A Demagogue’s Demagogue

By Nick Catoggio

Friday, January 09, 2026

 

The nicest thing one can say about the vice president is that he’s not the worst or even second-worst person in the White House, and that will remain true as long as Donald Trump and Stephen Miller are on the job.

 

Which is a problem for him politically.

 

J.D. Vance is supposed to be the answer to the question, “What does Trumpism look like without Trump?” Postliberal intellectuals adore him because his ascension to the presidency portends an “America First” agenda unburdened by Trump’s demented, erratic, off-putting viciousness. Imagine having a fascist leading the country who can resist the impulse to celebrate the murder of Rob Reiner.

 

With a disciplined man like that in charge, there’s no telling what marvels MAGA might achieve.

 

The potential hiccup for authoritarian technocrats is that it’s not clear Republican voters share their priorities. Trump revealed in 2015 that populist conservatives cared a lot about populism and very little about conservatism, something that rivals like Ted Cruz had misjudged. Postliberals now risk their own misjudgment: Maybe it’s the president’s ruthlessness, not the “America First” claptrap he ran on, that actually binds the right-wing rank-and-file to him.

 

Don’t think so? Check the polling on Trump’s latest foreign adventure, the sort of thing “America First” was supposed to abjure. In November, despite their isolationist pretenses, MAGA Republicans were considerably more likely to support military action in Venezuela than non-MAGA Republicans were. A second poll conducted a few days ago saw the trend continue with respect to the kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro. Non-MAGA Republicans backed his capture 80-20; MAGA Republicans backed it … 97-3.

 

That’s not a fluke either. In June, after the president took the dangerous step of bombing Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, MAGA Republicans once again rallied behind him in greater numbers than non-MAGA Republicans did.

 

Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon, and other postliberal eggheads are free to go on deluding themselves about there being some meaningful principled “restraint” faction on the right, but Trump has always understood the vacuous populist id better than its other would-be tribunes. “MAGA loves it. MAGA loves what I’m doing. MAGA loves everything I do,” he told NBC News a few days ago about Venezuela. “MAGA is me. MAGA loves everything I do, and I love everything I do, too.”

 

“MAGA is me.” Not literally true, but a hell of a lot truer than “MAGA is ‘America First.’”

 

And so you can see the problem for J.D. Vance. If MAGA is Trump, and if what it chiefly prizes in him is his ruthless will to dominate his enemies rather than any specific agenda, a 2028 Vance campaign premised on professionalizing postliberalism will not make the right-wing heart flutter.

 

That’s not to say he’ll lose a primary—a sitting VP is nearly unbeatable, especially if he earns the president’s endorsement—but it risks inviting a challenge from some charismatic upstart who speaks demagoguery as a first, not second, language. And if Vance does land in the White House, it suggests his support among Republican voters won’t be nearly as “sticky” in office as Trump’s has been.

 

To make right-wingers fall in love, not just fall in line, J.D. Vance needs to be the biggest fascist scumbag he can be. And that’s tricky, since he happens to hold the one job in the administration with practically no duties. Apart from casting the occasional tiebreaking vote in the Senate for some grossly unfit Trump nominee, he has few opportunities to demonstrate ruthlessness through official actions.

 

All he can do is talk. So, on Thursday, that’s what he did. As part of his ongoing effort to impress the MAGA faithful, he went out in front of the White House press corps and was the biggest scumbag he could be.

 

Blaming the victim.

 

“J.D. Vance is defending this murderer more passionately than he’'s ever defended his wife or kids,” one left-wing critic observed during the vice president’s press conference on the ICE shooting in Minneapolis.

 

That sounds like a dark joke, but it isn’t. I noted myself a few weeks ago how circumspect Vance becomes when asked about slurs aimed at his Indian American family from the right, plainly fearful of antagonizing a constituency that’s now big enough to make trouble for him in the next election. When asked last month about white supremacist Nick Fuentes calling his wife a “jeet,” Vance offered a flash of anger before quickly pivoting to this: “​​If you believe racism is bad, Fuentes should occupy one second of your focus, and the people with actual political power who worked so hard to discriminate against white men should occupy many hours of it.”

 

He turned a question about the groypers’ bigotry toward his own children into an opportunity to align himself with one of their core policy grievances. I’m almost impressed.

 

But yes, to return to the point, the VP was passionate at the podium on Thursday. Specifically, he was passionate about smearing Renee Good, the woman killed by the ICE agent, as a terrorist in league with radicals whose death was “of her own making.”

 

“I’m not happy that this woman was there at a protest violating the law by interfering with the law enforcement action,” Vance added. … “We’re not going to give in to terrorism on this and that’s exactly what’s happened.”

 

…

 

Vance also asserted that the media has failed to cover that Good was “part of a broader left-wing network to attack, to dox, to assault and to make it impossible for our ICE officers to do their job.”

 

…

 

“I think it’s really irresponsible for you guys [in the media] to go out there and imply or tell the American people that a guy who defended himself from being rammed by an automobile is guilty of murder,” he said. “Be a little bit more careful. We’re going to talk about toning down the temperature, which I know the president wants to do, and I certainly want to do. One of the ways we tone down the temperature is to have a media that tells the truth. I encourage you all to do that.”

 

Let’s turn down the temperature and tell the truth, said the authoritarian mouthpiece whose colleagues spent Wednesday lying bald-faced to Americans about the circumstances of the shooting and implying in every which way—as Vance himself did—that Good got what she deserved.

 

If you haven’t watched one of the many videos of her death, do so now so that you can appreciate the filthiness of the vice president telling a national audience that Good tried to “ram” the ICE agent with her vehicle. What she tried to do is pull away and flee—but couldn’t without momentarily pointing her car at the agent, who had positioned himself in front of the SUV in violation of standard procedure. That led to her being shot through the windshield; as for why the agent felt entitled to fire twice more at her through her side window after he was already clear of the front of her car, neither Vance nor anyone else in the administration seems to care.

 

“If you happen to be killed by a federal agent, your government will bear false witness to the world that you were a terrorist,” Adam Serwer wrote, identifying a key takeaway from the press conference.

 

The insidious common refrain in right-wing defenses of the shooting is that, in Vance’s words, Good was “interfering with the law enforcement action.” That’s actually not clear from the video: As I pointed out yesterday, she was trying to wave ICE’s pickup around the front of her SUV rather than block its path. Her mother told the press that Good was “not part of anything” that involved protesting ICE, and her ex-husband claims he’d never known her to be an activist of any kind. According to him, she was shot on her way home after dropping her son off at school.

 

But let’s assume all of that is wrong and that, as the New York Post alleges, Good was affiliated with a group called “ICE Watch” that monitors and sometimes “interferes with” the agency’s operations. What’s that got to do with whether, under the circumstances, the police were justified in killing her?

 

You are, in fact, allowed to follow the cops around in public places in America to make sure they’re doing their duty lawfully. (Although ICE very much resents that form, or any form, of accountability.) You’re not allowed to stop the cops from carrying out those duties, of course—civil disobedience is illegal by definition, even in a just cause—but if you try, they still aren’t allowed to blow your head off unless you’re threatening deadly force. Ted Bundy could have been driving Good’s SUV and the ICE agent still would have been wrong for standing in front of the vehicle, which created the conditions for a deadly misunderstanding, and for firing those second and third shots through the window.

 

The unmistakable point of his tirade in the White House briefing room was to align himself publicly with the two core right-wing takes on the incident that I described yesterday. One: If you interfere with the police, particularly Donald Trump’s secret police, they should be entitled to kill you, full stop. At one point, Vance went as far as to assert that the ICE agent had “absolute immunity” for the shooting, which for obvious reasons is not a thing that does or should exist in America for state agents who wield deadly weapons.

 

And two: If you’re affiliated in any way with the left, you’re effectively a lawful combatant in a hot culture war in which, again, the good guys are entitled to kill you. Consider that a sort of fallback rationalization for Republicans who watched the videos and found themselves struggling to justify what happened. Whether Good tried to “ram” the ICE agent or not ultimately isn’t important. What’s important is that she was part of a “left-wing network.” For many right-wingers, that’s justification enough.

 

2028.

 

This was, in short, an attempt by the vice president to vice signal in the most obnoxious way to the feral MAGA base that he’s capable of being the ruthless fascist they crave in a leader. And a pretty successful one, I think. He proved he’s a demagogue’s demagogue, the highest qualification to lead the modern GOP.

 

It wasn’t completely successful. Tim Miller and many others pointed to an obvious logical hole in Vance’s argument: If federal officers are justified in using deadly force against protesters simply for interfering with their operations, the cops on January 6 probably should have machine-gunned the crowd as it breached the Capitol, no? They were in far graver danger than the ICE agents who confronted Renee Good were.

 

Nitpicks aside, a performance loathsome enough to draw a rebuke from the National Catholic Reporter can only improve the VP’s standing in his party. “The vice president’'s comments justifying the death of Renee Good are a moral stain on the collective witness of our Catholic faith,” digital editor John Grosso complained, alleging at one point that Vance’s “Catholicism seems to be little more than a political prop, a tool only for his career ambitions and desire for power.” Indeed, apart from abortion, it’s hard to see how Catholic dogma has influenced the VP’s politics; his midlife religious conversion, coinciding as it did with his conversion to Trumpism, feels more like a form of cultural signaling by a RETVRN bro about his preference for pre-liberal political norms.

 

Maybe that’s unfair—how dare I question the sincerity of a fascist’s devotion to Christ’s teachings?—but when Vance grumbles about America’s “Somali problem,” he doesn’t sound like Pope Leo. He sounds like Father Coughlin.

 

Which, again, is why I wouldn’t bet against him in a Republican primary.

 

Using his turn at the podium yesterday to scold the media for its coverage of Good’s shooting was an especially deft touch. You can never go wrong when trying to ingratiate yourself to a right-wing audience by whining about the press, but blaming the public backlash to the incident on news agencies achieved more than that. It discouraged Republican voters from trusting their lying eyes when watching videos of the killing lest they be guilty of abetting another supposed liberal media “hoax.” And it advanced the administration’s project to convince Americans that to even report on misconduct by ICE is to conspire to endanger federal agents.

 

“The Legacy Media is complicit in violence against ICE officers,” Stephen Miller’s wife Katie growled in a tweet showcasing news stories about Renee Good’s good character. To the White House, humanizing the victim is and can only be leftist propaganda aimed at building public support for a villain. Sympathy for the devil who (supposedly) obstructed the agents in Minneapolis and (supposedly) put them at risk will inevitably encourage more devils. By merely declining to vilify an anti-ICE activist, Vance and Miller would have us believe, the media is inciting others to engage in dangerous anti-ICE activities.

 

Speech as violence, essentially: It’s heartwarming to see a traditionally left-wing concept gaining traction on the postliberal right.

 

Serwer is onto something in thinking that demagoguery in this vein is designed to “perpetuate the false narrative that federal agents are in constant peril and therefore justified in using lethal force at the slightest hint of danger,” to the point where even publishing unflattering copy about the agency risks tipping America over into anarchy. The implication is clear: If the press insists on continuing to cover ICE’s abuses, turning the public against the agency and inspiring more Renee Goods, agents will simply have no choice but to shoot more people.

 

It will be a tragedy of the media’s “own making,” not ICE’s, just like how Good getting shot in the face was allegedly her fault, not the shooter’s.

 

We’re left with this question: Why now? J.D. Vance doesn’t typically commandeer the White House briefing room to rant about daily events. Why did the Minneapolis incident cause him to interrupt his daily sh-tposting on Twitter and go live?

 

Two possibilities. One, very simply, is that the vice president always has his antenna up for a spicy culture-war flashpoint he can exploit to show the GOP’s 2028 primary voters that he’s One of Us. He was the guy who led the smear campaign in 2024 about Haitian migrants supposedly stealing and eating their neighbors’ pets. He was the guy who encouraged right-wingers to call the employers of leftists celebrating Charlie Kirk’s murder and try to get them fired. He’s the guy who’s forever rushing to the defense of chuds in Trump’s government or the wider institutional GOP after their racist communications surface.

 

Vance has a nose for this stuff. He knew the right would be heavily invested in rationalizing the killing of Renee Good, so he volunteered to lead the effort.

 

But here’s another possibility. Maybe this is his way of “compensating” for having kept a low profile in Trump’s big war jamboree over subjugating Venezuela.

 

Why he’s been in the background is hard to say. Perhaps the VP is uncomfortable with the operation against Maduro, either on the merits or because it’s awkward for him to be associated with it. A politician who postures as a serious “America First” isolationist ideologue, convincingly enough to have a fan in Tucker Carlson, understandably wouldn’t want his fingerprints on the most nakedly imperialist U.S. foreign adventure in many decades. It’s bad for his “brand” among those postliberal intellectuals who like him so much.

 

Or maybe there’s a simpler explanation. Venezuela is Marco Rubio’s baby. He’s running this show, and there’s just not much of a role in it for J.D. Vance.

 

Either way, as we saw earlier, the vice president’s new right patrons might dislike the idea of war for oil, but the MAGA Republicans he’s counting on in 2028 love it. He’s missed a golden opportunity to impress them by attaching himself to the cause—and, what’s worse, the closest thing he has in the Cabinet to a rival for the GOP nomination has become the face of the operation. This is Marco Rubio and Donald Trump demonstrating “strength” and dominance in the most formidable possible way, and J.D. just isn’t part of the action.

 

Solution: Demonstrate “strength” in a different way by storming into the White House press room and angrily telling a national audience that Renee Good had it coming. Vance’s job limits his ability to behave ruthlessly, but he can, and routinely does, eagerly defend the ruthless behavior of others—Trump, online racists, now ICE after it’s killed an American citizen. He’s doing everything he can to show Republicans that he’ll be the scumbag of their dreams if only they give him the chance to lead in 2028. I think they will.