The NYT published a lengthy interview with J.D. yesterday. Here are my thoughts:
- The interviewer expended a lot of energy trying to get J.D. to justify sending wildly different messages to the base and to more establishment institutions. He shouldn’t have bothered; virtually all politicians do some form of this in order to get votes. What makes Trump and J.D. different from the rest is the vast distance between the messages, not the fact that one exists.
- The headline news about the interview pertained to J.D.’s refusal to admit that Biden won the election. Since Vance would be excommunicated by the base and by Trump if he had done otherwise, this should come as a surprise to exactly nobody.
- The interviewer was shrewd enough to ask Vance questions about what happens to the economy if millions of essential workers are driven out of the country. Vance insists that there is a huge pool of discouraged workers who will re-enter the labor force to work in construction (or, I suppose, packing plants or agricultural fields) if the illegal immigrants leave. The numbers and common sense clearly don’t back him up, so he is either deluded or simply doesn’t care–probably the latter.
- The interviewer should have asked him where the money is going to come for the deportation scheme, and whether the government will obey court orders blocking it. He didn’t, unfortunately.
- Vance sort of makes it sound like his ideas about abortion have evolved naturally to become identical to Trump’s. That clearly isn’t true. He is swallowing his principles in favor of his ambitions.