Eight reasons JD Vance is full of shit
Especially now, but also, in general.
By MAGA standards, JD Vance has an unrivaled ability to string together coherent sentences. At times, this allows him to articulate the closest thing we have to an intellectual defense of Trump’s policies.
In recent weeks, the Trump administration’s policy has been to round up people it suspects of being in a gang and condemn them—without trial, and in defiance of court orders demanding that it not do this—to life imprisonment in a brutal offshore concentration camp.
It turns out that this policy is not very popular. So last week, as the media and public outcry reached fever pitch, Vance took to X to defend the approach. In typical JD Vance fashion, he presented that defense as an elevated exposé of left-wing dishonesty—as if his were the voice of reason, above the fray of our sensationalized politics. Here’s what he wrote:
Consider that Joe Biden allowed approximately 20 million illegal aliens into our country. This placed extraordinary burdens on our country--our schools, hospitals, housing, and other essential services were overwhelmed. On top of that, many of these illegal aliens committed violent crimes, or facilitated fentanyl and sex trafficking. That is the situation we inherited.
The American people elected the Trump administration to solve this problem. The President has successfully stopped the inflow of illegal aliens, and now we must deport the people who came here illegally.
To say the administration must observe "due process" is to beg the question: what process is due is a function of our resources, the public interest, the status of the accused, the proposed punishment, and so many other factors. To put it in concrete terms, imposing the death penalty on an American citizen requires more legal process than deporting an illegal alien to their country of origin.
When the media and the far left obsess over an MS-13 gang member and demand that he be returned to the United States for a *third* deportation hearing, what they're really saying is they want the vast majority of illegal aliens to stay here permanently.
Here's a useful test: ask the people weeping over the lack of due process what precisely they propose for dealing with Biden's millions and millions of illegals. And with reasonable resource and administrative judge constraints, does their solution allow us to deport at least a few million people per year?
If the answer is no, they've given their game away. They don't want border security. They don't want us to deport the people who've come into our country illegally. They want to accomplish through fake legal process what they failed to accomplish politically: The ratification of Biden's illegal migrant invasion.
President Trump and I will not stand for it.
A follow-up tweet elaborated:
None of these people can articulate a deportation standard that: 1) would satisfy left-wing critics of the administration's immigration policy; 2) would satisfy their intuitions about what "due process" is required; 3) would be workable given resource constraints; and 4) would permit deportation of most of the illegal immigrants allowed under Joe Biden's administration.
They want to nullify the results of a democratic election. It's that simple.
My post today will do two things. First, it will meticulously lay out all eight reasons why Vance is so full of shit that it’s oozing out of his ears; so full that the neighbors are complaining about the stench, which was so pungent it made the Pope keel over and die; and crucially, so full of shit that even he must know it, and struggle to keep a straight face as he types it.
Second, I’ll explain why Vance behaves this way constantly, and why it makes him one of the most revolting figures in American politics. A follow-up post will reflect on why people like Vance deserve less charity and compassion than ordinary Trump supporters.
Today’s 8 reasons JD Vance is full of shit
1. He lies flagrantly, right off the bat.
Joe Biden did not allow 20 million illegal aliens into our country—no, not even “approximately.” In March, a conservative immigration think tank called the Center for Immigration Studies put the true figure at 5.4 million. This roughly tracks with a July 2024 CBO report, which estimated that “other foreign nationals” in the country—which includes not only illegal migrants, but also some legal parolees and asylum applicants—grew by 7.3 million from 2021-24.
Some conservatives claim higher numbers by citing the total number of border encounters under Biden, which totaled 10.8 million from FY21-24. But that methodology doesn’t make sense, because many encountered were returned to their home country, and some were repeat encounters of the same people trying to enter multiple times. Of course, even that figure is still only half of what Vance claimed.
In truth, 20 million would even exaggerate the total number of illegal immigrants in the country, regardless of when they entered. The right-leaning CIS study estimated that figure at 15.4 million. Other estimates say it’s closer to 11 million.
Any way you slice it, what Vance asks us to consider is a lie. It’s not a rounding error. It’s not misspeaking or misremembering. It’s not an ideological disagreement about measurement methodology, nor normal political embellishment in the heat of rhetorical flourish. It’s an intentional fourfold exaggeration of the true figure, because that’s just what MAGA does.
2. He misrepresents his mandate…
I’ve written before that I don’t believe in democratic “mandates." Even in normal times, when politicians were genuinely popular (John F. Kennedy had an average approval rating of 70%) and could win by sizeable margins (LBJ and Reagan each got over 486 electoral college votes), election outcomes did not necessarily reflect public preferences on individual policy questions. Campaign platforms compile dozens of policy positions that needn’t go hand in hand, so it’s tough to tease out whether the majority supported a candidate because of or in spite of any individual stance.1
The concept of a mandate gets even less coherent in our hyper-polarized era, when election margins are tiny (Trump won the popular vote by 1.5%), and when most voters are voting against the other side, rather than expressing enthusiasm for the lesser evil’s agenda.
So no: the American people did not “elect Donald Trump to solve” the problem of “extraordinary burdens” placed on our country by the 20 million illegal aliens Vance pretends Biden let in. They certainly didn’t demand that he solve that problem by violating the law. At most, immigration as a whole was one of a dozen reasons they elected him, alongside inflation, woke overreach, dishonest elite antics surrounding Joe Biden’s age, and a global anti-incumbent sentiment.
It is fair to say the public broadly trusts Republicans more than Democrats on immigration. But if you poll Americans on what to do about it, their views come out much more nuanced. Only 32% say “all” illegal migrants should be deported; 51% say “some.” Majorities oppose deporting those who have not been convicted of a violent crime (which is most of them); and large majorities oppose deporting those with children or spouses who are U.S. citizens, or who have lived here for 10 or more years—both of which apply to Kilmar Abrego Garcia.
Trump does not have a morally relevant mandate just because fewer than 50% of voters preferred him to Kamala Harris. To narrow that mandate to individual issues like immigration is even sillier; and to narrow it to especially radical immigration policies is a conservative fantasy.
3. …and pretends that mandate can overrule the constitution.
The whole purpose of the Bill of Rights is to limit what democratic majorities can tell our government to do. No matter how unpopular an idea is, the 1st Amendment prevents the government from banning its expression. No matter how popular gun control gets, the 2nd Amendment prevents the government from banning guns entirely—etc.2
Likewise, when the 5th and 14th Amendments say “no person” (not just citizens, mind you!) “shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law,” it doesn’t matter how many Americans may want to deprive them anyway. The framers rightly decided those rights too sacred, eternal, and complicated to be left to the fickle whims of a democratic majority. So at best, the whole contextual preface of Vance’s argument is pure distraction from the legal question at hand, and bringing it up is a dishonest sideshow.
(In truth, it’s worse than that. It’s not merely a distraction from, but an inversion of the legal principle. Later on, we see that the purpose of framing his mandate in this contrived way is to conflate his preferred policy outcome with the democratic values that policy undermines. But I’ll get to that later.)
4. He shamelessly lies about how due process is determined.
J.D. Vance is aptly named: he does, in fact, have a J.D. From the best law school in the country, to boot!3 So we can safely assume that he knows better than what he says next:
“To say the administration must observe “due process” is to beg the question: what process is due is a function of our resources, the public interest, the status of the accused, the proposed punishment, and so many other factors.”
To use the technical legal term from the original Latin, this is what’s known as “fucking horseshit.” What process is due is a function of the law. That’s why it’s called “due process of law!” Laws are made by Congress and interpreted by the courts; the executive is sworn to execute them. In suggesting that the President gets to weigh these factors himself, Mr. Yale Law School feigns confusion on a concept comprehensible from a single viewing of Schoolhouse Rock.
In this case, both Congress and the courts have been quite specific about what process is due to illegal aliens. They’ve created a whole system of immigration tribunals, called the Executive Office for Immigration Review, to conduct removal proceedings and adjudicate appeals.4 And they’ve written thoughtful laws to govern those proceedings while balancing the factors Vance describes. If you have a few spare hours, you can flip through Title 8 of the U.S. Code, titled “Aliens and Nationality,” to read all about it.
One of those laws, found in Title I, §1231(b)(3), is titled “Restriction on removal to a country where alien’s life or freedom would be threatened.” Based on this law, an immigration judge under Trump’s own Justice Department, back in 2019, ordered that Kilmar Abrego Garcia not be deported to El Salvador, given his “well-founded fear of persecution from Salvadoran gang members who might kill him if he returned there.”
“Those, of course, would be gang members presently incarcerated in the prison to which the Trump administration has now consigned Abrego Garcia, in the country to which it was illegal to send him.”
That’s from Andrew McCarthy, of the National Review. The National Review is a famously conservative publication, but even McCarthy can’t help but admit that I’m right here:
The process that is due to aliens depends on what process Congress has prescribed. Vance doesn’t mention this because the Trump administration is flagrantly violating immigration statutes.
That leads us to the point I said I’d get back to later. Remember this quote from Vance near the end?
…does their solution allow us to deport at least a few million people per year? If not, they’ve given their game away…
They want to nullify the results of a democratic election.
Of all the lies I’ll tear into in this post, this is the whopper of them all: in McCarthy’s words, a “grandiloquent rationalization for shredding the Constitution…pitched as a defense of constitutional principle.”
U.S. democracy is a system of laws passed by the people’s representatives according to a constitutional process, with checks and balances and all the works. Vance reimagines it as a majoritarian dictatorship that can defy the people’s laws at whim, simply because it was democratically elected. By his theory, if a candidate promises to do something illegal during the campaign and then wins, the law no longer applies; trying to enforce the law is “nullifying” the election.
That’s not how it works! And if it were, our system would be almost indistinguishable from that of Russia or Venezuela.
The President does not get to pick his preferred policy outcome first and then invalidate any law that doesn’t allow it. Trying to do that only concedes the accusations of his harshest critics. Vance is right that we’ve given our game away—it’s just that “our game,” in this case, is adherence to the constitution that he and his boss are sworn to uphold.
5. He calls Kilmar Abrego Garcia an MS-13 gang member, when he knows the evidence of this is flimsy.
I do not know whether Kilmar Abrego Garcia is a member of MS-13, or has ever been a member. Neither, I promise you, do you. Quite a few experts more qualified than us have looked at the evidence more closely than we have and decided that it was plausible, but not definitive—so that’s what you should believe too.
To briefly summarize the mountains of reports on this subject, the evidence that he is a member is as follows:
In 2019, he was detained for “loitering” in a Home Depot parking lot alongside three other men. Police documented that he was wearing a Chicago Bulls hat, which has been associated with MS-13 due to the similarity to the gang’s devil horns symbol.
Police also documented that he had “rolls of money covering the eyes, ears, and mouth of the presidents on the separate denominations,” which has been associated with gang culture (I believe this is a reference to the “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” proverb, as a code for not talking about the gang’s doings).
One unnamed detective, who was not cross-examined, claimed that a confidential informant advised him that Abrego Garcia was an active member of the MS-13 “Westerns clique.”5
The evidence that his is not a member is as follows:
That detective has since been suspended for unknown reasons.
The “Westerns clique” is based out of Long Island, New York—a state Abrego Garcia has never lived in.
The police documents recording this evidence contradict themselves in several places.
The Hyattsville City Police Department’s incident report only mentions the other three men arrested, with no mention of Abrego Garcia.
Even if the police documents are accurate (ex: not mixing up Abrego Garcia with one of the men he was with), plenty of people wear Chicago Bulls hats without being gangsters.
Money also changes hands frequently, especially within the same cash-economy ethnic subcultures (ex: migrants looking for work outside Home Depot). Doing construction work alongside gang members does not make one a gang member.
Gang culture and symbology can be fashionable in these subcultures without indicating actual membership. For example, plenty of normal people have skull tattoos because they think they look cool.
Gang “membership” is often transient (not permanent) and fuzzy (not black and white). People can drift in and out of different social circles, or be stuck in a group housing situation with other Salvadorans, or loyal to their brother without taking part in gang activities themselves, etc.
He has no criminal record after 12 years of living in this country, which is the relevant reason why gangs are bad.
If your review of this evidence leaves you certain that this man you’ve never met either is or is not a member of MS-13, that is your brain on tribalism. You simply do not know that, and JD Vance doesn’t either. Vance says it anyway because the messy truth is less useful to him than fearmongering about barbaric terrorist thugs.
6. He portrays a “third deportation hearing” as redundant to the first two, when in fact the initial process ruled in Garcia’s favor.
Vance has the gall to put asterisks around *third*…
When the media and the far left obsess over an MS-13 gang member and demand that he be returned to the United States for a *third* deportation hearing…
…to evoke frustration with administrative bloat, and imply that his critics’ demands would somehow replicate a completed process. That pesky “due process” stuff the left cares so much about? That’s just a bunch of red tape, you see.6 It’s jumping through hoops to prove something that two courts, we are told, have already decided.
Except the courts didn’t decide that. The courts decided the opposite: that he must not be deported to El Salvador! McCarthy elaborates:
It would actually be a *second* removal hearing. What Vance doesn’t tell you is that Abrego Garcia won the first hearing in the sense that there was (and is) a binding ruling, pursuant to a congressional removal statute, that it would be illegal to deport him to El Salvador. A new hearing is required not because Abrego Garcia’s apologists keep going back to the well; it’s because the Trump administration needs a do-over after losing in the first go-round and failing to either appeal or to take other legally available steps to remove Abrego Garcia.
Vance understands that Abrego Garcia was deported in error. The administration’s own lawyers admitted that in court. So it’s incredibly dishonest to portray a correction to his own side’s fuckup as the other side dragging their feet.
It's also worth noting that even before the withholding of removal was put in place, the two tribunals Vance references did not, as MAGA keeps insisting, rule that Abrego Garcia was a member of MS-13. They merely denied him bail while he was detained for his immigration status alone. They cited possible gang membership as one of the reasons for this—but they did not rule, and were not even asked to rule, on the question of whether he was a member. Acknowledging the existence of an accusation as a factor relevant to bail is wildly different than ruling that this accusation is true. But this administration has no interest in that level of nuance, because it gets in the way of frenzied chest-beating about subhuman terrorist trash who rape babies and eat dogs.
7. He pretends the only people who disagree with him “want the vast majority of illegal aliens to stay here permanently.”
I’ll be honest: as it happens, I do personally want that. I support the closest thing to open borders that our politics allows us to have.
But most Democrats do not want that, and certainly most conservative critics of the Trump administration don’t either. So I’ll let McCarthy cover why this is a lie:
Vance claims that taking the position I’ve just outlined, the legal aggressive-enforcement position, is “giving the game away.” By that he means one who stakes out this position secretly “doesn’t want border security,” doesn’t “want us to deport the people who’ve come into our country illegally,” wants “a fake legal process,” and hopes for “ratification of Biden’s illegal migrant invasion.”
It’s not enough to say that is self-evidently untrue. I’d add, in all sincerity, that it is Vance who is giving the game away….Vance does not tell us what his plan is for rapidly deporting 20 million people. That’s because such a plan cannot include faithfully executing the law. And he knows it.
8. He pretends the outcry is about deportations, when it’s mostly about using foreign prisons to defy court orders and consolidate power.
Deportations anger me. But I recognize that my views on immigration are outside the political mainstream. When Trump won, I resigned myself to the reality that lots of illegal immigrants were going to be deported. There are legal ways to do that—without going quite as fast as Stephen Miller wants, perhaps, but still fast enough to hit record numbers. And if Kilmar Abrego Garcia had merely been deported—even illegally, even in error, as a genuine administrative accident—this would be a complete non-story by now. Vance knows that too. Deportations happen every day, under every President, and most Democrats just sigh and change the channel.
What’s making us angry is the life imprisonment in a gulag part. Coupled with the ignoring the courts part. Coupled with taunting the people who don’t like it by chumming it up with the dictator you’re paying to help you do it, while talking about how “homegrowns” are next. Coupled with pretending the whole process—from police roundups, to judge to jury to executioner—is actually foreign policy, where courts and Congress get no say.
When people on the left spent four years screaming that Donald Trump was a threat to democracy, that’s pretty much what they envisioned. The same people who insisted we all had Trump Derangement Syndrome do not now get to pretend we’re lying about what we care about when our longstanding concerns are proven right.
This is who JD Vance is
I’m keenly aware that spending 4,000 words engaging with Vance’s ““““argument””” is exactly what he wants me to do. I do not intend to do it regularly. Debate is only productive when your interlocutor engages in good faith, and JD Vance never does.
My point in writing this once, now, is so I have something to link to the next time I need call Vance a slimy, watery stool.
Sometime soon, Vance will gaslight the country again, in a way that sounds superficially reasonable to people not paying attention. Hundreds of brain-dead Substackers will confuse his words with an actual argument, and expect me to engage with it. Some days, I won’t have the time. So I’ll just link them here to explain who J.D. Vance is.
JD Vance’s entire schtick is to be the political version of Sheldon from the Big Bang Theory: a stupid person’s imagination of what a smart person must sound like. His job is to take populism and pretend it is intellectualism; to take a movement driven mainly by angry monkey ooga-booga and make it sound defensible in polite society.
Vance excels at this role in part because his running mate is Donald Trump, next to whom most 7th-graders sound eloquent. But he’s also admittedly slick in front of a camera, which is why he ran circles around Tim Walz in their debate. Beyond stage presence, he’s practiced in the art of pseudo-intellectual diversion, which is crucial to maintaining the façade of principled conservatism.
This is an important role because America has lots of thoughtful people who lean conservative, but need something to latch onto to retain their self-conception as independent thinkers. Substack is chock-full of these people. I know a bit about them, because 15 years ago, I was one of them.7
These people are usually men. They are not stupid, and they often follow politics more closely than the average person. But a disproportionate share are low empathy and socially maladapted, and they’ve baked those traits into their psyche and identity. They deeply distrust groupthink, which they associate with mainstream circles from which they are excluded. They value individualism over collectivism, and relish being contrarian.8 And they pride themselves on being rational, not emotional, without admitting the social and emotional roots of their own conservative bias. They cackle when Ben Shapiro says “facts don’t care about your feelings”—and then they keep scrolling, in search of facts that fit their present feelings.
JD Vance provides those “facts.” He does this by making them up—but his audience rarely notices, so long as he validates what they already felt to be true. He is Chief Conductor of that class of internet blowhards who fancy themselves free thinkers because they regurgitate other people’s critiques of the establishment.
He gaslights, he sealions, he distracts. He throws spaghetti at the wall, in all directions, so that the conversation chases down eight separate rabbit holes, until nobody can keep it all straight anymore. Until people get exasperated, and give up, and the liars get to keep dodging the question.
He does this on purpose. He knows that his lies are lies, and he chooses them carefully. And whenever he’s called out on it, he plays dumb to what he’s doing so he can portray his critics as the ones unwilling to engage in good faith. Like he did to Jesse Singal on X, replying to the thread I described above:
“I hate this smug, self-assured bullshit. "I know I'm right, and people must be dumb or immoral to disagree with me." It's an easy way to go through life, because then you never have to think seriously about why your worldview is a justification for the mass invasion of the country my ancestors built with their bare hands.”
I am, to my core, the polar opposite of who he describes. I’m unhealthily self-aware about my biases, and I’ve spent decades thinking obsessively about the many reasons why smart and moral people disagree with my worldview. From all that thinking, I’ve developed a certain knack for identifying which dissenters are smart and moral—and which are con artists, saying one thing while believing another.
J.D. Vance is the second thing. He manipulates fools. He exists to provide bombastic cover for the basest racist impulses of an egomaniacal tyrant, and people should spit at him as he walks down the street.9
Most Trump supporters are not like J.D. Vance. And overcoming tribalism—what this blog is supposedly about—requires people like me to sit with our anger and direct it carefully. Unless I’m distracted by life (or some other scandal…), I’ll try to weigh in next week on how to walk that tightrope.
The truth, as I’ve also written, is that voters often don’t know or care about policy in the first place.
Back when Republicans had consistent principles, they used to be fond of reminding us that we live in a constitutional republic, not a direct democracy. Respect for the constitution’s limits on majoritarian government is one of the theoretical underpinnings for why they were called Republicans.
Indisputably better than Harvard’s—although not quite as impressive as Yale’s Jackson program…
These are technically under the Justice Department and distinct from true “courts” under Article III. The fact that the court that barred Abrego Garcia’s deportation was within Trump’s own Executive Branch is an additional point of embarrassment for the administration.
What’s definitely NOT evidence of his membership is his knuckle tattoos. Nobody in ICE or the administration thought those had anything to do with MS-13 until an anonymous X account made up a code from thin air, with Q-Anon-style reasoning that a cross is a 1 and a skull is a 3. Then the President’s social media team decided to run with it to cover his ass.
Vance’s unspoken implication here is: “We dictators? We get stuff done fast.” Hitler, I’m told, made the trains run on time.
I was in high school at the time, so I’ll cut myself some slack.
In fairness, these traits are often useful, and these people are sometimes right. There is good reason to distrust groupthink, and I still value individualism highly, etc. I’m just describing the type.
Apart from that, I guess he’s alright.
After the VP debate, I said to my wife, “you know, regardless of who wins, we gotta worry about Vance long term. He’s got his sights set on ‘28 and he’s a better bullshitter than trump.”
Great piece. Now I understand why BB recommends your Substack. I’m also glad to have an article to cite whenever someone defends Vance.