It’s no surprise that V.P. nominee J.D. Vance told about his life to the crowd at the Republican Convention. Growing up poor in southwestern Ohio, his mother an addict, raised mostly by his grandmother, he bootstrapped himself, joining the Marines, earning a summa cum laude degree at Ohio State, and on to Yale Law School. It’s an appealing story and he wrote about it in a best-seller, “Hillbilly Elegy”, which gave readers a firsthand look at the hardships of life for the left behind of middle-America.

There was no stopping there. Having served no elective office – no time served in the Ohio legislature, none in the U.S. House, for example – he went straight to the Senate where, only two years into his rookie
J.D. Vance and wife Usha.

term, after diligently courting Mr. Trump, he’s been anointed as his co-candidate.

NBC reports that Trump had settled on North Dakota Governor Doug Bergum, a no-drama conservative who would probably have dutifully stayed in his supporting role. But Trump’s sons interceded. “Don Jr. and Eric went bats— crazy”, a longtime GOP operative told NBC News. “Why would you do something so stupid? He offers us nothing.” Vance had covered that base, making himself a great friend of Donald Jr.

Jim Geraghty at The Washington Post said that in choosing J.D. Vance as his running mate, “Trump is doubling down on himself”. It’s MAGA times two. “With Vance, there’s no broadening of appeal; Trump is rejecting the idea that it’s needed”, so confident is the GOP about defeating Biden.

about face

You’ve probably heard what he has said in the past about his benefactor, calling him “America’s Hitler”. He has also called him “cultural heroin”, “noxious”, “reprehensible”, “might be a cynical a— hole like Nixon”. In 2016, he said Trump “is unfit for our nation’s highest office.” Talking then to Kentucky Sports Radio host Matt Jones, he repeatedly called Trump a “total fraud.”

Despite once declaring himself a “never-Trump guy”, Vance has managed to successfully walk all that back. The turnabout was so rapid that with Vance on stage alongside him at a Youngstown, Ohio, rally in 2022, Trump said about the candidate for the Senate, “J. D. is kissing my ass — he wants my support so bad”.

world view

Vance is an isolationist, a non-interventionist. His greatest impact at the outset of a second Trump presidency will probably be persuading Trump, if he is not of that view already, to abandon Ukraine. On Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast he said, while talking about the U.S. southern border,

“I think it’s ridiculous that we’re focused on this border in Ukraine. I gotta be honest with you, I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another.”

He later backpedaled, saying Russian President Vladimir Putin “is the bad guy” and “we want the Ukrainians to be successful”, but his anti-aid stance was consistently expressed while in the Senate. Abandonment will confirm to the world that the U.S. can no longer be relied on.

Trump is determinately against China, but intends to fight them with tariff barriers. Vance has said we should help Taiwan make it difficult for China to conquer the island, but it’s a safe bet that he will be against the U.S. joining the fight.

a radical for v.p.

Vance’s best friend from Yale, Jamil Jivani, now a member of the Canadian Parliament, a radio host, and political commentator, says Vance’s resentment with the elite liberal establishment happened when he was at Yale, exposed to “students from San Francisco, New York, mostly, all pontificating about how to help poor people in America”. He fell in with the political intellectuals of the New Right about which this publication wrote a year ago in “Who Are the New Right and What Do They Have in Store for Us?”, quoting Vance saying:

“I tend to think that we should seize the institutions of the left and turn them against the left. We need like a de-Baathification program, a de-woke-ification program…I think that what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.”

That even goes beyond to what Trump intends to do – institute what is called “Schedule F”, which would reclassify tens of thousands of civil service employees to “at will” status subject to dismissal if suspected to be disloyal.

“And when the courts stop you,” he went on, “stand before the country, and say” — quoting Andrew Jackson’s challenge to constitutional order — “the chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.” Given the Court’s bias, ignoring its edicts might find some agreement among Democrats.

Currying Trump’s favor, Vance has said he would do what Mike Pence refused to do — overturn an election in order to retain power.

making himself known

While at Yale, Vance introduced himself to Peter Thiel, after he had given a lecture that Vance called “the most significant moment of my time at Yale Law School”. The talk had made him realize he “was obsessed with achievement … not as an end to something meaningful, but to win a social competition.” It’s fair to point out that despite that epiphany he went into venture capital for a few years on the West Coast.

A billionaire several times over, Thiel co-founded PayPal with Elon Musk and was then the first outside investor in Facebook. He thought the 2020 election should not have been certified and in 2009 said, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible”. Thiel’s use of his wealth, such as bringing about the bankruptcy of Gawker, is its own story, but Vance clearly impressed him. Years on, Thiel would put up $15 million to fund Vance’s Ohio Senate campaign.

Vance is a searcher, a political intellectual looking to develop his own philosophy. Jivani says:

“He is thoroughgoingly illiberal in his instincts. I don’t mean it as a slur. I mean it in a technical sense. He is skeptical of the political project of enlightenment liberalism.”

Vance is influenced by writers such as Patrick Deneen (“Why Liberalism Failed”) and Daniel Markovits (“The Meritocracy Trap”). He has said that Ross Douthat’s “The Decadent Society” best parallels his own belief system. He is disillusioned by the unregulated capitalism of the right and the social promiscuity of the left that has led to a soulless neoliberalism.

“We are in a late republican period,” Vance has said, evoking the common New Right view of America as Rome awaiting its Caesar:

“If we’re going to push back against it, we’re going to have to get pretty wild, and pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.”

Like many conservatives, he is drawn to Catholic social teaching, and iconoclasts like Rod Dreher, commentator and author of “The Benedict Option”, which says that to preserve their faith Christians should segregate themselves from the “post-Obergefell” society brought about by the Supreme Court’s sanctioning of same-sex marriage. Vance, an atheist, converted to Catholicism and Dreher, an expatriate who lives in Hungary, attended his baptism.

pro-life

When Roe v. Wade was overturned, Vance released a statement saying, “Today is a great day. … We now enter a new phase of the pro-life movement.” Two-and-a-half years ago he said he was open to a national abortion ban: “I certainly would like abortion to be illegal nationally,” Vance said in January 2022 on a podcast when running for the Senate. That women travel out of states where abortion is banned to states where abortion is legal calls for federal action. He has said he is against abortion even in instances of rape and incest. Asked about that in an interview with Spectrum News he elaborated:

“I think two wrongs don’t make a right. At the end of the day, we’re talking about an unborn baby…Do we want to have a society that sees unborn babies as inconveniences to be discarded? It’s not whether a woman should be forced to bring a child to term, it’s whether a child should be allowed to live, even though the circumstances of that child’s birth are somehow inconvenient or a problem to the society. The question really, to me, is about the baby.”

In the early weeks of pregnancy, it is hardly a “baby”, and it is also about the woman being forced to carry to term and to then raise the issue of rape or incest, which Vance brushes aside.

In a 2022 debate while running for the Senate, he moderated his stance:

“You can have some minimum national standards, which is my view, while also allowing the states to make up their minds.”

Along with fellow Republicans, he said he supports in-vitro-fertilization, but then voted against the Democratic-led bill that would have safeguarded access to IVF.

family first

He is unsympathetic to LGBTQ matters, and has expressed opposition to the bipartisan Respect for Marriage Act. In the Senate he introduced legislation to make providing gender-affirming care to minors a class C felony. He calls educating about LGBTQ awareness “grooming” and the “sexualization of children”.

Vance concern is elsewhere — a strong advocacy that America should restore the family as the center of our culture.

“I think the combination of porn, abortion have basically created a really lonely, isolated generation that isn’t getting married, they’re not having families, and they’re actually not even totally sure how to interact with each other.”

Vance speaks of “the childless left” and admires Viktor Orban’s Hungary for issuing loans to newly marrieds to encourage their starting a family, then forgiving the loan if they stay together and have children.

Quick summations of his views report Vance as even saying a woman should not leave even a violent marriage, but that ignored the context. He was parroting the view of others’ casual view of marriage “making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear” to make the point that broken marriages, for whatever reason, “really didn’t work out for the kids of those marriages.”

His wife Usha is Indian, a Hindu, born in the U.S. of immigrant parents. They met at Yale. A lawyer herself, she clerked for Brett Kavanaugh when he was D.C. Circuit Judge and later Chief Justice John Roberts. Married ten years, they have three kids, seven, four, and two.

It is astonishing to realize that, in the United States of America, where supposedly no one is above the law, the Supreme Court has effectively decreed that nothing will come of former President Donald J. Trump’s treasonous actions leading up to and on January 6, 2021. The Court has put prosecution for his inciting an insurrection to overthrow the election of his opponent and retain power for himself out of reach.

The Court’s novel and radical law says a president cannot be prosecuted for breaking laws when doing so is an official act of the office, and that
Prophetic Time Magazine cover from 2018.

just about all presidential acts are “official”. “Unofficial” actions, those taken for a president’s private purposes, can be prosecuted if illegal, but the Court went out of its way to make that difficult by throwing up roadblocks.

Although meant for all presidents, the Court’s constraints rule out key evidence supporting the indictment against Trump (specifics later). The curbs make it unmistakable that the six conservative members of the Court are doing their damnedest to clear the path for Trump to be the next president.

Neal Katyal has argued before the Supreme Court over fifty times. He says:

“This Court’s decision goes way, way, way too far in giving the president carte blanche. This is not the Constitution that I have ever thought it to be.”

Nowhere in the Constitution can the self-described originalists at the right end of the bench find justification for their expansion of presidential power. They just made it up.

In the nation’s near 250 years, presidential immunity has neither been considered nor deemed necessary. The opposite is true. Every one of our 46 presidents has assumed that the criminal law applied to him and performed with that in mind. But now, this Court has bestowed immunity on the one potential president most likely to commit illegal acts.

Of course, the Court already contrived to give the former president de facto immunity by taking the appeal, letting the weeks go by, and delaying the decision to the final day of its term, making it impossible for Special Counsel Jack Smith to mount and conduct a trial before the election. The question Americans would like to know before voting — is Trump guilty or not guilty? — has been deliberately denied them. The district and appellate courts in D.C., in the context of only the January 6 indictment, had ruled against what they viewed as an outlandish claim of immunity by Trump’s lawyers. But the Supreme Court invited itself to go far beyond the case before it by taking up the question of overall presidential immunity “for the ages”, as Justice Neil Gorsuch heralded it.

Before that, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against the Colorado Supreme Court for keeping Trump off the state’s presidential ballot according to the Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment’s prohibition of anyone who “shall have engaged in insurrection”. They took less than a month against Colorado to make certain Trump would be on the ballot in all 50 states and the territories. Where speed benefited Trump, the Court went fast; where it was detrimental, it dragged its feet.

the master plan

It’s all dropping into place so tidily. In another momentous upheaval, the Supreme Court has just decreed that the government agencies are no longer free to develop the rules and regulations that implement legislation. “Project 2025”, the Heritage Foundation’s 920-page blueprint for an all-powerful presidency, speaks of “the obligation of the executive branch to use its independent resources and authority to restrain the excesses of both the legislative and judicial branches.” The Supreme Court has done its part by now handing the presidency the power to do exactly that.

The foundation’s president, Kevin Roberts, says,

“We are going to win. We are in the process of taking this country back. We are in the process of the second American revolution which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be”.

That’s a threat of a bloody revolution if the left resists. But Heritage has no army, so what are they telling us? It’s not outlandish to speculate that they have lined up extremist militias such as the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, the Three Percenters, etc. And their ranks will be replenished when Trump follows through on his pledge to pardon the “warriors” imprisoned for taking part in the January 6th insurrection.

We are seeing come to fruition a forty-year plan for the right not only to take the country back, but to never allow it to be relinquished again. The left fears that if Trump wins, this will be the last election.

making him untouchable

Chief Justice John Roberts says immunity is needed to enable the president to take ”bold and unhesitating action”, to “boldly and fearlessly carry out his duties”, “to carry out his constitutional duties without undue caution”. Did Abraham Lincoln need immunity to take this country to war? Or Franklin Roosevelt into history’s largest war? Did Harry Truman ask first for immunity before ending the war against Japan with nuclear strikes against Hiroshima and Nagasaki? This is clearly a contrived shield to give free reign to a particular president who immediately said after the ruling that he intends to press the limits of presidential power the moment he resumes office.

Roberts writes in the majority opinion that the President “may not be prosecuted for exercising his core constitutional powers”, which refers to the specific list of powers granted in Article II, but then adds that “he is entitled, at a minimum, to a presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts”. There lies the broad sweep of immunity – the inclusion of any action outside the listed powers but “within the outer perimeter of his official responsibility”.

“The Court effectively creates a law-free zone around the President, upsetting the status quo that has existed since the Founding”, writes Justice Sonia Sotomayor in her blistering dissent. “In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law”. We scoffed at Richard Nixon saying, “When the president does it, that means it’s not illegal.” Now, we have Justice Clarence Thomas concurring with the majority (emphasis his):

“In this case, there has been much discussion about ensuring that a president ‘is not above the law’. But, as the Court explains, the President’s immunity from prosecution for his official acts is the law.”

How is this license for the president to break the law, decree his own laws in effect, different from Mussolini’s definition of fascism: “everything within the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State” where the dictator becomes the state. Justice Sotomayor elaborated:

“When he uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution. Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune.”

On Fox News, Jason Chaffetz, a former Republican Congressman, called this “brazen, irresponsible fear-mongering”:

“A sitting Supreme Court justice is undermining the Court’s ruling by claiming without a shred of evidence that this ruling would allow the president to commit such blatantly unconstitutional actions”

But assassination was floated as a hypothetical in the oral arguments in April; there was this dialogue:

Justice Elena Kagan: “If the President decides that his rival is a corrupt person and he orders the military or someone to assassinate him, is that within his official acts from which he can get immunity?”
Trump attorney John Sauer: “It would depend on the hypothetical, but we see that could well be an official act.”

It is noteworthy that Roberts’s opinion for the majority made no mention whatever of the hypotheticals posed in the hearing. Leaving them unaddressed effectively says, yes, those are official acts that cannot be prosecuted. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson says it out loud:

“Thus, even a hypothetical President who admits to having ordered the assassinations of his political rivals or critics…has a fair shot at getting immunity under the majority’s new Presidential accountability model.”

Liberal media, aghast at the tyranny the Court has granted their favored candidate, speculates other illegal actions Trump might take, freed from any possibility of prosecution. He can sell pardons for a million apiece and pocket the money. Bribes can become the price for ambassadorships. He can round up political opponents, critics, and journalists and detain them in camps. No charge, no complaint, no evidence, no due process. Those who execute such orders do not have immunity, but Trump will insulate them with pardons.

He can quash funding appropriations mandated by Congress or redirect them to preferred agencies and causes without there ever being legal challenges, as there was when he redirected Department of Defense monies to build sections of his border wall. Justice Jackson sees this coming, writing in her dissent:

“[T]his Court has effectively snatched from the Legislature the authority to bind the President to Congress’s mandate, and it has thereby substantially augmented the power of both the Office of the Presidency and itself.”

For that matter, what stops a president such as Trump from defying an order from the Supreme Court itself?

Andrew Weissmann, lead attorney of the Mueller probe, rues the irony that the ‘take care of the laws’ requirement of the president in Article II — “he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed” — is what now a law that gives Trump exclusive authority under immunity to violate the law.

targeting Jack smith

“The President enjoys no immunity for his unofficial acts, and not everything the President does is official. The President is not above the law”. So writes Roberts. But any case brought against a former president must peel away any overlapping official acts from an indictment. The Court doesn’t leave it at that. It throws up three barriers aimed directly at Special Counsel Jack Smith’s January 6 case:

1. Official acts cannot be evidence: An official act that may have been the precursor to an illegal unofficial, personal act cannot come into a case even as evidence. Only the bribe, in the example above, but not the official act of appointing an ambassador. The bribe is left afloat in evidence of a president’s wrongdoing, unmoored to any reason for it.

Roberts himself must have been set straight by the extremists on the bench because in April’s oral arguments, he found that befuddling:

” Well, if you expunge the official part from the indictment, how do you — I mean, that’s like a — a — a one-legged stool, right? I mean, giving somebody money isn’t bribery unless you get something in exchange, and if what you get in exchange is to become the ambassador to a particular country, that is official, the appointment…so, if you say you have to expunge the official part, how does that go forward?”

But now he has reversed himself.

Justice Barrett, while concurring with the majority, would not join that part of the Court’s opinion that forbade reference to official acts at least as evidence:

“[E]xcluding from trial any mention of the official act connected to the bribe would hamstring the prosecution. To make sense of charges alleging a quid pro quo, the jury must be allowed to hear about both the quid and the quo.”

2. Do not inquire into motive: The statutes under which Trump is being prosecuted require specific intent, that Trump had a criminal state of mind (mens rea) — the overthrow of the government. The majority opinion says,

“[C]ourts may not inquire into the President’s motives. Such an inquiry would risk exposing even the most obvious instances of official conduct to judicial examination on the mere allegation of improper purpose.”

What about openly expressed motive? Is Roberts signaling that the Court, in an ultimate appeal, would reject the motives revealed by the former president who, in his lack of impulse control, sent thousands of early morning tweets in the months leading up to January 6? Is the Supreme Court setting up for what would be a corrupt obstruction of Smith’s case, that even motives expressed in the public arena are out of bounds?

3. Communications between the president and government officials are off limits:

“Trump is therefore absolutely immune from prosecution for the alleged conduct involving his discussions with Justice Department officials.”

The justices are here ruling out a particular communication between Trump, the active attorney general, and others at the Justice Department that is of smoking gun importance to the January 6 prosecution, the very reason why the Court says it must be expunged. It doesn’t matter that the communication was about an illegal plot. The story in brief:

A high official at the Department of Justice, Jeffery Clark, had written a letter that he proposed to send to Georgia’s governor and officials which lied that the DOJ was conducting an investigation of the 2020 election and that the Georgia General Assembly should convene in special session to look into irregularities in that state. The plan was to send the letter, an implicit threat, to all states narrowly lost by Trump. Neither Acting Attorney General Jeffery Rosen nor his second in command Richard Donoghue would co-sign the letter, a firing offense for Trump, who decided to replace Rosen with Clark. He backed off when he heard that firing Rosen would cause mass resignations at Justice.

Evidence of the attempt to overturn Georgia’s election of Biden, Trump’s intent to fire his acting AG for refusing to comply, is suppressed, cannot be used by Smith, Roberts says.

In the future, it means when Trump orders up sham prosecutions of his enemies from the Justice Department, or calls the IRS to have the agency investigate his critics, the evidence to his criminality is blocked.

And to protect Trump, Roberts moves to seal off his conversations with Vice President Mike Pence on January 5th and 6th:

“The indictment’s allegations that Trump attempted to pressure the Vice President to take particular acts in connection with his role at the certification proceeding thus involve official conduct, and Trump is at least presumptively immune from prosecution for such conduct.”

Trump’s illegal act was to repeatedly harangue Pence to go beyond his constitutional role of mere Electoral College vote counting and illegally disrupt certification so Trump could stay in power. How is that an official act? Roberts and his corrupt majority will surely snuff this evidence of crime in any ultimate appeal.

the upshot

Trump’s lawyers are challenging his New York conviction; part of the evidence overlaps into when he became president. They’ll claim he stole the Mar-a-Lago documents while still president and is therefore immune; we may see Judge Aileen Cannon, anxious to do everything she can for Trump, move to throw out the case entirely. Trump’s illegal election tampering by pressing the Georgia secretary of state to find enough votes to make him the winner?; Roberts spherically wrote that a president’s conversations with “state officials” are official acts and immune.

All of these cases will have be re-worked, with narrowed indictments, possibly re-tried, meaning months of start-over delay, going nowhere. Two will be shut down if Trump is president again.

As expected, the Court has remanded the January 6 case to Judge Tanya Chutkan and the D.C. District Court, advising that she must conduct a hearing to sort out what in the indictment is official vs. private. The instructions are detailed, complaining, as example, that her ruling denying immunity contains “select Tweets and brief snippets of the speech Trump delivered on the morning of January 6, omitting its full text or context”, all meant to stretch the calendar.

With a trial impossible before the election, the hope is that Judge Chutkan and Jack Smith will leap at the Supreme Court’s mandate as opportunity to conduct an evidentiary hearing to do the sorting out, bringing forth the entire story including everything the Court prohibited from use at trial, with subpoenas flying out coast to coast to the full cast of characters — all in the hope of getting across to the American people what millions of them have never heard that it wasn’t just a protest gone bad that day, but a months-long plot to overthrow the government.