J.D. Vance’s Burrito Offensive

By Jonah Goldberg

Friday, August 07, 2026

 

Sometimes a burrito isn’t just a burrito.

 

Let me be honest with you: I’m on a mini-vacation and I’m looking for an easy topic. I thought about tackling Tucker Carlson’s 10-point plan for pretending to be a serious person, but I just can’t do it. Besides, Douglas Murray beat me to the punch in pointing out that this agenda demonstrates the degree to which Tucker’s head is Israeli-occupied territory. Forget Judea and Samaria, the really settler-colonial drama is in Tucker’s cranium.

 

I do respect how he’s bringing back some of the greatest hits—including attacking the sin of usury and the slavery of debt. The “slavery” of debt is No. 2 on his 10-point platform. Meanwhile, “breaking the slavery of interest” was a mere No. 11 on the National Socialist German Workers’ Party’s list.

 

There will be plenty of time to deal with all of this nonsense later.

 

I want to tackle a different nonsense. A headline from the Telegraph:

 

How burritos are tearing apart the Republican Party

 

Rising food costs – and conservatives’ eating habits – at heart of social media row

 

And Fox News:

 

Burrito debate rips open GOP civil war on affordability: ‘We will lose, and deserve it’

 

A viral complaint over the price of a burrito has exposed a widening conservative divide over affordability

 

“This is nothing short of a battle for the future of the Republican Party,” Politico’s White House reporter, Megan Masserly, declared on the Playbook podcast this week, according to the Telegraph. That’s right. Sorta. But this fight isn’t really about burritos or even “affordability.”

 

You can read the Telegraph piece or Jim Geraghty’s analysis if you want to dive into the details of this social media firestorm. But the short version is: Someone from Turning Point USA, the campus right-wing network, quoted a student summarizing his concerns with affordability as “A burrito shouldn’t cost $20.”

 

Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen, a friend and colleague at the American Enterprise Institute, indirectly defended the current administration with some conventional Twitter mockery. “Cry me a river. The burritos in the college cafeteria are included in your meal plan.”

 

Then the vice president made fun of Thiessen by calling him fat (which he isn’t), tweeting, “I’m surprised to hear Mark [sic] say this. If you’ve ever met him in person, it’s quite obvious the man has never missed a burrito.”

 

And with that, everyone was off to the races. I agree with the folks—Eric Erickson, Ben Shapiro, Geraghty, et al.—who pushed back on the claim that $20 burritos are really a thing. I mean, sure, they exist. But generally speaking, if you’re dropping Hamiltons like Aaron Burr on burritos, you’re either ordering some very rarefied burritos or you’re having $10 burritos delivered by DoorDash or Uber Eats.

 

Some have noted the awkwardness of the sitting vice president lending aid and comfort to the kids whining about “affordability,” given that “affordability” is a word, and concern, that Vance’s boss believes is a Democratic hoax. Weirder still: Trump’s policies are one of the major contributors to higher prices. You can support his anti-immigration efforts, in whole or in part, while still acknowledging that driving out cheap labor—the kind of labor that goes into making a lot of America’s burritos—isn’t helping affordability. Likewise, you can love his tariffs all you want, but I would love to see a serious argument for how they’ve made things like burritos cheaper. Ditto rising fuel costs. Oh, and then there’s the monetary theory. One funny irony: Generally speaking the same folks who ridiculed opponents of Trump’s Liberation Day fiasco—mocking people for thinking cheap stuff from China mattered—are now bitching about affordability. Remember it was Vance who said, “We believe that a million cheap knockoff toasters aren’t worth the price of a single American manufacturing job.”

 

It’s absolutely true that the Biden era (and Trump’s first term before that) contributed to inflation significantly. I’m always surprised when people seem to think bringing the rate of inflation down means lowering the price of things. It doesn’t. A lower inflation rate is a decline in the rate of increase. Deflating prices—something we are not seeing, at least in the burrito sector—would mean lower prices. Barring deflation, what makes things more affordable is rising real wages. Things have been fairly meager on that front since Trump took office.

 

Now, if you’ve been following the burrito wars, you’ve heard all of this already. And if you haven’t, you don’t really need to hear any more, because this “civil war” isn’t about burritos or even affordability. It’s all about J.D. Vance.

 

You may have noticed in recent weeks that Vance and his surrogates have been jumping ugly on his critics lately. Indeed, Vance’s cheap insult of Thiessen was a counterpunch in response to a very tough column Thiessen wrote about Vance titled, “Trump’s Iran strategy is working. His vice president’s isn’t.”

 

Now, I didn’t love the column. I don’t think Trump’s Iran strategy is working. But I agree that Vance’s Iran strategy is worse and that Vance’s internal White House strategy is to undermine his boss. But my main objection to the column is that it falls perilously close to a mode of analysis I am very weary of: Donald Trump cannot fail, he can only be failed. We see a lot of this from some Republican senators who put the blame for Trump policies on unnamed subordinates giving the president “bad advice.” It’s a Trumpified version of the old “good czar, bad boyars” canard.

 

But none of that is particularly relevant. Marc was just the latest victim of the Vance team’s effort to silence any internal opposition to his capturing the 2028 nomination. Dan McLaughlin had an excellent piece on this at the end of last month, when Vance loyalists were flaying Rod Dreher for turning on Vance.

 

Vance wants a coronation, not a contest. Moreover, as Dan noted, for a certain segment of the right, there is no substitute for Vance. If you want someone—someone who can actually win the nomination at least—who champions postliberal, Orbánophilic, cultural and economic nationalism and statism, he’s your only choice. Tucker is not going to be your guy. Indeed, it wouldn’t shock me at all if Tucker’s thinking is to build up a base of ultra-MAGA supporters and then endorse or team up with Vance at some crucial moment. That might seem outlandish now, but the longer the Vance people go without training their vitriol on Tucker, the more plausible that scenario will seem.

 

Axios had a write-up of Vance’s war with his detractors. The piece wasn’t terrible, but the headline could have been written by Vance’s press team: “Pre-Trump GOP is coming for Vance.” Vance wants—needs—people to believe that the “MAGA revolution” is permanent, because if it is then he is the rightful heir to it. The first problem with the headline, and some of the analysis, is that it is Vance who turned on the pre-Trump GOP. He was one of them, felt the wind on his wet finger, and changed course. The second problem is that the author—and Vance’s surrogates—believe that MAGA is what they say it is. Marc Thiessen, Ben Shapiro, Rod Dreher, the late Lindsey Graham, et al. have not been “Never Trumpers” by any stretch for a very long time. Some have been pro-Trump longer than Vance himself. What makes them Vance’s enemies is that they don’t agree with him on various policies or accede to Vance’s sense of entitlement.

 

Vance’s theory of politics is that he needs to be the avatar of the Very Online populist right. His “big tent” is explicitly aimed at attracting the Nick Fuentes and Tucker crowd, while nightsticking the “neocons” out of the tent. Groups like TPUSA are his base, which is why he thought it wise to do his “hey fatso” schtick with Thiessen. And it’s why his surrogates piled on. From the New York Times:

 

An ally of the vice president said the columnist had it coming. “It’s neither appropriate nor constructive for self-described ‘Republican’ commentators like Marc Thiessen, who earns an absurd living promoting war after war on television, to use their platforms to dismiss the economic anxieties of young Americans,” said Alex Bruesewitz, a former Trump campaign aide.

 

He added: “I support elected officials who speak the truth. The vice president was right: Marc Thiessen appears to be severely obese. He should lay off the burritos.”

 

The idea that Bruesewitz is a champion of “truth-telling” politicians is transparent nonsense. Indeed, if he thinks it’s outrageous for Republicans to mock concerns about affordability, he’d be attacking Donald Trump, the undisputed leader of the Republican Party.

 

It’s also nonsense that Vance is a serious champion of affordability. His economic ideas are closer to Elizabeth Warren’s than they are to those of traditional conservatives, which is why he says so many silly things about GDP, Milton Friedman, etc. But that’s not why he ran to the defense of a kid whining about $20 burritos. He ran to his defense to bully a critic and to further secure the support of the whiners.