J.D. Vance Wanted a Constitutional Crisis

The Ohio senator makes his vice-presidential pitch to the New York Times.

An interesting new Politico/Ipsos poll, out today, sheds more light on the electorate’s reaction to Donald Trump’s recent felony conviction. Team Trump has been triaging the political damage with relentless messaging of a rigged trial: 43 percent of respondents either strongly or somewhat agreed that the prosecution was brought to help President Joe Biden. But 21 percent of independents “said the conviction made them less likely to support Trump and that it would be an important factor in their vote.”

Meanwhile, Biden is leaning hard into Trump’s legal troubles: A new campaign ad up this morning across battleground states portrays an election “between a convicted criminal who’s only out for himself and a president who’s fighting for your family.”

It’s hot out there: More than 70 million Americans are under heat advisories today and are likely to remain there for the rest of the week. Here’s the Weather Prediction Center: “The duration of this heat wave is notable and potentially the longest experienced in decades for some locations.” Stay safe, folks. Happy Monday.

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Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio, is seen in the U.S. Capitol on Tuesday, November 14, 2023. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images.)

J.D. Vance’s Constitutional Crisis

Why is Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance shooting up the Trump veepstakes power rankings, as our Marc Caputo reported last week? Lots of reasons. He hails from theoretically-still-swingy Ohio. He’s a leading figure in MAGA populist thought. He pals around with Don Jr.

Above all, though: He’s easily the most gifted and most enthusiastic shit-shoveler on the shortlist. 

Last week, Vance sat for a largely friendly interview with the New York Times’s Ross Douthat. They talked about lots of things: class struggle in America, Vance’s old book Hillbilly Elegy, the war in Ukraine. 

Then they got to 2020. “What’s your take,” Douthat wanted to know, “on the legitimacy of the 2020 election?”

Vance is no moron: He knew this was the make-or-break portion of the interview. Trump is on the cusp of making his running-mate decision, and willingness to boost his stolen-election lies is the first and last question on his vetting sheet. So Vance launched in, talking about tech censorship, the Hunter Biden laptop story, COVID-era changes to voting procedures. The RNC should have been fighting harder in advance of the election against all this, he said.

Okay, Douthat pressed—but what about after the election? “Did it make any sense,” he asked, “to use the office of the vice presidency to shift the outcome of the election?” 

Vance replied: 

The vice-presidential thing—look, here’s what this would’ve looked like if you really wanted to do this. You would’ve actually tried to go to the states that had problems; you would try to marshal alternative slates of electors, like they did in the election of 1876. And then you have to actually prosecute that case; you have to make an argument to the American people . . .

I think the entire post-2020 thing would have gone a lot better if there had actually been an effort to provide alternative slates of electors and to force us to have that debate. I think it would’ve been a much better thing for the country. Do I think Joe Biden would still be president right now? Yeah, probably. But at least we would have had a debate. And instead what we had was the Jenna Ellis legal clown show and no real debate about the election. And now every time we bring it up, it’s like, ‘Well, yeah, we litigated all these things.’ No, you can’t litigate these things judicially; you have to litigate them politically. And we never had a real political debate about the 2020 election . . .

Even under a circumstance where the alternative-electors thing works, and [Trump’s] president again, he would have served four years and retired and enjoyed his life and played golf. The idea that this sets off a sequence where Donald Trump becomes the dictator of America is completely preposterous. He was using the constitutional procedures. 

I am not kidding: This might be the most impressive piece of election bullshitting I have ever seen. It’s a tour de force that does three things at once: It endorses the most aggressively abusive strategy for stealing the election Trump contemplated in 2020, it absolves Trump of the strategies that didn’t work, and it works in some sneering at libs who think that wielding naked political power to steal an election might qualify as a step toward dictatorship.

In case you’ve somehow forgotten, here is Donald Trump’s narrative of what happened in the 2020 election. He defeated Joe Biden easily—or he would have, if it weren’t for dastardly Democratic cheating across a suite of swing states, which resulted in untold Trump votes going uncounted and untold phony Biden ballots counted from thin air. He and his lawyers had unbelievable heaps of evidence proving this fraud—but election officials and the courts were too cowardly to let them win their cases. Result: Biden to the White House, Trump to Mar-a-Lago. 

This narrative has taken an almighty pummeling since the day Trump and his allies first rolled it out, for the simple reason that every specific accusation of fraud they tried to bring forward collapsed at the first whiff of scrutiny. Their lawsuits crumpled by the dozens. Their promised reams of definitive evidence kept going up in smoke. 

Vance knows all this, and he knows Douthat knows it, too; he’s too slippery to try to fight the battle on this hill. So, in his telling, Team Trump’s post-2020 lawsuits become “the Jenna Ellis legal clown show”—as though it wasn’t Trump leading the charge, but some random outside lawyer. (Not just any outside lawyer, either—one who last year abandoned Team Trump to admit many of her post-election claims had been lies and later went on to endorse Ron DeSantis for president. In other words, a very good scapegoat for a VP hopeful performing for an audience of one.)

Trying to go to court to prove fraud at all was strategically foolish, Vance maintains—“you can’t litigate these things judicially.” Instead, “you have to litigate them politically.” He mourns that “we never had a real political debate about the 2020 election.”

This might seem an odd claim, since all of us, including Ross Douthat and J.D. Vance, have spent insane amounts of time debating the 2020 election ever since it happened. But to Vance, “political debate” isn’t just having a robust public discourse about what factually happened. “Political debate,” in Vance’s telling, is something that couldn’t really happen in 2020 unless Mike Pence, rather than certifying Biden’s win, endorsed Republicans’ fraudulent “effort to provide alternative slates of electors.”

In other words, Vance is being euphemistic. What he refers to as “political debate” is what the rest of us would call a constitutional crisis. 

It was a mistake, Vance maintains, to spend all that time trying to prove fraud. The fact that millions of Republicans believed there had been fraud was enough: Republicans should’ve jumped straight into trying to seize the presidency by political force. Otherwise, Vance argues, “an entire section of our democratic republic would’ve had their concerns ignored.” 

The cherry on top here is Vance’s final claim. He imagines a world where Republicans had gone forward with this insane plan, and it worked—Trump remained the president because the Republican Congress decided to honor alternate slates of fake electors despite having failed to prove the slightest whiff of fraud. 

And in this universe—where Trump has unshackled himself from the will of the voters and forced his way to another term without ever proving an ounce of fraud—here’s Vance, still whining that liberals would have the gall to call him an authoritarian! After all, Trump would have just “served four more years and retired”—why are you all getting so bent out of shape?

A couple last stray thoughts on this. One: I know he’s not the most popular guy around here, but I’ve always had a soft spot for Douthat, and I think he provided a valuable service with this interview. 

The liberal line on interviewing MAGA lunatics is usually that the interviewers let them get away with too much—that the interviewer needs to get adversarial and hostile. It’s a hard balance to strike, because of course letting your subject dissemble with no pushback is a disservice to your audience. But push back too hard, and the interview devolves into a meaningless shouting match. Vance doesn’t get nearly as insane here if Douthat doesn’t give him gentle pushback, then give him the space to yak. 

Two: If you’re Trump, what’s the point in keeping looking? The perfectly pliable, highly intelligent, utterly morally bankrupt option is right in front of you, just waiting for the tap-in.

“If he asked me, certainly I would be interested,” Vance told Douthat. “I’m not trying to think too much about it until he actually asks.”

—Andrew Egger

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We tell you the truth and we don’t pull our punches. Come along for the ride.

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Catching up . . .

• Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu dissolves war cabinet after political rival walks out, citing lack of plan for Gaza’s future: CBS News

• Israel announces ‘pause’ along southern Gaza route to allow in aid, but no let up in Rafah offensive: CNN

• ‘A hellscape’: Dire conditions in Gaza leave a multitude of amputees: New York Times

• Six in 10 key state voters turn our sporadically or are not firmly committed, poll finds: Washington Post

• Surgeon general calls for warning labels on social media platforms: New York Times

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Quick Hits

1. On the Trumpstalgics

Matt Yglesias has a great Slow Boring post up today on our honestly inexplicable national failure to remember that, when it came to the basic nuts and bolts of governance, Donald Trump did a very bad job:

On the economy, Trumpstalgics say that what matters is that the results were fine, even if the ideas espoused (like funding the entire government with tariffs) were often unsound. But on Covid, Trumpstalgics say that what matters is that he espoused the right ideas (in this case, being less cautious), even if he was completely inefficacious in delivering results. Biden gets no credit for rapid job growth, because that was just the natural unwinding of Covid-era unemployment, but he is personally to blame for every cent of inflation, which is somehow totally unrelated to that unwinding. And the unemployment itself wasn’t Trump’s fault, because it was the virus that caused the collapse of the labor market, but Trump — rather than the aforementioned collapse of the labor market — deserves credit for the temporary halt in the flow of asylum claims.

It genuinely makes no sense! And it’s worth taking a break from wrangling over whether January 6 was technically an insurrection or exactly what Trump meant when he suggested using disinfectant on people’s lungs, and zooming out to the part where he was overall bad at the job.

Read the whole thing.

There’s lessons for media here. We can be tempted to focus nearly all our Trump coverage on the eye-popping stuff—the guy’s personal awfulness, his autocratic aspirations, his norm-breaking. And with good reason! But perversely, that media environment can create the conditions for Trump supporters to cast him as a Mussolini type, breaking norms and making the trains run on time. Many voters, it turns out, care much less about the norms than they do about the trains running on time. It is important to note that Trump did not actually make the trains run on time!

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2. Tamping down the preening

Over at The Dispatch this morning, Yuval Levin has some suggestions for new C-SPAN CEO Sam Feist:

Since its launch, transparency has been C-SPAN’s watchword. Its purpose was to bring the People’s House to the people and let Americans see and hear what their representatives were up to. Yes, transparency is an essential democratic good. But all good things are a matter of degree, and there is such a thing as excessive transparency in political institutions.

Cameras have turned all of Congress’ deliberative spaces into performative spaces, leaving less and less room and time for members to speak and work in private. The most obvious consequence of this transformation has been the explosion of grandstanding in both chambers. There has obviously always been grandstanding in Congress, but the omnipresence of cameras has taken that vice to new lows. To make matters worse, the ubiquity of cameras has attracted cadres of members who understand public performance as the essence of the job . . .

The solution is not to burn down C-SPAN. The network does a lot of good, educating viewers about public affairs and American history. And in any case, there is no turning back now from the televising (and YouTubing) of much of Congress’ work. But by taking account of the problems to which it has contributed, C-SPAN could help advance some solutions.

One useful step might seem counterintuitive: To make Congress just a little less performative, C-SPAN should push for a loosening of the reins on its coverage of the floors of both chambers. The House and Senate floors are not where most bargaining has ever happened in Congress. They are venues for voting, and on rare occasions also for debate. But since the televising of floor action began, they have also been prime venues for grandstanding, because Congress’ rules require C-SPAN to only show close-up shots of the person speaking. This keeps the audience from seeing that the speaker is often addressing an empty chamber, and the dramatic video clip is purely for show. It turns C-SPAN into reality television, rather than facilitating the televising of Congress’ reality. Wide shots of the House floor could cut down on the production of such clips.

We know that could help, because Congress actually let C-SPAN do this for several years in the late 1980s and early 1990s. To curb made-for-TV grandstanding by Newt Gingrich and others, Democratic House leaders allowed C-SPAN to pan out during speeches. The House ended that practice in 1994, at Gingrich’s behest. C-SPAN has requested permission to resume it several times since then, to no avail, so there is no way to know if another push would succeed. But it’s worth a try, particularly as part of a broader effort to rethink video coverage of Congress. 

Read the whole thing.

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