Here’s the latest entry into Donald Trump’s Fatal Attraction obsession with Barack Obama. Obama is driving O.J. Simpson’s white Ford Bronco down the freeway. I remember that occasion well. It was a Friday night and I was extremely annoyed because the local news preempted the X-Files. I had worked hard all week and all I wanted to do was have a beer and vege out watching monsters and space aliens on my then-favorite TV show. But that simple pleasure was denied to me, while local TV reporters interviewed each other as helicopters shot footage of Simpson on the 405. I kept hoping he’d pull the trigger to just get the show off the road. It sounds uncharitable, I know, but considering the kind of person Simpson was, I don’t think it’s particularly cruel to say that. Both he and Bill Cosby should go to a circle of Hell all their own.
You might expect a 7th-grader to put together something like that on a Saturday morning…
— The Solutions Party (@_SolutionsParty) July 26, 2025
So if you get a magnifying glass, you can see Trump in the cop car on the right and J.D. Vance (this version of Vance) in the cop car on the left. What is that about?
I prefer this JD Vance meme 😏 pic.twitter.com/IBtZOXdaPO
— Politics Sloth 🧦🌐🇬🇷🇺🇸 (#1 reply guy) (@SockDemFan) July 26, 2025
Fixed it. Kind of anyway! pic.twitter.com/zXxWeynfe1
— The Dullahan (@thedullahan2025) July 26, 2025
So where’s J.D. these days? Yes, we know he’s on vacation and getting protested. But where is he in terms of power, and Trump’s inner circle?
Vice President JD Vance has been left out of the “room where it happens,” ceding his vice presidential role to posts usually considered more junior and acting as Donald Trump’s social media cheerleader, a New York Times columnist wrote Wednesday.
Locked out of real power while Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller runs deportations and Director of the Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought terrorizes federal workers, Vance has become Trump’s “official fanboy,” spending his time crafting sophisticated arguments for the administration’s cruelty, wrote Jamelle Bouie.
But his recent speech at the right-wing Claremont Institute revealed that he’s bringing something to that role that’s far more sinister than typical MAGA rhetoric.
“America is not just an idea,” Vance declared at Claremont. “It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future” — meaning your passport might say American, but that doesn’t make you equal, Bouie wrote.
Vance explicitly rejected what he called the “over-inclusive” nature of founding ideals, arguing that believing in the Declaration of Independence’s principles would mean admitting “billions of foreign citizens.” But his alternative is chilling: a hierarchy where “the people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War have a hell of a lot more claim over America than the people who say they don’t belong,” Bouie wrote.
This isn’t just nativism—it’s a direct echo of Chief Justice Roger Taney’s infamous Dred Scott decision, which argued that Black Americans could never be citizens because the founders never intended it, Bouie argued. Taney, too, found the Declaration’s egalitarian language “over-inclusive.”
Vance’s tiered citizenship extends to immigrants, who he says must show proper gratitude. He savagely attacked New York City’s Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani for describing America as “beautiful, contradictory, unfinished” on Independence Day.
“Has he ever looked in the mirror and recognized that he might not be alive were it not for the generosity of a country he dares to insult?” Vance sneered. “Who the hell does he think that he is?”
The message is clear: there are Americans who can critique their country, and Americans who cannot—determined by bloodline and deference, Bouie wrote.
Perhaps most grotesquely, Bouie finished, Vance invokes Civil War soldiers while rejecting everything they died for. Abraham Lincoln called the Declaration’s promise of equality the “electric cord” linking all Americans. Vance wants to cut that cord, replacing it with what he calls connection to “soil and the dead,” Bouie wrote.
More grist for the mill that Vance is a non-charismatic sidekick and therefore no threat to Trump, but he’s not the inheritor to the MAGA throne. And to whom will the crown fall? That remains to be determined. But it will not be Eric Trump or his junkie brother, and it most definitely will not be Marco Rubio or Ron DeSantis. The casting call is still out.
Who knows? It may be Steve Bannon and he’ll reign from his podcast and the MAGA candidate will be whomever Bannon says it will be. That is a possibility.
While Vance may not be the inheritor of the MAGA throne, he is constitutionally, the inheritor of the Presidency should the Grim Reaper call in on T or the 26th be acted upon or T be impeached. Odds anyone?
Any of these lets Vance in along with his mentor Thiel and that cohort. And bringing with it the Scott thinking on circles of citizenship (which brings to mind Vance being rebuked by the Vatican and others on circles of love and neighbourliness). That said, if we can get properly past Nov 26, you are right that his lack of charisma and the splintering of MAGA will hopefully leave him hobbled.
Also, asking for a friend, “the people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War have a hell of a lot more claim over America than the people who say they don’t belong,” are Union and Confederate soldiers equal in the hierarchy? My logic suggests primacy those who fought for the Union leaving scope for an interesting debate/friction. And where stand the non-whites who fought?