Politics
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October 18, 2024
Trump’s deluded fantasies have now become the GOP gospel.
JD Vance is Donald Trump’s heir, but an awkward one. Trump has spent decades shamelessly hustling, so deception comes as naturally to him as breathing. Trump no longer operates, if he ever did, in a world where the difference between truth and falsehood is relevant: He only says and believes what is most convenient for him at any given moment. Better than anyone else in our era, Trump illustrates the crucial distinction, insisted on by the late philosopher Harry G. Frankfurter, between being a liar (someone who consciously fabricates) and being a bullshitter (someone indifferent to the truth).
As I’ve noted before, JD Vance is a liar with a bad conscience because he can’t bullshit. Vance always knows he’s spreading falsehood and has to develop post facto rationalizations. Which doesn’t mean that Vance isn’t given to lying profusely.
The way the two men handle conspiracy theories illuminates this distinction. Conspiracy theories have long been central to Trump’s political vision. He rose to prominence for his unabashed embrace of birtherism: the lie that Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States. Throughout his rise, Trump and those closest to him embraced a host of sinister delusions, buying into Pizzagate and the QAnon movement’s portrayal of Trump’s political foes as pedophiles and Deep State cabalists. The Big Lie of election denial in 2020, the motivating force behind the January 6 attempted coup, was a distillation of Trump’s conspiracism: the master narrative of Trump as a brave rebel leading a mass movement against a corrupt elite.
Conspiracism is Trump’s instinctive mode, fitting in with his formative years as a resentful outer-borough real estate developer who felt that Manhattan old money looked down on him. Vance, by contrast, has risen from a working-class background by studiously imitating the elite, fueled by emulation and admiration rather than resentment. Until his recent conversion to Trumpism, Vance in fact aspired not to overthrow the establishment but to join it, which meant going along with the elite consensus against conspiracy theories about the American ruling order.
As NPR noted last month:
JD Vance not long ago described conspiracy theories as the feverish imaginings produced by “fringe lunatics writing about all manner of idiocy.”
That was before he became a rising star in Republican politics.
The Ohio senator and GOP’s vice presidential nominee has in recent years declared that the federal government deliberately allowed fentanyl into the United States to kill conservative and rural voters. He has praised Alex Jones, a well-known conspiracy theorist who claimed the deaths of 20 young children in the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax.
And he’s echoed—contrary to all evidence—former President Donald Trump’s assertion that the 2020 election was unfairly won by Democrats and that those charged in the subsequent Capitol insurrection are “political prisoners.” More recently, he gave credence to the debunked idea that Haitian immigrants were abducting and devouring pets in Ohio.
Vance is also an ardent (but in this instance possibly sincere) proponent of the racist Great Replacement theory, holding that elites are bringing in non-white immigrants to supplant the white population.
Current Issue
NPR describes Vance as someone who has gone from being an “intellectual” to being a “conspiracy theorist.” This description obscures the truth. Vance is still an intellectual—but now uses his considerable mental energy to defend conspiracism and use it as a glue to bind together the MAGA coalition. Writing in AlterNet, Lindsay Beyerstein notes that Vance’s function is to reassure the more buttoned-down Republicans that it’s possible to collaborate with outlandish fantasists such as Alex Jones and Marjorie Taylor Green. Beyerstein also notes that Vance uses conspiracy theories to unite “integralist Catholics, protestant New Apostolic Reformation types, and the more secular Silicon Valley contingent exemplified by Elon Musk.”
Beyerstein helpfully calls attention to a talk Vance gave in 2021 at the Teneo Network conference, where he laid out why respectable conservatives should accept conspiracy theorists as part of their coalition. According to Vance, “Believing crazy things is not the mark of whether somebody should be rejected. Believing important truths should be the mark of whether we accept somebody, and if they believe some crazy things on the side, that’s fine. We need to be okay with non-conventional people.”
Addressing his willingness to listen to Alex Jones, Vance said:
But then the second criticism that I get is, well, he’s a crazy conspiracist, right? He doesn’t believe that 9/11 actually happened or he believed 9/11 was an inside job. And look, I understand this desire to not be called terrible names. It’s like, yeah, okay, this person believes crazy things. But I bet if you’re being honest with yourself, every single person in this room believes at least something that’s a little crazy, right? I believe the devil is real and that he works terrible things in our society. That’s a crazy conspiracy theory to a lot of very well-educated people in this country right now. Even though, of course, they participate in it without knowing about it. But that’s a separate, a separate matter.
But ladies and gentlemen, the most important truths often come from people who are crazy 60% of the time, but they’re right 40% of time. I don’t know Elon Musk very well. I know him a little bit. I’ve had a couple of private conversations with him. Elon Musk believes some crazy stuff.
Vance’s arguments are, of course, pure sophistry. There’s a difference between saying that otherwise good and intelligent people can believe in conspiracy theories and actually elevating those conspiracy theories to the forefront of your politics.
In fairness, conspiracy theories aren’t just the preserve of the right. There are plenty of liberals and leftists who believe in absurd conspiracies—see Hillary Clinton’s willingness to loosely denounce her critics as Russian assets, or the recently popular idea that the assassination attempts on Trump were staged. Fortunately, the more fanciful versions of Russiagate sputtered out, and in general the Democrats don’t promote conspiracism on the national stage.
The ascendency of Vance, by contrast, shows that conspiracism has become central to the GOP. In the long run of American history, we can trace an apostolic succession of paranoid politics: Joseph McCarthy mentored Roy Cohn, who in turn tutored Donald Trump, who provided a role model for Vance. McCarthy and Cohn flourished only briefly on the national stage, while Trump and Vance prove that conspiracism is now the central ideology of the Republican right.
Podcaster Matthew Sitman, cohost of Know Your Enemy, recently noted, “Vance is one of the highest profile conspiracy theorists in U.S., he should not be Trump-eating-one-too-many-Big-Macs from the presidency.” Unfortunately, Vance also proves that embracing conspiracism is good politics for a Republican. Even if Trump loses in November, Vance’s version of cynical conspiracism is here to stay.
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In the coming election, the fate of our democracy and fundamental civil rights are on the ballot. The conservative architects of Project 2025 are scheming to institutionalize Donald Trump’s authoritarian vision across all levels of government if he should win.
We’ve already seen events that fill us with both dread and cautious optimism—throughout it all, The Nation has been a bulwark against misinformation and an advocate for bold, principled perspectives. Our dedicated writers have sat down with Kamala Harris and Bernie Sanders for interviews, unpacked the shallow right-wing populist appeals of J.D. Vance, and debated the pathway for a Democratic victory in November.
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