Trump listens as Senate candidate Vance speaks at a rally in Ohio in April 2022. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
In Ross Douthat’s engrossing sit-down with his old friend and now Senator J.D. Vance, there is, to begin with, a nuanced discussion of how Trump has upended American politics toward the populist right, which Vance supports for a variety of decent (and, to my mind, largely persuasive) reasons. This strikes me, for example, as a very cogent insight into the last couple of decades:
[C]enter-left liberals who are doing very well, and center-right conservatives who are doing very well, have an incredible blind spot about how much their success is built on a system that is not serving people who they should be serving.
So far, so smart. I plead guilty of center-right complacency myself. And there is a potential, serious defense of Trumpism that dispenses with Trump, even if Trump deserves real credit for changing the debate in the first place.
But of course, Trump is still around, as deranged as ever and a bit more incoherent, and Vance has to find a way to cope with that towering reality as well. And part of that reality is entertaining Trump’s delusional conviction that he won the elections of 2016 and 2020 in landslides of historic proportions — but was denied re-election because of massive, coordinated fraud.
That’s when a few sparks finally begin to fly during the Ross interview. And it’s worth mulling Vance’s triple-lutz of rationalization, because it amounts to the most plausible attempt to justify Trump’s inability to accept any election result he doesn’t win. Vance notably doesn’t bother to defend Trump’s own firehose of specific accusations of voter “fraud”. He knows he can’t. Only Trump himself can sustain the manic conviction that he was massively robbed both times. So Vance performs a two-step:
Every time we bring it up, it’s like, “Well, yeah, they litigated all these things.” No, you can’t litigate these things judicially; you have to litigate them politically. And we never had a real political debate about the 2020 election.
But you can litigate things judicially. In fact, every claim of election fraud in the US has always been litigated judicially. That’s how we do it. And in 2020, after dozens of suits, there was no significant fraud found.
So what constitutes litigating an election “politically”? Vance explains:
My actual critique starts with the Molly Ball article in 2021 — that felt like bragging. I put that article in front of the average Trump-fan Republican voter in my hometown, and they say, ‘That is an illegitimate election.’
What did Ball’s piece say? It’s a somewhat goosed-up account of bipartisan attempts to ensure a smooth and transparently fair election during a once-in-a-century pandemic. Money quote from the piece:
They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time. They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears.
The result was a massive increase in mail-in and absentee ballots. And look: if this had happened out of the blue, it would be one thing, especially since Republicans are less adept at early voting than Democrats. But it happened during a plague for obvious reasons. Rules had to be changed — or turnout would have collapsed, delegitimizing the entire enterprise. Maybe those new rules should have been challenged at the time — but nothing was stopping the Republican National Committee from doing that, as Vance admits:
[T]he R.N.C. should’ve been mobilizing and responding to that, and they failed, and that was a huge indictment of the R.N.C.
He further concedes that the new voting rules were proposed “for Covid reasons, in a way that partially is the fault of the Republican National Committee — we weren’t prepared for it, Democrats were, and they took advantage of it.”
So this has nothing to do with the new rules as such, but merely with one party being less on-the-ball than the other in a dramatically-altered election. And sorry, but that’s not “election interference,” let alone “fraud” or “rigging”. It’s just an election in a uniquely difficult year. And you don’t get to complain about the rules you agreed to after the game is over.
The new pandemic rules, moreover, were endorsed by the Congress, which passed $400 million in the CARES Act for the election’s unique challenges, which Trump himself signed into law. If the rules were rigged, Trump helped rig them! Sure, Mark Zuckerberg donated $300 million — but there’s no evidence the money was directed only to help Democrats; and the Voter Participation Center channeled resources to secretaries of state, red and blue.
How about the attempt to pressure social media not to run “disinformation”? In the late-breaking case of Hunter Biden’s laptop, that was indeed a black mark for the mainstream media. But the story wasn’t buried entirely; it was covered by a big paper, the New York Post; and their scoop wasn’t totally suppressed by Twitter and Facebook, despite their best efforts. And decisions by the press to cover some things and not others in a campaign is simply what happens in a free society. The press has been biased to the left for as long as I can remember. And at the very end of every campaign, choices about coverage can get fraught, as with the Comey shocker in 2016. But that doesn’t constitute “election interference.” It constitutes normalcy.
And, of course, this blaming of social media for an election loss is more than a little ironic since that was precisely Clinton’s sad story in 2016 — with the charge that the Kremlin had somehow made the critical difference in electing Trump by its own propaganda campaign in social media. By Vance’s own standards of election interference, therefore, Hillary was robbed. But she wasn’t, of course. She ran a predictably shitty campaign as the worst politician of her generation.
Vance even goes so far as to say that the attempt to stop the certification of the election by force on January 6 was no big deal, and less reckless than “the attempt to completely suppress concerns about ... our most fundamental democratic act as a people.” Constitutionally, Vance says he was far more worried about the military brass finding ways to avoid obeying Trump’s commands than a violation of the peaceful transfer of power in a democracy.
I guess you can just about see a sliver of a case here (although as Ross notes, you can obviously be against military subordination and against perverting the peaceful transition of power). Vance is right that the way in which elites have responded to Trump has been in many ways reckless and counter-productive.
But Vance’s case is completely undermined by Trump himself. Trump, after all, did not say after the election that the Covid rules were why he’d lost. He said he’d lost because votes were stolen, stuffed, and hidden, and the voting machines had been rigged. He’s saying the same things today. And the reason for all of it was not some genuine concern about easier mail-in and absentee voting (he endorsed absentee voting, after all), but Trump’s basic, characterological inability to function in a system that doesn’t guarantee him victory every single time.
That is not the system’s fault. It’s the fault of the party that nominated a malignant, delusional loon. We also know from Vance’s Twitter history — recently exposed even more thoroughly by Andrew Kaczynski — that Vance indeed once understood all of this perfectly well. Of course he did.
And Trump’s endorsement of violence on the night of January 5 and through the day on January 6 takes all of this to a unique and much darker place. He didn’t make the strained case for politically litigating the election rules that Vance makes; he was even happy to egg on a mob to hang Mike Pence for doing his constitutional duty. There is simply no defense of this, and no defense of the double standards, any-argument-to-hand tactics, and flirting with constitutional disaster that Trump deployed in his psychotic war on reality. He is unfit to be president.
Vance knows this of course — he has a law degree from Yale, after all — which is why he remains such a fascinating figure. Juggling the legitimate insights of Trumpism and the lying, livid lunacy of Trump himself makes for an unedifying but instructive spectacle. Vance has made the bet. Excusing political violence, supporting a deranged fantasist, and delegitimizing free and fair elections is the price he is prepared to pay for power.
And it’s a bet, I’m afraid, he is increasingly likely to win.
(Note to readers: This is an excerpt of The Weekly Dish. If you’re already a subscriber, click here to read the full version. This week’s issue also includes: a really fun chat with Nellie Bowles over woke madness and her former complicity; listener dissent over the super-popular pod with George Will; reader dissent over my views on immigration and Biden; seven notable quotes for the week in news; 22 pieces on Substack we recommend on a variety of topics; a Mental Health Break of a piano sailing over the English countryside; a summery view from the Ptown library; and, of course, the results of the View From Your Window contest — with a new challenge. Subscribe for the full Dish experience!)
From a happy subscriber:
I wanted to note for the first time, to you, that I truly enjoy the Substack and Dishcast accompaniment. Specifically, and most recently enjoyable, was the episode with George Will. For a political theory and philosophy neophyte like myself, the conversation was approachable and engaging. I enjoyed the arc of the episode, from philosophy to current affairs. Thanks to you and Chris for your hard work creating this platform.
New On The Dishcast: Nellie Bowles
Nellie is a writer and reporter. She has worked for many mainstream publications, most notably the NYT covering Silicon Valley. Now she is teamed up with her wife, Bari Weiss, to run The Free Press — a media company they launched on Substack in 2021. Nellie’s weekly news roundup, TGIF, is smart and hilarious, and so is her new book, Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches From the Wrong Side of History.
Listen to the episode here. There you can find two clips of our convo — on the scourge of Slack, and questioning whether trans is immutable. That link also takes you to a bunch of commentary on our very popular episode with George Will, plus more reader dissents over immigration. We also share a heart-rending tale of a reader’s son who lost his three-legged dog, and I have an update on Truman’s first trip to Provincetown. I also have a fond remembrance of the late great David Boaz.
Browse the entire Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy (the first 102 are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: Lionel Shriver on her new novel, Tim Shipman on the UK elections, Elizabeth Corey on Oakeshott, Erick Erickson on the left’s spiritual crisis, Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy on animal cruelty, Van Jones, and Stephen Fry! Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.
I cannot speak for what happens in Canada, the UK and EU, but you’re getting several things wrong on the immigration debate. It has been the REPUBLICAN establishment that enabled Trump, not the Democrats. During the Obama administration, we had an immigration deal. It wasn’t perfect and wouldn’t have solved all our problems, but remember who killed that deal: Republicans.
Biden and the Democrats then went to Republicans this year and basically had them write another bill. Guess who killed that one? Yep, Republicans. Why? Because they want to bash Biden on immigration instead of fixing the problem. Republicans will ALWAYS choose to bash Democrats on the border, use hyperbolic attacks to make a point, and then refuse to cut any deal because it’s not good enough. This has been the tradition my whole young life.
The border wasn’t solved under Trump, it won’t be solved under him again (or at least with any permanence in mind), and it’s all entirely a cynical ploy to bash Democrats. You are falling into that trap by spending your days bashing Biden instead of remembering who called up his lackeys in Congress and demanded they kill their own bill so they would have an election issue.
Sigh. I don’t disagree that the GOP has been cynical and shameless on this, repeatedly. But they have been right to focus on enforcement and border security — and it need not have taken Joe Biden three years to realize that. Look at Europe. It’s coming here if we don’t act.
Read five more dissents here, along with my responses. More tough dissents over immigration are on the pod page, and I reply throughout. As always, keep the criticism coming: dish@andrewsullivan.com.
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This is a feature in the paid version of the Dish spotlighting about 20 of our favorite pieces from other Substackers every week. This week’s selection covers subjects such as Hunter’s conviction, the elections in the UK and EU, and Ibram X Kendi. Below are a few examples and new substacks:
Ann Coulter is furious that MAGA is going after a Republican who has a good shot at winning at Senate seat in deep-blue Maryland.
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The View From Your Window Contest
Where do you think it’s located? Email your guess to contest@andrewsullivan.com. Please put the location — city and/or state first, then country — in the subject line. Proximity counts if no one gets the exact spot. Bonus points for fun facts and stories. The deadline for entries is Wednesday night at midnight (PST). The winner gets the choice of a VFYW book or two annual Dish subscriptions. If you are not a subscriber, please indicate that status in your entry and we will give you a free month subscription if we select your entry for the contest results (example here if you’re new to the contest). The contest archive is here. Happy sleuthing!
The results for this week’s window are coming in a separate email to paid subscribers later today. The super-sleuth in San Mateo reimagines the view:
For San Luis Obispo last week, the VFYW Reimagined swung realistic: red-tile roof; palm trees; gas station; and white SUV. This week we were presented with the Brutalist architecture of the brick apartment building across the street, and given that this city is known for having one of largest collections of impressionistic art outside of Paris, I’ve decided to go impressionistic for the VFYW Reimagined this week:
From our Russian-American super-sleuth:
Yesss!!! I have finally achieved super-sleuth status! Thanks for mentioning this in the last post. I haven’t counted all my submissions since I joined the contest four years ago, but lately life has been too busy, so I was on an extended break dealing with work, kids, life, and whatnot. But I am back now!
Also, I’m sending you the view from MY window today:
If you look closely, you’ll see an assortment of cicadas, which have overwhelmed our neighborhood lately. Apparently, we have a year when several broods are coming out, including the one that gets out just once every 17 years! I’ve lived in the Chicago area for only 10 years and never experienced cicadas before moving here. For a while I had no idea what they were, and that THEY were the source of this bizarre noise outside. This year is still different. These creatures came out more than a month earlier than usual, and it seems like there are hundreds of times more of them than ever before. I have never seen them on the tree in front of my house, but here they are now!
I am taking a couple of short trips this summer, so I’ll try to take some pictures worthy of the contest :)
Yes please. Send any window submissions to contest@andrewsullivan.com. Please include part of the window frame, ideally a horizontal photo, and ideally accompanied by another photo showing the building with the window circled. And the full address is also nice, as are personal details about the view. If we end up selecting your photo for the contest, we’ll extend your subscription by six months for free.
