One of my many New Year’s resolutions back in January was never to write what I call “Captain Obvious columns” about the Donald Trump scandal du jour that’s all over your social media feed. So you’ll have to imagine the column I didn’t write about Trump’s tacky UFC cage match that desecrated the White House, and the role of bread and circuses (or just circuses…where’s the bread?) in the inevitable decline and fall of decrepit empires.
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A ‘President JD Vance’ would be a different kind of dictator. The scary kind.
They say you never get a second chance to make a first impression — unless your name is JD Vance, or it becomes JD Vance after a few false starts. In 2016, a then utterly unknown Yale Law grad introduced himself to America with a No. 1 bestseller, Hillbilly Elegy, that used his (sort-of) Appalachian family’s hardscrabble story to come off as an empathetic horse whisperer for the white working class.
He cemented that first impression when we learned he’d privately described Trump as a kind of a demagogue feeding off the pathologies he’d written about in Elegy — someone he feared might become “America’s Hitler.”
But Trump’s victory coupled with some exposure to the ketamine-fueled paranoia of Silicon Valley’s billionaires gave the former James Donald Bowman yet another shot at reinvention — now embracing extreme right-wingers and crackpot conspiracy theories all the way to his election, at age 40, as the 50th vice president of the United States.
Today, less than two weeks before the 10th anniversary of Hillbilly Elegy’s publication, Trump has become America’s…Mussolini, a strutting yet sometimes buffoonish strongman and a hopelessly corrupt invader of faraway lands.
It’s Vance who could actually become America’s Hitler, if he gets that chance…a very real possibility.
That’s a strong statement, but it’s also perhaps the most powerful takeaway from the heavily promoted, about-to-be-published book from all-access New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, Regime Change. It portrays the vice president as eager to go much further than Trump in crushing domestic dissent.
In book excerpts published Monday, Haberman and Swan depicted Vance — in a tag-team alliance with Trump’s ruthless mass-deportation guru Stephen Miller — as calling for the radical step of invoking the Insurrection Act to send in troops to put down protests by everyday Americans in Minnesota who were enraged by masked goon squads snatching their immigrant neighbors and the killing of two U.S. citizens.
Describing a White House meeting of senior aides — but not Trump — in late January after Renee Good and Alex Pretti were gunned down, the Times reported that “Vance got to the point. They needed to invoke the Insurrection Act, swiftly, to crush the unrest in Minnesota. It would be painful in the short term, he said, but the message it would send — that paid agitators could not get away with disrupting ICE operations — would make sure no one tried it again.”
There are many problems with Vance’s anti-democratic impulses. As Haberman and Swan reported, even most of the Trump aides in the room agreed that invoking the 1807 law in this circumstance would be both a significant expansion of presidential power and a public-relations nightmare. Even worse, the nation’s No. 2 official was urging this would-be abuse of power based on a right-wing internet lie — the falsehood that Minnesota’s angry neighbors were “paid protesters.”
The deeply reported episode isn’t the only disturbing glimpse of Vance’s governing philosophy in recent months, but it’s the most revealing, and most damning: a true believer in the worst conspiracy theories about the left, with the inclination to wield dictatorial powers against them.
Earlier this month, Vance — arguably the regime’s top cheerleader for Europe’s extreme far-right political parties — stunned the United Kingdom’s center-left government by weighing in on growing unrest over the stabbing death of an 18-year-old English college student by a Sikh migrant. He sounded more like a wannabe X influencer than a top official of the U.K.’s historic American ally. As racist hate mobs prowled streets in England and Northern Ireland, Vance said the murder of Henry Nowak proved that “European elites” had failed to oppose the “politics of self-hatred and the mass invasion of migrants.”
One thing is clear: Vance is not on the side of calm, which is problematic when what the world needs now is love, sweet love.
Increasingly, Vance seems to disappear for longer stretches of time, and when he reemerges he is bathed in the stench of the social media sewers where he seems to spend much of his time.
That’s certainly appears to be the case with his main mission in 2026; rooting out fraud, which isn’t targeted at the nation’s biggest scam — the multi-dollar enrichment of the president’s family — but at alleged schemes by Somali immigrants and other heirs to Ronald Reagan’s racially coded “welfare queen.” A recent Washington Post report found many claims by a Vance-led task force are misleading or overhyped, and that legitimate business have been swept up in its wide net.
Ten years ago, Vance wrote a book seeking your empathy because that served his true purpose: ruthless ambition. In that context, it was no moral conflict at all to pull a 180 and support a victorious Trump, or to leverage his rising fame into a hookup with Silicon Valley types like his billionaire patron Peter Thiel — people who believe in building private cities to protect them from the masses and the government, and who are more prone to conspiracy theories than your 79-year-old uncle on Facebook.
Thiel and the other tech billionaires have programmed Vance into a true believer of whatever nonsense they believe, and lined him up next in the queue for power. That makes him even more dangerous than Trump, who believes in nothing beyond himself.
Ever since Trump first claimed victory on Nov. 8, 2016, I’ve worried that the next guy would be even worse — chasing American autocracy with a real plan, not clown-car narcissism. Vance is the one I was worried about, and he is only an 80-year-old, Big Mac-infused heartbeat away from the presidency for the next 31 months.
I’ve made clear my disgust at political violence, and the possibility of a Vance succession is another reason why I shudder to think what would happen if an attack killed or disabled the 47th president someday. If Vance was willing to send troops to Minneapolis to stomp down soccer moms and baristas with whistles, his militaristic power grab against the left after an assassination would end any last hope for our bedridden democracy.
It’s one more item on the pro-democracy checklist. It may be the proverbial lost cause worth fighting for, but we should try to ensure that JD Vance does not become the 48th president of the United States.
If Democrats stay on track to retake the House and possibly the Senate, they should hold hearings not only on Trump’s high crimes and misdemeanors but on the vice president’s involvement — and, based on that evidence, his possible impeachment. It may prove impossible to remove Vance from office, but hearings will help to establish a record that will end his dreams — and those of his billionaire buddies — about 2028.
It’s past time for the next transition for this American chameleon who calls himself JD Vance: back to private citizen.
Yo, do this!
- The World Cup’s return to North America has gone much as I expected it would: Marred by its runaway commercialism and the U.S. immigration hassles that kept too many fans and a world-class referee from Somalia at home, but with a focus on joy on the pitch and in the stands now that the games have begun. Here in Philadelphia, the essence of everything good about the World Cup has been the FIFA Fan Festival at Lemon Hill, the city greenspace on the hill behind the Art Museum on the Schuylkill. It’s been a daily gathering post for thousands of fans to watch the matches on a 60-foot screen, imbibe from a beer garden, and load up on official merch. It’s free but ticketed; learn how to gain access and how to get there here.
- Some 51 years after Jaws, filmmaker Steven Spielberg is still finding ways to get us out to the multiplex for a summer blockbuster. His new the-aliens-are-here epic, Disclosure Day, merges nostalgia for his greatest hits like E.T. with our 21st century anxieties about artificial intelligence, outsiders, space, and what it means to be human in our modern world. It’s getting excellent, but not perfect, reviews, and I’m looking forward to seeing it for myself.
Ask me anything
Question: What is your favorite fast food joint? — @funkndonuts.bsky.social via Bluesky
Answer: Most of this week’s questions were in this lighthearted mode; it feels like the good sports excitement of the World Cup and the NBA finals has provided us a calm eye in the hurricane. Anyway, as an apparent donut lover you’ll be glad to know that my modern family runs on Dunkin coffee. As a kid, my barely-evolved-from-hillbillies family had low-brow tastes that I now appreciate in hindsight, and on our yearly road trips to the ancestral home of Peoria, I fell in love with the greasy pizza — later augmented by greasy fried chicken — at Shakey’s. The chain has shrunk to a few West Coast outlets and I haven’t been in decades. Probably for the best.
What you’re saying about…
Last week’s question about what the next, hopefully normal U.S. president should do about the ballroom monstrosity rising on the east side of Donald Trump’s White House drew a good array of responses. Although a couple of you wanted to see the project repurposed for community gardens or housing for D.C.’s homeless, others believe any Trump creation must be expunged in dramatic fashion. “Provide Pulaskis (fire axes) and sledgehammers and a good crew of competent supervisors and let we the people come and pay five bucks for the privilege of fifteen minutes of smashing it up,” wrote Linda Nafziger-Meiser. “Hell, I’ll bring my own Pulaski.” But architect Larry Weintraub thinks the White House needs a ballroom, as long as it meets historical and architectural standards. “Hopefully, the new design will be understated but appropriate and subordinate to the majesty of the White House,” he wrote.
📮 This week’s question: In a recent column, I announced that I’ve deleted Elon Musk’s social-media app X, which once thrived as Twitter. I saw that as a way to protest Musk’s racism, and his obscene wealth. Should governments and corporations continue to use X for communications? Are you still on X or have you left, and why? Please email me your answer and please put the exact phrase “Deleting X” in the subject line.
Backstory on the birthright citizen who’s a U.S. hero
Folarin Balogun, now 24, grew up in London, which is where one of the world’s top clubs, Arsenal, spotted him as a potential soccer star at age 8. His parents are Nigerian. He currently plays club soccer in Monaco. So how was it that Balogun found himself last Friday wearing the red, white, and blue jersey of the United States in front of 70,000 delirious Americans on the pitch near Los Angeles, mixing skillful footwork with an aura of glee as he scored two goals in a 4-1 World Cup opener win over Paraguay?
Credit the 14th Amendment — or maybe blame it, if you’re one of the reactionaries who believe that people like Balogun should not be U.S. citizens, soccer gods be damned.
Even if for some weird reason you’re not yet a soccer fan, you’ve probably followed the heated debate over birthright citizenship. The notion that anyone born on U.S. soil is automatically an American citizen — an idea enshrined after the Civil War to remove any potential doubts about the citizenship of formerly enslaved African Americans — is disputed by the Donald Trump regime. The president’s executive order seeking to undo the longstanding interpretation of the 1868 14th Amendment, and strip citizenship from millions of people born here to immigrant, non-citizen parents, is currently before the U.S. Supreme Court. Trump’s xenophobic MAGA supporters have long slurred children of undocumented migrants with the epithet, “anchor babies.”
It turns out that Balogun, when he’s not lighting up the back of the net, is a law-school case study of the immigration debate roiling his accidental country. In the summer of 2001, Balogun’s future mom, who was seven months pregnant, and dad decided to vacation in the United States. When the couple attempted to fly home to London, an unnamed airline worker who would change the course of soccer history told Florence Balogun she was too pregnant to safely fly. So she stayed in Brooklyn, gave birth to her son, and the family left America after two months.
As he developed into a world-class striker on European soil, Balogun came to understand that his U.S. citizenship offered a much better shot at competing in the World Cup than the other two nations where he was also eligible, England or Nigeria. For his mom, Balogun’s fate was sealed in the summer of 2001. “Even when he wasn’t even thinking of making an international decision, I’d already made up my mind that he is going to play for America,” Florence Balogun said.
They say that the Supreme Court, despite all the blather about “calling balls and strikes,” is in reality always aware of the political zeitgeist. Even a right-wing justice who happens to also be a long-suffering Phillies fan in Samuel Alito probably sees on some level that stripping citizenship from the breakout star of U.S. men’s soccer would be highly unpopular. The World Cup — the idea, and not its capitalist corruption by FIFA — imagines a society that abhors exclusion, where it takes every kind of people to make what life’s about. I dream of an America that can run with France and Argentina on the pitch, and that welcomes human beings like Balogun, even ones who’ve never kicked a soccer ball in their lives.
What I wrote on this date in 2019
This newsletter goes out Tuesday on the 11th anniversary of the day that changed America forever: Donald Trump’s gilded Trump Tower journey down an escalator to join the 2016 presidential race, as Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World” blared behind him. In 2019, I used that date to reflect how much we’d fallen in just four years since June 16, 2015. I wrote: “The president’s “shocking” tweet or statement of the day still sparked hours and hours of cable TV blather, including a parade of congressional Democrats who were concerned or saddened or what not. They called Trump’s worst acts impeachable offenses, but then nobody impeached him. They said Trump was unpresidential, but the next day he was still president.” Read the rest: “4 years since Trump came down that escalator and the cycle of empty outrage has become unbearable.”
Recommended Inquirer reading
- Last week I focused on the little people who’ve been crushed by the return of Donald Trump, and the big guys getting obscenely rich. In my Sunday column, I looked at the agonizing fate of Tuan Van Bui, an Amerasian born in Saigon at the height of the Vietnam War who was welcomed to Philadelphia in 1990 under a government-approved visa. Why was he violently arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and what is the truth about his April death behind bars in Indiana, at age 55? Over the weekend, I voiced my outrage over Elon Musk, who in just one week used his massive platform on X to whip up race riots in Belfast, and was rewarded by Wall Street as the world’s first trillionaire. I looked at how we enable this situation, and announced my small step in fighting back by deleting the X app.
- One depressingly constant story in the 21st century is the way that supposedly liberal blue states and big cities still fall back on oppressive, militarized policing to crack down on protesters. Progressive activists in New Jersey took to The Inquirer this week to express their lingering disappointment in first-year Gov. Mikie Sherrill — a Democrat that many of them had worked to elect in 2025 — and her state police’s aggressive handling of demonstrations outside the ICE detention center in Newark, Delaney Hall. They would have found an amen chorus here in Philadelphia’s LGBTQ+ community, where city cops showed up at the annual Gayborhood Pride festival in riot gear and arrested 15 of the revelers. The backlash against the police actions has already triggered a City Council investigation. Journalists are typically society’s first line of defense against police misconduct. You support that mission when you subscribe to The Inquirer.
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