By Diane Roberts
J.D. Vance eclipses DeSantis, but he might want to watch his back
As for the future, maybe Ronbo can land an afternoon slot on Fox
Ron DeSantis must be madder than a wet hen, sick as a parrot, fit to be tied.
His political future just got knee-capped by Donald “My Ear Took a Bullet for America” Trump when the convicted felon and Putin fan girl chose J.D. Vance as his running mate.
It’s not that Ronbo wanted the VP slot: He doesn’t do second-in-command. But he had visions of a 2028 run for the White House dancing inside his head.
If only Diaper Don had picked a sad also-ran like the once kinda sorta moderate-turned-toady Marco Rubio, the epically boring governor of North Dakota (what’s that dude’s name again?), or the embarrassment that is Tim Scott, Ronbo figured that, with his charisma and charm, he could whip any of those guys next time.
But Trump went and screwed him, elevating a brat senator who’s younger and smarter and arguably more extreme.
Ronbo’s consolation prize was a last-minute speaking slot at the convention with Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy, Trump’s other discarded concubines.
As for the future, maybe Ronbo can land an afternoon slot on Fox.
If Trump wins and somehow doesn’t declare himself president-for-life, Vance will be the nominee in 2028. Ditto if Trump loses and the country survives the violence.
Vance could end up as president before then, possibly without lifting a finger — except maybe to pass Trump the Pretzel Bacon Pub Cheeseburgers that finally tip him over into massive stroke territory.
Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and their autocracy-loving billionaire buds will see to that: Those two, along with Don Jr. (whose own cousin calls him “stupid”), pushed hard for Vance to be on the ticket.
Risibly ignorant
Vance is their kind of guy: not merely a jerk of the first order, but a democracy skeptic.
Ukraine? He says he can’t figure out why people think Putin is a threat and “really doesn’t care.”
Damn, y’all: Ukraine is white and mostly Christian: Wonder how he feels about, say, South Korea or Kenya?
Assuming he has any knowledge of those countries. He’s already proved himself risibly ignorant when he referred to Britain as “the first Islamist country” with nuclear weapons.
You may know Vance from his 2016 memoir “Hillbilly Elegy” in which he congratulates himself for surviving Appalachian deprivation and his mother’s drug addiction to become a venture capital bro.
He trashes the poor people he grew up with, dismissing them as a bunch of lazy losers who failed, unlike him, to get into Yale Law School.
You may also know Vance from the insults he once heaped on the short-fingered vulgarian: “reprehensible,” “an idiot,” “a total fraud,” “a moral disaster,” “cultural heroin,” and “one of USA’s most hated, villainous, douchey celebs.”
Sounds about right, doesn’t it? But in 2021, Vance was running for U.S. Senate and needed Trump’s endorsement, so he slunk down to Mar-a-Largo, prostrated himself on the floor between the boxes of classified documents, and begged forgiveness from the man he once referred to as “America’s Hitler.”
That’s just the kind of moral fiber we want to see in the vice president of the United States.
‘Class war’
But Vance is not only a wholly owned Trumper, he’s in thrall to “Project 2025,” embracing the racism, the cruelty, the science-denial, the arrogance, the authoritarianism, and especially the misogyny.
My God, the misogyny: Vance is anti-choice (of course) and wants to ban abortion with no exceptions for rape or incest, calling a pregnancy resulting from a crime “inconvenient” while piously declaring “two wrongs don’t make a right.”
He blames the “sexual revolution” for liberating all these dang women from their God-ordained roles as incubators. He’s against no-fault divorce, once suggesting women stay in violent marriages for the sake of the family.
He disapproves of working women and has said universal day care is “class war against normal people.”
His wife, Usha Vance, a high-powered corporate litigator, has just quit her job, but you wonder who looked after their three kids while she was out making big money.
No doubt Vance would argue that his family is different. Special, even though Usha Vance, daughter of Indian immigrants, may be in for a rough campaign ride.
White supremacists are throwing little tantrums because Trump’s running mate is married to Hindu. On his podcast, Baby Nazi Nick Fuentes huffed, “Do we really expect that the guy who has an Indian wife and named their kid Vivek is going to support white identity?”
But a little hatred directed at his wife and kids won’t stop the ambitious Vance. He knows how to weaponize spite and stupidity.
Make America Hungary
For example, did you know the Democrats who run the country are “childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too”?
This will come as a shock to the Bidens, Kamala Harris and Douglas Emhoff, Sen. and Ms. Charles Schumer, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigeig and husband Chasten, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and his wife Evan Ryan, Attorney General Merrick Garland and his wife Lynn, who all together have 12 children and many, many dogs.
I didn’t trawl through the entire cabinet, but even a cursory glance reveals a distinct lack of childlessness and a sad scarcity of cats: Interior Secretary Deb Haaland has one kid and four pups, for God’s sake.
But why let reality get in the way of childish insults?
J.D. Vance certainly won’t. He’s on a mission to make America not so much great again (again) but to make America Hungary.
He’s a Viktor Orbán wannabe, and if he gets anywhere nearer the Oval Office than the VIP tour, we will soon find ourselves living in a cross between Budapest and Gilead, a land of so-called “Christian conservative governance” where LGBTQ people have few rights, women have no rights over their own bodies, and none of us are free to read and think what we like.
Orbán and Vance are agreed: Education and the arts should be instruments of state propaganda.
Of course, our own Ronbo concurs, as he demonstrated when he vetoed funding for museums, music, and theater with “sex stuff” (present only in his impoverished imagination) and destroyed the once-distinguished New College of Florida.
If he doesn’t get a Fox gig, maybe Ronbo will become Minister of Information in a Vance regime.
On the other hand, ole J.D. might want to slow down and consider whether being Trump’s vice-president is really worth the butt-kissing, boot-licking, and general humiliation.
He might consider the danger.
He might want to remember what happened with Trump’s last VP.
On Jan. 6, MAGA insurrections erected a gallows at the Capitol, determined to hang Mike Pence.
Trump had no intention of stopping them. In fact, he thought it was a fine idea.
Diane Roberts is an 8th-generation Floridian, born and bred in Tallahassee. Educated at Florida State University and Oxford University in England, she has been writing for newspapers since 1983, when she began producing columns on the legislature for the Florida Flambeau. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Times of London, the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Oxford American, and Flamingo. She has been a member of the Editorial Board of the St. Petersburg Times–back when that was the Tampa Bay Times’s name–and a long-time columnist for the paper in both its iterations. She was a commentator on NPR for 22 years and continues to contribute radio essays and opinion pieces to the BBC. Roberts is also the author of four books.
