Sen. JD Vance, Donald Trump’s newly chosen running mate, wrote this on Facebook during the 2016 presidential campaign:

I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler.

It seems he ultimately decided Trump is both of those things — a Hitler type and a cynical asshole who could help Vance further his own political career. The irony here is that Vance is at least as cynical as Richard Nixon — note his use of the word “useful” — or he wouldn’t have become so shamelessly loyal to the wannabe dictator who tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

My friend Swamp Rabbit called up a recent New York Times interview with Vance, a lengthy piece that shows how much the Ohio Republican revels in being perceived as both a populist firebrand and a staunch opponent of those who don’t believe in the sort of populism that allows for hostility toward Blacks, immigrants and everybody else who doesn’t fit the resentful white working-class MAGA mold that Trump has exploited so successfully.

Vance said this in the Times interview: “I think people really, really underrate the sense to which there is palpable and actionable frustration, and I’m always surprised that their assumption appears to be that Trump is the worst, rather than the best, expression of that frustration.” 

Just what we need, another pugnacious hustler pretending to be a spokesperson for the people. Vance is as familiar as the rest of us with Trump’s appalling personal history — the housing discrimination lawsuit, the failure to pay an army of small business contractors in Atlantic City and elsewhere, Trump University and other major scams, the unending stream of documented lies, his role in the Jan. 6 insurrection, the impeachments, the election subversion charges, the conviction for sexual battery and defamation, the convictions on 34 counts of business fraud, and so on.

“Up means down, worst means best,” Swamp Rabbit said when I asked him to explain Vance’s reasoning. “It don’t make no sense unless you drink the Trump Kool-Aid.”

Footnote: In case you thought Vance might have some redeeming qualities, check out the person he chooses to blame for Trump’s recent brush with violent death: “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”