JD Vance Is Ohio’s Greatest Embarrassment

Although Ohioans have much to be proud of, Vice President-elect JD Vance, hailing from Middleton, Ohio, is, without question, their state’s greatest embarrassment. Before proceeding, it is vital to note that he poses more significant threats to Ohio, the nation, and world than mere embarrassment. However, embarrassment is deployed in this piece for strategic reasons, including giving voice to how many Ohioans and people across the country viscerally experience him.

Vance received an undergraduate degree from Ohio State University and a law degree from Yale University. Therefore, he holds a coveted Ivy League degree, historically perceived as an unassailable sign of authentic intellectual giftedness. However, we must remember that President-elect Donald Trump possesses an Ivy League MBA from the University of Pennsylvania and hardly ever evidences any trace of intelligence.

To his credit, Vance is more astute than Trump, although it does not take much to be smarter than him, and such a concession is not a ringing endorsement of the Yale graduate’s mental acuity. Given the vice president-elect’s academic training, Ohioans and people nationwide and globally should be able to expect ignorance not to spew from his mouth so often. Unfortunately, the sheer ignorance that frequently comes from his mouth makes it difficult to believe he earned an Ivy League law degree.

While he is a slick and articulate communicator, at least that is the dominant narrative about him in mainstream media, several things he has said and the support he has given Trump make him a legitimate threat to democracy and America’s cherished founding ideas and ideals.

JD Vance and American Democracy

In the 2024 vice presidential debate against Governor Tim Walz, Vance refused to admit that President Joe Biden defeated Trump in the 2020 presidential election. Following that debate, in an interview with CNN, Kit Maher reported that Vance was pressed several times to answer whether he believes President Biden won the 2020 presidential election, but the now vice president-elect refused to offer a direct answer. Such prevarication is dangerous.

Think about why this is dangerous for a moment. The vice president-elect, soon to be a heartbeat away from serving as the American president, lacks the courage and integrity to tell the truth about the 2020 election results. Instead, he embraces the same mendacity at the center of who Trump is. If Vance is unwilling to be honest about election results, such duplicity does not inspire confidence in his capacity to be transparent about other matters of national import.

Denying the results of a free and fair presidential election and advancing “the Big Lie” encapsulate what anti-democratic means. Trump and Vance embody an anti-democratic spirit increasingly gaining traction and threatening American democracy and the American way of life. Unfortunately, mainstream media primarily lets them go unscathed about their anti-democratic words and actions, although CNN, in the interview cited above, deserves some credit for insisting that Vance address “the Big Lie.”

To be clear, though, character and integrity mean nothing to these two election deniers about to occupy the White House for the next four years. If one can still imagine or remember life before Trump, American conservatism (and Western conservatism more broadly) always underscored the centrality of character and integrity to a healthy and sustainable democracy, especially a representative democracy.

True American conservatives laud and espouse the conservativism of Barry Goldwater and former President Ronald Reagan. Goldwater and Reagan would be appalled by Trump and Vance and even more so by how many Republican voters and politicians have abandoned organic conservatism for authoritarianism, paving the merciless road for fascism to dismantle our democracy.

Genuine conservatives in the mode of Goldwater and Reagan, what remains of them, who reject Trump’s authoritarianism, must wonder if the conservative movement Goldwater and Reagan championed tirelessly and successfully has done more than wane; they must seriously contemplate if it has tragically died.

Vance’s Attack on the Childless

Speaking of former President Reagan, he put the first woman on the United States Supreme Court, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, a tangible and substantive move to make his value of women visible. While Vance may have some value of women, considering he is married to a woman, Usha Vance, he contends that childless men and women, “cat ladies,” have no real investment in America, given that, in his malevolent belief, having biological children is requisite to “having a direct stake” in America and her future, spewing this venom in a 2021 “Tucker Carlson Tonight” interview on Fox News.

Therefore, Vance’s vision of America is an American nightmare, one where childless people are disposable. In Vance’s America, people who cannot conceive are regarded as not central to America and her future. These people often live with the pain of being unable to conceive. Instead of using his position to aid them in healing, he inflicts more pain and wishes to alienate them from the nation and her continuing story.

For so many MAGA Republicans like Vance, “cruelty is the point,” as posited by Adam Serwer, staff writer at The Atlantic. Most Americans employ unity rhetoric, language accentuating supposedly common values that bind us. Unfortunately, when over 75 million Americans voted for Trump and Vance in the 2024 presidential election, being fully aware of their reprehensible words and actions, words and actions grounded in hate, cruelty, and division, those folks cannot genuinely assert they believe in liberty, equality, and justice for all, for, to be frank, their rhetoric is disingenuous at its core.

Parting Thoughts

Even after being informed that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, were not eating people’s pets, cats and dogs, Trump and Vance have persisted in maintaining this lie, as reported by ABC News. Why would both men, who over 75 million Americans voted for to serve as president and vice president of the United States, have such disregard for these lives, minoritized lives? Well, unsurprisingly and unfortunately, all too familiar ideologies are at play: racism and white supremacy.

Delivering unsettling clarity about why racism and white supremacy persist in such potent ways in the 21^st century, in Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul, Eddie Glaude (2017), one of the nation’s leading scholars and public intellectuals, the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, argues that these ideologies continue to operate with such power because America suffers from “the value gap,” a relentless belief that White people matter more than others because of their skin color. Too many in the dominant culture, according to Glaude, believe that whiteness is supreme, imbuing American values with racism and white supremacy.

With Trump and Vance headed to the White House, racists and white supremacists are more emboldened than ever. Although dark days are ahead and this is yet another bleak period in American history, we must resist authoritarianism, anti-democratic forces, and the road to fascism by starting with the words of the brilliant science fiction writer Octavia Butler (1993) in The Parable of the Sower, “Live. Hold out. Survive. I don’t know whether good times are coming back again. But I know that won’t matter if we don’t survive these times.”

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This Post is republished on Medium.

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Photo credit: Flickr