J.D. Vance Thinks Trump Should Defy the Supreme Court

How do you administer the oath of office to someone who thinks the Constitution doesn't matter?

Two Notes:

(1) If you want to experience Ohio’s Ted Cruz tonight, do it with us. We’ll be livestreaming the whole shirtshow here.

(2) We’re coming to Dallas! Okay, *I’m* not coming to Dallas, but The Bulwark is. Come hang with Sarah, Tim, Bill Kristol, Sonny Bunch and Adam Kinzinger.

The show is at the Wyly Theatre on Thursday, September 5.

Get tickets here.

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A hillbilly who just loves him some elves, tech VC’s, and Benjamins. (Melina Mara/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

1. Illiberal

I did a YouTube short on J.D. Vance yesterday and RealTalk: It’s some of my best work.

But I did make one factual error. See the correction below.¹

Anyway, while digging around for this I came upon a podcast interview J.D. Vance did with Jack Murphy a couple years back.²

During the interview, Vance offered advice for prospective presidential candidate Donald Trump:

“I think Trump is going to run again in 2024,” he said. “I think that what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.”

“And when the courts stop you,” he went on, “stand before the country, and say—” he quoted Andrew Jackson, giving a challenge to the entire constitutional order—“the chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.” . . .

“We are in a late republican period,” Vance said later, evoking the common New Right view of America as Rome awaiting its Caesar. “If we’re going to push back against it, we’re going to have to get pretty wild, and pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.”

Please read that again.

The man who is seeking the Constitutional office of the vice presidency has baldly stated that he believes the president is not bound to follow the orders of the judicial branch.

That is naked authoritarianism.

And it is not just one data point. There is Trump’s avowal that he wants to be “a dictator” along with his statement that parts of the Constitution which are inconvenient to his pursuit of power should be “terminated.”

I have many questions, but foremost is this:

How is it possible to administer the oath of office to a man who has already declared that he does not believe the oath is worth keeping? Who has already stated that he believes our Constitution to be out-moded, and weak, and ready for overturning?

If you want a silver lining, it seems unlikely that this Supreme Court would issue a ruling which created a showdown with Trump. Either because of “conservative legal principles,” or a desire to prolong “institutional legitimacy,” or simple cowardice, this court would not stop Trump from replacing the civil service bureaucracy with “his people.”

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That’s about the only kind of good news we’ve got these days. But that’s why people ride with us. We don’t do cheerleading or happy talk. Dangerous times demand clear eyes and full hearts. That’s what this community is all about.

Come join us. The only way through is together.

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Oh, one more thing: I stole “Ohio’s Ted Cruz” from Trae Crowder, who has a hysterical bit on Vance. Turns out that back during J.D. Vance’s NeverTrump phase, he came to one of Trae’s shows and then hung out with him afterwards, pounding beers and talking about how bad Trump was.

This is worth your time.

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2. Two-Tiered System of Justice

Democratic senator Bob Menendez was arrested just 10 months ago. He has already been convicted on 16 felony counts. He will be sentenced 10 weeks from now. He may well go to jail for the rest of his life.

Hunter Biden, the son of a sitting Democratic president, was arrested in September of 2023 for an offense he committed in October of 2018. He was found guilty in June of 2024. When the judge in his case—who was appointed by Donald Trump—sentences him, he could go to jail for up to two years.³

But Donald Trump? He attempted a coup in January of 2021 and then spent more than a year hiding stolen classified documents from the federal government.

Not only will Trump not go to jail, but a judge he appointed dismissed the air-tight documents case against him. When If he wins a second term, he will have his attorney general dismiss the other federal case against him. And there is almost no chance that the Fulton County case against him in Georgia will ever go to trial.

So yes, obviously, there is a two-tier system of justice.

I can’t wait for President Trump and Vice President Vance to fix it.

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3. Christine Blasey Ford

From a review of her new memoir:

“IF YOU WANT A HAPPY ENDING,” Orson Welles once quipped, “that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.” But sometimes, it’s not that the story stops so much as that the audience stops paying attention. This might be one way to think of #MeToo, which, in the years since it has faded from prominence, has been historicized in largely triumphalist terms. One version of the story goes something like this: there used to be evil men who harassed and attacked women, and because these men were powerful, or seemed so, nobody stopped them. But then, all that changed. Some women began to tell the truth, in public, about what had happened to them. And others joined them. They felt compelled to speak—empowered, at last, by each other’s example. One by one, abusive men were felled, like Samson after a haircut; their money and status were no match for the women’s moral authority. The women were heroes, restored, at last, to a place of public respect by the force of their testimony. And we, the audience, were changed. We were enlightened and made more empathetic; we were reminded of the power of speaking the truth. This, generally, is where the story stops: on a happy ending. The curtain lowers, and the lights fade as cheers echo in the mezzanine. 

One Way Back, Christine Blasey Ford’s memoir of her testimony at the confirmation hearings of now–Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and its aftermath, extends the scene a little further, into the months and years that followed her public disclosure. This prolonged attention reveals a more complicated and difficult story than the typically pat histories of #MeToo allow. Ford is one of the most famous accusers of the #MeToo era, and the movement’s dimming hopes were already becoming apparent as her story was unfolding. Unlike some of #MeToo’s other prominent public figures, Ford didn’t choose to testify; instead, she was all but forced to. Most important, her words were futile: the man she says assaulted her when she was in high school was not vanquished by her declaration. He was confirmed to the Supreme Court, where he went on to vote to overturn Roe v. Wade. 

Instead of triumph, Ford’s story is one of anxiety, humiliation, ostracism, torment, and defeat. And so her account undermines the cheap sentimentality typical of conventional liberal accounts of #MeToo—from the solemn faces of Taylor Swift and Ashley Judd, dubbed “The Silence Breakers,” on the cover of Time magazine in 2017, to the schlocky righteousness of Carey Mulligan and Zoe Kazan in the Harvey Weinstein reporting drama She Said. In One Way Back, “courage”—that faintly condescending term with which public survivors like Ford are usually praised—does not enter into it. Instead, Ford’s story guides readers to an uncomfortable awareness: that #MeToo, for all the spectacle and moral edification that it was supposed to provide for its audience, demanded something much darker and costlier from the women at its center. . . .

The book shows that the central catastrophe of Ford’s life—the one that wreaks the greatest psychic and material havoc—is not the sexual assault she was subjected to in high school. It is what happened to her when she tried to talk about it. 

Read the whole thing. Really read it. And then discuss in the comments, please.

1. Correction: In the video I claim that the Narya—the Elvish Ring of Fire—was forged by Sauron, but that’s fake news. The Narya was actually forged by Celebrimbor, who was tricked into making it by Sauron, who at the time had disguised himself as Annatar.

I regret the error.

2. For those who might have forgotten, Jack Murphy is one of the alpha male, gigachad, manly-man, Claremont hangers-on who, it turns out, enjoys both pegging and being cuckolded.

I’m not kink shaming, just informing.

3. While the max sentence for Hunter Biden is 22 years, experts say that because he is a first-time offender and the gun was not used in a crime (or even fired), the more likely sentence is 15 to 21 months.