Donald Trump is a world-class BS artist. His running mate is just a twitchy liar.
JD Vance: If his lips are moving…(Dia Dipasupil / Getty Images)
During a contentious interview with Dana Bash on CNN on Sunday, JD Vance seemed to admit that he is willing to “create stories” to push a political agenda. Bash had rebuked Vance for spreading “baseless” and “unsubstantiated” stories that Haitian immigrants were eating cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio. The CNN host rightly noted that these claims were inciting racist violence against Haitians. Vance responded, “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”
These are remarkable words for a politician to say at any time, let alone when he’s being challenged for spreading falsehoods. Vance critics immediately jumped to the conclusion that this was a confession. But Vance had defenders who claimed that his words were taken out of context and what he was saying is that he and Trump were willing to elevate true stories in order to make the suffering of working-class white Americans visible to a media culture that ignores this reality.
But a look at the broader context of Vance’s comments do not lend credence to a charitable reading of his words. His claims about Haitians are demonstrably false—and even lawmakers in Ohio (notably, Springfield Mayor Bob Rue and Ohio Governor Mike DeWine, a Republican) have condemned Vance and Donald Trump for spreading lies that are endangering innocent people.
A closer examination of Vance’s exchange with Bash does not exonerate Trump’s running mate but rather makes clear that he is knowingly polluting the clear waters of truth. The crucial part of the verbal tussle between Vance and Bash went like this:
Vance: “The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I start talking about cat memes. If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do, Dana, because you guys are completely letting Kamala Harris coast. You had one interview with her. You talk about pushing back against me, Dana, you didn’t push back against the fact that she cast the deciding vote on the Inflation Reduction Act, which is why a lot of Americans can’t afford food and housing.”
Bash: “You just said this is a story you created…?”
Vance: “Dana, it comes from first-hand accounts of my constituents. I say that we’re ‘creating a story’.. meaning we’re creating the American media focusing on it.”
The first thing to note is Vance’s inaccurate and euphemistic use of the phrase “cat memes.” Normally, cat memes refers to cute pictures and videos of cats that tug at the heartstrings, an appeal to warm emotions that makes them spread like wildfire on the Internet. The fake stories of pets being kidnapped and eaten are the opposite of a cat meme. They are more akin to a blood libel—the deliberate defamation of a disadvantaged group in a way calculated to inspire revulsion and violence. Throughout the interview with Bash, Vance referred to the Haitians in Ohio as illegal immigrants, which is also broadly untrue. In any case, memes are not factual statements but stylizations of reality.
Further, Vance defended his claim by saying he’d heard “firsthand” accounts of feline feasting from “his constituents.” But no such firsthand accounts have been verified. At best, we have hearsay and urban legend. Moreover, the Haitians in Ohio who are now victims of threats and physical violence are also Vance’s constituents—although he is clearly loath to think of them as such. It’s unclear why the “firsthand” testimony of Haitian Americans should be less credible than the words of their accusers.
Many other Vance claims don’t withstand factual scrutiny. Are there, as Vance has repeatedly said, 20,000 Haitians who have moved to Springfield? Trump, a more extravagant fabulist than Vance, now says that number is too low and the real number is 32,000. In fact, both Vance and Trump are playing fast and loose with the facts: Census data points to a much more modest total of 5,000.
Given that Vance’s basic contentions are lies, there is no reason to accept his attempt at cleaning up his words by claiming that when he said “create stories” he meant “we’re creating the American media focusing on it.” While perhaps not an outright confession, the sentence about “create stories” was something like a Freudian slip—an inadvertent admission of truth.
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A Freudian slip suggests something like a guilty conscience, an awareness of some individual wrongdoing. To use the language of the medieval church that Vance as a Catholic convert might appreciate, he suffers from “ayenbite of inwyt.”
One way to understand Vance is that he’s trying to be like his new political hero, Donald Trump, a master bullshit artist. In fact, Trump is the perfect emblem of a crucial distinction developed by the late philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt between bullshitting and lying: A liar knows they are telling a falsehood, while a bullshit artist is simply unaware of the difference between truth and lies.
As Frankfurt observes in his classic 2005 book, On Bullshit:
It is impossible for someoneto lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all bets are off.… He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of truth than lies are.
Trump is a very great bullshit artist, perhaps the greatest bullshit artist who has ever lived. Bullshit flows as easily from Trump’s mouth as water rolling down the Mississippi. Whatever ability he might have once possessed to discern reality from fiction has long ago atrophied into nothing.
Vance—until a few years ago someone who feared that Trump might be an American counterpart to Adolf Hitler—now wants nothing more than to be Trump’s heir. But Vance lacks Trump’s effortless ease at spewing deception. He is haunted by an awareness that what he’s doing isn’t on the up-and-up. As Zack Beauchamp of Vox notes, “Vance isn’t as good at lying as Trump because he feels a deep need to be respected intellectually. So you get humiliating admissions like this.”
Vance’s own intellectual and literary ambitions might explain why he can’t escape remorse. Vance’s entire career as a public official is due to one achievement, the authoring of a best-selling memoir, Hillbilly Elegy. As Chris Lehmann noted in The Nation, this work won the applause of centrist liberals as well as conservatives. To be sure, like many famous autobiographies, Hillybilly Elegy is vulnerable to factual critique: It’s very much a subjective version of the truth, not shared by Vance’s own family.
But the inevitable partiality and impressionism of a memoir is a very different kettle of fish from blood libel. However exaggerated and glib Hillybilly Elegy might be, Vance has entered a whole new moral universe in targeting an ethnic group with malicious, fear-inducing fiction. Some part of Vance’s mind might still cherish the idea that he remains a widely respected author and intellectual. But that’s just another lie.
Jeet HeerTwitterJeet Heer is a national affairs correspondent for The Nation and host of the weekly Nation podcast, The Time of Monsters. He also pens the monthly column “Morbid Symptoms.” The author of In Love with Art: Francoise Mouly’s Adventures in Comics with Art Spiegelman (2013) and Sweet Lechery: Reviews, Essays and Profiles (2014), Heer has written for numerous publications, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The American Prospect, The Guardian, The New Republic, and The Boston Globe.