Winners & Losers | To Know Him Is to Hate Him
And nobody hates JD Vance more than JD Vance.
It’s time again for your weekly checklist of Losers and Winners, and a reminder that all of the chaos, tumult, awfulness, and catastrophe you are experiencing is caused by people.
Tariffs, my friends, do not exist in nature. They are constructed. Bombing a civilization into the Stone Age is a choice made by a (not very smart or moral) human. A fair society is built on a foundation of accountability. Minh Ly, the author of Answering to Us: Why Democracy Demands Accountability, gave me an incredible analogy a few months ago. It’s possible you’ve read about it in this column before, but here we go again:
Imagine you live in a small village. You hire a sheriff and give him the only gun in the region. Without any mechanism for accountability, this sheriff may or may not become a king-like figure, able to kill or coerce anyone on his own whims. The gun — or any power we bestow upon our leaders — needs to be in service to a civic purpose, not in service to calcifying control in the hands of the person who wields it.
It sounds pretty obvious. The sheriff in this analogy must understand that if he uses the gun for his own purposes, he will face consequences. The more power we bestow on our leaders, the more severe the consequences ought to be for its misuse.
Obvious, maybe, but not inherent. We have failed to hold Trump accountable for anything. We have failed to even make him fear accountability. His shit polling is great as a headline, but a terrible poll is just, well, a piece of paper that predicts the future. Trump doesn’t fear paper, and he doesn’t fear the future.
The election of Biden in 2020 was at least a measure of accountability. It was a relief, sure, but look what happened. Trump did not accept that measure of accountability (he still doesn’t believe he lost!), and nobody on our side or any side went the extra step to enact durable, real accountability commensurate with his crimes.
And here we are. Kinda fucked.
But not totally fucked! This week’s Winners & Losers is about the possibility of real accountability, and the incredibly difficult work ahead of us.
JD Vance, Loser
What a repugnant piece of shit. I hate to write that because it’s more, like, ad hominem than I like to go. Maybe more puerile. But I’m just so sick of this guy.
Turns out, most Americans are, too. In a recent YouGov poll, the most positive takeaway for Vance is that 96% of respondents had heard of him. That’s where the positives stop, because to know him is to hate him.
Since January, most polls have his favorability plunging into the mid- to low-30s. To be fair, what’s not not to love? This guy sucks.
But the last two weeks have been especially bad for our Vice President. Let’s review.