VANDALIA, OHIO -Former U.S. President Donald Trump and Ohio Republican U.S. Senator JD Vance. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images.)
Marilou Johanek
It was the kind of juvenile stunt you’d expect from a frat boy being a jerk. But the problem child pulling the bizarre maneuver on an airport tarmac in Wisconsin last week — to stalk Vice President Kamala Harris — was none other than Senator Cringeworthy from Ohio, or J.D. Vance, his latest alias.
The Republican vice-presidential nominee is seemingly hellbent on reinforcing his odious public image as a weird piece of work from The Handmaid’s Tale. No wonder the Gilead-curious Vance is soaring off the unlikability charts as more voters discover what Ohioans already have about the fringe right-winger with patriarchal fever dreams.
Like the No. 1 man on the GOP ticket, the No. 2 man apparently has a problem with strong women who wield power. J.D.’s insecurities were on full display as he marched (uninvited) up to Air Force 2 on the tarmac to smugly “check out my future plane” and to “say hello to the vice president and ask her why she refuses to answer questions.”
Unclear what questions the off-putting frat boy had in mind with his cheeky disrespect and overt menacing of the vice president of the United States. But Vance was oddly pleased with his performative obnoxiousness. “I had a bit of fun,” tittered the floundering running mate of a convicted felon. “Don’t think the vice-president waved at me as she drove away, but I’m glad to have done it.”
Vance’s puerile ‘bit of fun’ stalking the woman who is now the Democratic presidential nominee backfired. His faux attempt to “confront” Harris was widely seen as both weird and creepy. Mary Trump, the estranged niece of the ex-president, even suggested Vance should be slapped with a restraining order by Secret Service agents “the next time JD tries to get within a mile of the vice-president’s plane.”
You’d think Trump’s historically unpopular veep pick, whose net favorability rating with voters is under water and getting worse by the day, might course correct. But Vance struts with an invincibility borne of arrogance and a ruthless drive for power. The 40-year-old project of alt right tech billionaire Peter Thiel is deep into delusions of autocratic grandeur.
Vance — and the anti-democratic Silicon Valley neo-reactionaries of the New Right — long to impose their new world order on the masses (as outlined in the alarming Project 2025 edicts). The Ohio Republican wrote the foreword to an upcoming book by the architect of that GOP manifesto, Kevin Roberts, that concludes, notably, with a call for revolution. “We are now all realizing that it’s time to circle the wagons and load the muskets.”
And, declared Vance, Roberts’ Christian fundamentalist views of “culture and economics” that recognize “virtue and material progress go hand in hand” will be an “essential weapon” in the “fights that lay [sic] ahead.” Interestingly, the release date of the book, including Vance’s prominent affirmation of its dystopic premise, was abruptly changed from September to after the election to squash scrutiny of its burn-it-all-down rage against American democracy.
Vance appears to be a true disciple of Roberts’ dystopian vision of a homogeneous, hierarchal society of power, status and freedom where cis white men naturally reign supreme. To be sure, the Ohioan bankrolled into fame and fortune by Thiel is as phony as a three-dollar bill, but he owes everything to the rich wingnuts who buttered his bread, bought him a U.S. Senate seat and catapulted him to the Republican presidential ticket.
So Vance embraces the extreme orthodoxy of his far-right community that would have women return to traditional social roles — homemaking and child-rearing — and surrender social agency and bodily autonomy to the men in charge. The first-term senator’s recently resurfaced comments disparaging “childless cat ladies” and disregarding people with unconventional families were no blunder.
They reflected the regressive agenda of a wistful patriarchy that wants to weaponize “family” as a cultural imperative and build a society around the white nuclear family with lots of white babies and women who secretly want to be subjugated. Vance derided leading Democrats as inferior because they had no biological children. He ridiculed them as less than childbearing tradwives.
“You look at Kamala Harris, [transportation secretary] Pete Buttigieg, AOC [congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] — the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children. How does it make any sense that we’ve turned over our country to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it.” Vance was unapologetic about his disparagement of those who don’t measure up to his metrics as proficient breeders.
Days ago, he again doubled-down in defense of his personal attacks against Harris, (who is a stepmother to two children) Buttigieg, who adopted two children with his husband, Chasten, and Ocasio-Cortez who does not have children — like millions of other Americans. Vance clumsily attempted to defect growing disgust over his rank misogyny by blaming the media that “wants to get offended about a sarcastic remark I made before I even ran for the U.S. Senate.”
Oh, J.D. It’s not the media you offended when you belittled those without children or weirdly stalked a powerful woman running for president like a self-impressed jerk. It’s the people who will cast a ballot in three months. “Women are paying attention,” warned a Harris spokesperson, “and will use their power at the polls.”
