Vice-President Fuckface

I have figured out Vance’s place in Tubby’s scheme

One reason I’m able to file so many columns on The Present Crisis is that the subject is capacious. In one sense, the problem can be explained very simply: The nation has been given over to a depraved thug and no one can or will stop his rampages. (Maybe we should just leave it there — so long and see you guys at the Counter-Reformation!)

Yet from that simple premise a whole galaxy of secondary propositions arise, from which columns and posts can be made. Some of these, granted, are rather strained, like those hot takes spun off from big pop culture subjects e.g. “We All Hate Corporate Jargon — But Here’s Why We Still Use It” or “Millennials and Gen Z Are Fighting Again. This Time About Gym Clothes.” We take quality seriously here at Roy Edroso Breaks It Down and try not to engage that kind of commerce, except when hung over on deadline.

It’s hard to find something new to say about the key topics, but I think I may have something to say about JD Vance.

Anyone who at all noticed what’s weird about this administration will have also noticed that, even by normal standards of political bullshit, their prevarication and fact-distortion — like sidekick Elon Musk’s claims that DOGE has found and cut absurdly massive amounts of government waste and fraud — are particularly extreme. Their lying is further distinguished by the outraged, Stephen-Milleresque tone with which they blurt it out.

Take the case of the Venezuelan immigrant Kilmer Armado Abrego-Garcia, shipped to the torture jail in El Salvador on, demonstrably, no grounds whatsoever. (We still don’t know how many of his fellow remandees are in the same situation.) This injustice keeps getting pointed out to administration officials, who respond as if Abrego-Garcia’s guilt were a settled matter. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt power-scoffed that the “insane, failing Atlantic magazine” report was trying to make readers “think this individual was father of the year… when that couldn’t be further from the truth.” Leavitt further claimed to have seen evidence that Abrego-Garcia had been convicted of “human trafficking,” which evidence she did not offer to share with the press (who, to be fair, abetted Leavitt’s lies by timidly omitting to ask for it).

Then Vance got into it:

After Jon Favreau, Barack Obama’s former director of speechwriting turned podcast host, called on Vance and other Trump administration figures to comment on X, formerly Twitter, the vice president said that it was “gross to get fired up about gang members getting deported.”

“My comment is that according to the court document you apparently didn’t read he was a convicted MS-13 gang member with no legal right to be here,” Vance wrote.

“Gross,” he says! This is, of course, proven bullshit. But let’s think a moment about how the gale-force lying of Leavitt, Musk, Miller et alia compares to that of Vance.

I’ve had a bit of fun with the Vice-President in sketches based on my perception of his watery persona. To me Vance always sounds like someone who’s really trying to get with the performative, vicious lying style of the administration. but can’t quite seem to put it over.

It’s not that Vance isn’t as evil as the rest of them. In fact you might say he’s worse in a way — the aforementioned Trumpkins and everyone in the cabinet seem to be in the grip of mania, addictions, Russian mobsters, or a combination of all three, whereas all I see in Vance is a desire to rise beyond the qualifications of his meager talents, and that he is willing to sell his soul in an aw-shucks-Satan-what-the-hey sort of way to do it.

So, Vance is at least as bad as they are — but he’s not in any way talented enough as a politician, a propagandist, or even a glad-hander to put that bad boy act over. (Have you ever heard anyone besides Peter Thiel believably say they were happy to spend time with him?)

Basically, Vance can’t pitch for shit. He was sent on that comical Greenland adventure only because Tubby himself had already laid the groundwork, so that if Vance face-planted — and he did — he couldn’t wreck the talking point; he could only embarrass himself.

Which leads me to a theory about what Vance is doing there in the first place.

Vance was always mentioned among the VP contenders in 2024. I thought Trump would pick a more self-evident prick like himself, a la Byron Donalds or Vivek Ramaswamy, to intensify the malign force of his This Time It’s Personal revenge tour. But in hindsight I realize there could only be ever be one alpha asshole on Trump’s ticket. Plus I knew that even the worst VP candidates are seldom a drag on a campaign — I have personally lived under the reign of Vice-President Dan Quayle — and Vance’s weird couch-fucking-rumored, flummoxed-by-donuts presence on the trail proved that point better than even Quayle had.

But now I have to admit I missed another angle that I have come to realize Trump was working with Vance. Though as a U.S. Senator Vance had sufficient establishment cred to be taken seriously as a political choice, he was always an obvious tryhard — much like Ron DeSantis, as I explained when DeSantis’ Presidential campaign began to disintegrate; but, even worse, Vance was a weakling tryhard. While DeSantis was at least as cruel and manipulative as Trump, but simply lacked the confidence to project it with the old Trump brio, Vance was obviously just an ambitious chucklefuck who would debase himself as much as it took to get the promotion — even if that meant sucking up to a man he’d previously compared to opioids and Hitler.

I know Tubby likes to have stone bastards around him, but he also likes to keep people close that he can smack around. Fortunately for him, some of his freakshow inner circle can fulfill both functions — like I’ve said, this is the last respectable job any of them will ever have, and they know it. And he’s also got a couple of fuckfaces he can definitely treat like shit whenever he wants: one’s “Little Marco” Rubio and the other is Vance. Trump sends them out specifically to step on their own dicks, which they always do, and he not only gets the pure joy of that spectacle but also a chance to send the world a message: That he’s the kind of guy that can and will do that to people, so everybody better watch out. He can’t really do that to Miller or Musk, but he sure as hell can do it to these clowns whenever he likes.

Does it go beyond the comfort factor? Do the psychometric numbers show that Vance’s and Rubio’s loserhood makes Tubby look like more of a big man? Does he want Vance demoralized so that if push came to shove, Vance won’t have the nerve to refuse like Pence did on January 6, 2021? Or is it just that he likes fucking with fuckfaces, and so far it’s always worked out for him? Guess we’ll see!