The Scapegoat

By Nick Catoggio

Monday, July 29, 2024

 

Base voters love a troll.

 

Base voters aren’t coldly rational about winning elections.

 

Those two facts are related, needless to say. If you immerse yourself in media that insists your world view is correct in all particulars and that victory is a simple matter of “fighting” harder than the other side, your candidate preference will trend toward the most combative trolls in your party. Never mind what swing voters who actually decide elections might think of them.

 

That phenomenon explains the last nine years in Republican politics. But Democrats aren’t above convincing themselves that pugnacious partisans who tickle their political erogenous zones make for good nominees.

 

A groundswell has formed online over the last few days for Kamala Harris to choose Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate. It’s idiotic. Harris is already comfortably ahead in Walz’s home state and Walz carries all sorts of left-wing ideological baggage that the other finalists on her shortlist lack.

 

He’d be a defensible pick for a presidential nominee who’s struggling to build grassroots enthusiasm for her campaign, but Harris doesn’t want for Democratic enthusiasm. To the contrary.

 

Between Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, Gov. Roy Cooper of North Carolina, and Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona, she has three strong centrist alternatives who could plausibly deliver a closely contested swing state that might tip the election. There’s no reason to pass all of them over for a flawed candidate like Walz—except one.

 

He’s good on television. He’s a talented troll, and Democratic base voters love a troll. And if they love him, surely undecided voters will love him too, no?

 

Harris almost certainly won’t choose Walz as her VP; she needs to move toward the center. But we do have a recent example of a nominee passing over candidates with crossover appeal and choosing a running mate who appeals chiefly to his party’s base instead.

 

No doubt Donald Trump expected some blowback from the RINOs and communists of the American center when he chose populist panderer J.D. Vance over Doug Burgum and Marco Rubio. But he was on a glide path to reelection. At the time, he could at least have rested assured that the Republican base would be thrilled with his selection.

 

Two weeks and one Democratic switcheroo later, Trump’s no longer on a glide path—and the base has not thrilled to his selection. Hardcore nationalists like Tucker Carlson might love him, but Vance’s polling is feeble. Numerous Fox News anchors have (politely) spoken disapprovingly of his old “childless cat lady” remarks. Ben Shapiro speculated that if Trump had a do-over on his selection, he would have chosen differently.

 

“He was the worst choice of all the options. It was so bad I didn’t even think it was possible,” one House Republican told The Hill of Vance last week. “The prevailing sentiment is if Trump loses, [it’s] because of this pick,” said another. Vance’s critics are so eager to ridicule him that they’ve managed to elevate a coarse joke made about him into a claim repeated so widely that some news outlets have felt obliged to debunk it (while further amplifying it in so doing, of course). 

 

It all feels a bit … excessive.

 

As rough as Vance’s start has been, he’s young, very smart, has a killer biography, and can articulate the populist vision for America more thoughtfully than his running mate. He’s not a crazy pick, whether or not you agree that Trump had better options.

 

So why has he become a whipping boy for so many so soon?

 

Everyone’s a suspect.

 

Vance’s first two weeks as a national figure have the feeling of a murder mystery in which a dozen different suspects each turn out to have their own motive for wanting the deceased dead.

 

For the professional Republican establishment, hating Vance doesn’t require disdaining his brand of nationalist politics—although many of them do. It’s reason enough to hate him that he adds nothing to the ticket that Trump himself doesn’t already supply. You’ll search in vain for a voter, even in Vance’s home region of the Rust Belt, who was wavering on whether to roll the dice on another MAGA presidency until a far less charismatic nationalist was added to the ticket.

 

Burgum or Rubio could have reassured wary Reagan conservatives and college-educated suburbanites that Trump wouldn’t wander too far into authoritarian lunacy in a second term. With Vance, all bets are off.

 

For certain factions of the new Republican coalition, hating Vance is a matter of hating the policies championed by other factions in that coalition. Trump’s movement is a bizarre alliance of nationalist ideologues, lukewarm Reaganite dead-enders, devout Christians, and populist “bros” who despise left-wing pieties, all led by a dissolute authoritarian whom each faction believes secretly shares its own priorities. 

 

Vance doesn’t get that same benefit of the doubt so some of those factions will chafe at his own nationalist agenda. On Friday, for instance, “Barstool conservative” Dave Portnoy was incensed by an old clip of Vance calling for parents to pay less in taxes. “You want me to pay more taxes to take care of other people’s kids?” he tweeted, incredulous. “We sure this dude is a Republican? Sounds like a moron. If you can’t afford a big family, don’t have a ton of kids.”

 

Social conservatives didn’t care for Portnoy’s complaint and let him know it, giving us a glimpse of how fragile the Trump coalition might be once Trump himself isn’t around to hold it together.

 

For anti-Trumpers of all stripes, from the left to Dispatch conservatives, hating Vance isn’t just a matter of scrambling to define an opponent unfavorably before he can define himself; it’s a matter of wanting an unusually cynical traitor to the constitutional order to suffer for his treachery. Of all the examples of promising young right-wingers embracing authoritarianism to get ahead in politics—and there are many—none has been more disappointing than the guy who called Trump “cultural heroin” and then became one of the biggest dealers in America. Going from critic to running mate in eight years is like joining the DEA and somehow ending up second in command of the Sinaloa cartel less than a decade later.

 

“J.D. Vance is the first politician whose social media posts from his younger days are squeaky clean while his posts during his time in office cause all the problems,” Bill Scher trenchantly observed. Every failure Vance endures during this campaign will be exquisite to those who refused to become pushers like him. The only thing better than Trump losing in November would be Trump losing and blaming the defeat on J.D., the latest reminder that “The Snake” is a better metaphor for Republican politics than it is for illegal immigration.

 

For Trumpy populists, meanwhile, hating Vance might be a straightforward case of the man proving unequal to the hype.

 

“Hate” is too strong a word for this group, obviously. The average MAGA voter likes Vance just fine, if for no other reason than that their hero liked him enough to choose him as his No. 2. But most Trump voters aren’t nationalist ideologues the way Tucker and Vance are. When Trump ordered the airstrike that killed Iran’s Qassem Soleimani, for instance, Carlson raged against it on air—and 86 percent of Republicans approved.

 

Most populists relish Trump’s (and Tucker’s) charisma and seething contempt for their left-wing cultural enemies. Vance gives them none of that. He’s a soft-spoken Ivy League egghead who speaks demagogue as a second language, and it shows. In a party that was as serious about populism on the economic merits as commentators like Ross Douthat or Michael Brendan Dougherty, Vance would be a star. In a party like Trump’s, one gets the sense that Republican voters are watching him quizzically, thinking, “This is the guy who’s going to fill Trump’s shoes in 2028?”

 

It’d be like replacing pro wrestling with Firing Line.

 

In the end, Vance is a man without allies except for the narrow slice of the New Right that’s tried to make ideological lemonade out of the lemony grievances Trump has handed them. That niche was influential enough in Trump’s inner circle to land him on the ticket, but it’s way too small to provide meaningful reinforcements when he’s besieged by political enemies on all sides. “Vance has barely been in politics, and has spent much of that time fighting with/dissenting from Republicans,” National Review’s Dan McLaughlin pointed out on Friday. “He needs friends he never cared to make and a brand fighting the left he never cared to build.”

 

Base voters love a troll, but J.D. Vance hasn’t been nearly enough of a troll in his short career to earn that love. Trump is left with a running mate whom the right merely likes and whom the rest of the political world despises.

 

There’s another reason Vance has been flogged so ruthlessly since his nomination, though. Unlike Trump, he’s susceptible to blame. He’s a perfect scapegoat.

 

A target of opportunity.

 

A smart conservative friend shared his own theory this weekend of why Vance is taking such an early beating. “It’s because all the normal rules apply to J.D. and none of them apply to Trump,” he said. “So J.D. can be less crazy than Trump and get roasted.”

 

However much you dislike Vance, it’s objectively true that he’s less crazy than Trump. A lot less.

 

Nothing J.D. Vance has ever said, including the “childless cat lady” stuff, is as weird as Trump celebrating Laura Loomer from the podium at one of his events or grumbling to relatives about why we keep the disabled alive or mocking news reports that his brush with death changed him by insisting he’s gotten “worse.”

 

Routinely since 2015, Trump’s said things that would end any other politician’s viability as a national candidate—but which, through sheer accumulation, have become mundane. It’s understating matters considerably to call him “weird,” as Democrats have lately taken to doing. But they’ve run out of other ideas. Every method they’ve used to try to awaken the public to his unfitness has failed miserably, enough so that he remains a favorite to recapture the presidency this November despite the burst of Kamala-mentum among Democrats.

 

The normal rules of politics don’t apply to him. He is weird—and then some—but, more than that, he’s Trump. And Trump is Trump. He’s been thoroughly normalized. Opinions about him are diamond-hard and won’t be altered by calling voters’ attention to his weirdness.

 

He’s also a blowhard who speaks vaguely about policy, which leaves voters forever uncertain about how seriously they should take him. That too would be held against most other politicians, but here again, as others have noted, the normal rules don’t apply to Trump. Because he’s so fickle and inarticulate, voters who like his economic record or share his attitudes toward the left can choose to believe or not believe anything he says, as their preferences require. Which explains how he’s managed to keep both evangelicals and “Barstool conservatives” happy-ish in the same coalition.

 

Vance has none of those advantages. As a young, little-known politician, he’s the softest of soft targets for his critics to define. And as an ideologue who’s committed to a nationalist agenda in a way Trump isn’t, his pronouncements about “childless cat ladies” and not caring about Ukraine can’t be dismissed as idle chatter that he doesn’t really mean. The normal rules of politics, in which candidates are taken seriously and literally, apply to him.

 

And Trump’s critics are elated about it. For the first time since 2015, they can wound Trump directly by attacking an associate who embodies the nationalist sentiments his leadership has cultivated on the right. Vance has become a scapegoat for them, a target of opportunity for those who detest Trump and Trumpism but who, until now, haven’t been able to damage either.

 

He’s the opposite of Mike Pence circa 2016. Pence was a fig leaf of normalcy for an abnormal nominee, the picture of a Reaganite Christian conservative of the sort who’d been leading the Republican Party for 30-plus years. Vance, the avatar of the nationalist New Right, is a fig leaf of abnormalcy by comparison. If Trump’s critics can’t convince voters that Trump is weird, they can probably convince them that Vance, his nationalist disciple and heir apparent, is. 

 

That’s a significant liability potentially for a nominee who’s twice as old as his running mate. America elected a 78-year-old three years ago and it didn’t work out great; the Joe Biden experience will lead swing voters to wonder if a vote for Trump is actually a vote for a weird 39-year-old president instead.

 

It may be that Vance didn’t realize that the rules for Trump were different from the rules for him and assumed that his comments about “childless cat ladies” and our “late republican period” would be dismissed as readily as Trump’s outrageous comments are. Or maybe he and the Trump campaign assumed it wouldn’t matter: Biden was such a weak opponent, they may have believed, that no amount of right-wing weirdness from Trump’s running mate was going to lead swing voters to gamble on reelecting the president.

 

With Harris now atop the ticket and the race tightening overnight, all of that is out the window and all interested parties suddenly have an incentive to fire at Vance. Democrats think they can finally put swing voters off of Trumpism by focusing on the VP nominee’s eccentricities; conservatives think they can discredit nationalism as a governing ideology for the GOP if Vance takes the blame for an eventual defeat; Republicans think they can distract from Trump’s obvious weaknesses as a nominee by exaggerating the extent to which Vance is supposedly weighing him down.

 

But it’s not J.D.’s fault that this race is neck and neck despite the new Democratic nominee having served at the right hand of the most unpopular president in the history of modern polling. And it’s not J.D.’s fault that Trump didn’t select his running mate with an eye to facing Harris instead of Biden this fall after Trump said repeatedly throughout the campaign that he didn’t believe Biden would last as nominee.

 

It’s the fault of Republican primary voters who stupidly chose to nominate Trump again instead of a candidate with better judgment and fewer liabilities. Democrats had the good sense to force a last-second switcheroo on their ticket when they realized their chances of winning would improve significantly by doing so. Republicans would have profited from making the same sort of switch—not at the bottom of the ticket with Vance, but at the top.

 

Base voters love a troll, though.

 

So spare a thought for J.D., an unsympathetic figure for whom I can’t help feeling a twinge of sympathy. The campaign clearly didn’t vet him, it’s done him a terrible disservice by not promoting his irresistible Horatio Alger biographical story more aggressively, and ultimately it’s going to treat him as a fall guy if Trump once again scares Americans into preferring a lackluster Democrat on Election Day. I’m almost inclined to say that Vance doesn’t deserve it. Almost.