be as a scapegoat.

People who’ve followed my commentary for a while know that I pretty much hate conspiracy theories. I’m especially disdainful of those that can lead to violence, or portray grieving victims as villains.

It’s one thing if you can present verifiable proof of a crooked act of collusion, but that’s almost never the case with today’s most popular conspiracy theories. Instead, the modus operandi is to begin with a desired conclusion — one that validates an existing bias, and then work backwards to selectively link bits and pieces of facts and speculations to support that conclusion.

This is not only a terrible method for determining the truth, but it often trivializes truly heinous acts, and subjects those most tortured by them to hate and harassment. We’ve seen this, for example, in the case of Alex Jones and the Sandy Hook school shooting.

But wild conspiracy theories, thanks to the internet, are unfortunately more popular than they’ve ever been in my lifetime. And though both sides of the political aisle have grown disturbingly comfortable tossing them around, the MAGA-right, united under one of the most prolific conspiracy theorists to ever hold high-office in the United States, is leading the contest… not just in terms of consequence, but also predictability. Virtually any circumstance that negatively affects Donald Trump is sure to spawn an alternate plot-line in which he is the target of calculated and coordinated wrongdoing; the only question is how deeply the narrative takes hold.

That’s not to say that Trump hasn’t fallen victim to unfair, even corrupt conduct. He has. But the facts in such instances never live up to the conspiratorial web spun by his supporters, and most of the time there’s no connection at all.

Having watched this routine play out for almost a decade now, I typically have a pretty good idea of which type of development will trigger which type of reaction. That’s why I have a hunch as to what MAGA-world’s next big conspiracy theory might just be. I’m not saying it’s set in stone, of course, and I should note that it requires that Donald Trump continue losing ground to Kamala Harris in the polls (which is far from certain).

No, I’m not referring to the tired old narrative that the polls are “fake,” and that the media is “lying” about the state of the race. That’s boilerplate Trump stuff — the equivalent of the sun rising in the morning. What I’m picturing is a Manchurian candidate level of absurdity, with the man at the center of the “plot” being J.D. Vance, Trump’s running mate.

Hear me out.

Regardless of how you feel about Vance, just about everyone understands at this point (even if they’re unwilling to say so) that he was a poor choice. He offers nothing electorally to the ticket. He can’t deliver a state that Trump wasn’t already going to win (Vance wouldn’t have even won his Senate primary in Ohio if Trump hadn’t endorsed him in the final hour), and he’s of little use to Trump with any key voting demographic. More likely than not, Vance will actually lose Trump support among important blocs, because, in addition to the man being green on the stump, and widely unliked, he has spent a surprising amount of time in recent years knocking childless Americans, with a special focus on women… who like cats.

A lot of voters fit that bill, and many more in some way identify with it.

I used to think that Vance’s biggest political liabilities were his stated indifference to the lives of Ukrainians, his disdain for Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and his breathtaking statement that if he were vice president on January 6, 2021, he would have refused to certify the election results (as Donald Trump wanted), instead of following the Constitution (as Mike Pence did). But it’s clear now that those things pale in comparison to his repeatedly stated (and doubled-down on) belief that childless Americans are less valuable to society, and less worthy of consideration in societal decision-making, than people with kids are. And because a lot of voters aren’t desensitized to Vance’s rhetoric the way they are to Trump’s, and thus hold him to traditional political standards, the Republican ticket is paying a price.

“…millions of Americans feel implicitly wounded by [Vance’s] unfeeling words,” wrote recent Daly Express guest Matt Lewis in a piece for The Hill. “Some are Americans who could not have children — and who might have spent tens of thousands of dollars trying. Many of these folks are great Americans, not to mention terrific aunts, uncles, friends and neighbors… What is more, Vance’s comments do not just intellectually offend these people; they affect them on a deeply emotional level.”

Clips of Vance spreading the controversial sentiment obviously weren’t hard to find. He said these things on some of cable-news’s top-rated shows. This begs the question of whether Donald Trump’s campaign actually vetted Vance. Maybe they did, knew of the statements, and somehow believed they wouldn’t be problematic. Whatever the explanation, selecting the Ohio senator was an act of political malpractice.

Who’s to blame for this? Donald Trump. Vance was his call, and his rationale for making it seems to be that he liked how Vance presented himself on television, appreciated his populist zest, and absolutely loved how utterly fawning and submissive Vance (an anti-Trump convert) was — and still is — to him. But since Trump never accepts blame for anything, a scapegoat will likely be needed. And it’s not going to be Donald Trump Jr. or Tucker Carlson (who both reportedly lobbied hard for Trump to choose Vance); they’re too close to the former president.

No, the smart money is on Vance himself taking the fall. But I don’t think it will come in the sense that he’s simply a bad politician and inexperienced leader who’s in over his head (which I believe is the truth). In today’s conspiracy culture, that would be too easy and innocent of explanation, and it wouldn’t sufficiently let Trump off the hook for failing to recognize Vance’s shortcomings at the get-go.

I think it’s far more likely that Vance will be turned into a conniving villain, much like what happened to Trump’s last vice president, Mike Pence. He’ll be cast as a disloyal, deep-state “RINO” who was all along looking for an opportunity to stab Trump in the back. Only, I think it will be even easier for supporters to do this with Vance, thanks to the senator’s remarkable anti-Trump origins.

In the lead up to the 2016 election, Vance, a self-described “Never Trumper” at the time, had hugely negative things to say about Donald Trump, including agreeing that Trump was a serial sexual predator, describing him as “cultural heroin,” and comparing him to Adolph Hitler. He even used the phrase “America's Hitler,” on at least one occasion, to describe his future boss.

(It’s worth mentioning, on a personal note, that for all the times over the years that Trump supporters have accused yours truly of suffering from “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” I’ve never said anything remotely as nasty about Trump as Vance did by comparing him to Adolf Freakin’ Hitler.)

But after two impeachments, an attempt to overturn U.S. democracy, and an insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, Vance decided that Trump was actually a stellar president and a pretty great guy. He got in tight with Trump’s inner circle, the aforementioned Don Jr. and Tucker Carlson. He sacrificed every ounce of dignity, on every right-wing media outlet, to spread word of the adoration and intense devotion he felt for Donald Trump. He even fully embraced the “stolen election” lie.

It was a staggering transformation, even in a political era where countless Republican souls have been sold to Trump for a dime a dozen. But as we’ve seen many times over the last nine years, no amount of personality loyalty, and moral and ethical surrender, can prevent one from being thrown under the Trump Train the moment that person has dishonored or displeased the tribal chief. Trump himself isn’t always the one doing the throwing, but he’s shown that he won’t lift a finger to pull the emergency brake if he sees such a person sprawled out on the track.

A number of MAGA and MAGA-adjacent firebrands are already openly slamming Vance over his shortcomings, and if the electoral prospects continue to worsen for the Republican ticket, I can easily picture that criticism morphing into charges of deliberate sabotage from within — a complex strategy by an unarguably intelligent Never Trumper playing the long game to defeat Trump, and hand the party and country back to the “evil establishment” or whatever. A modern day Judas!

Sound crazy? Yes, it does. That’s because it is.

But is it any crazier than Trump’s last running mate being cast as a traitor, needing to flee a violent assault on the Capitol by people who wanted to hang him, and having his political career ended… all for completing a simple, Constitutionally-bound process that acknowledged that Trump lost the election?

I don’t think so.

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