Since I started writing about J.D. Vance in 2022, I’ve repeatedly noticed his use of a certain rhetorical technique that I’ve come to think of as his trademark. He’ll claim vehemently to agree with one of Donald Trump’s various provocative or absurd claims—that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, for instance. Then he’ll explain himself using internally coherent language and reasoning that sounds well informed and registers as substantive … but that in no way supports the extreme premise he started with.
The reason I bring up this go-to move is that he is using it to justify false claims about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, who were not eating cats. But first let’s look at the “stolen election” argument as an instructive example. Vance does not believe that there were millions of votes cast in 2020 by illegal immigrants or that “ballot vans” made midnight drop-offs in Milwaukee and Detroit to tilt the race. He doesn’t make any of the dozens of other claims of global-sabotage conspiracies and preloaded voting-machine algorithms that other MAGA figures have endorsed.
Instead, he says the election was “stolen” by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (because Zuckerberg donated money to a group that helped pay for COVID safety measures at voting locations in a manner that, according to Vance, made it disproportionately easier for Democrats to vote) and by Twitter (because the service briefly obstructed the distribution of stories about material found on Hunter Biden’s laptop out of concerns that the information may have been fabricated or obtained illegally by a foreign government).
Both of those things—Zuckerberg’s underwriting of COVID voting support and Twitter’s laptop-story block—did happen. They might have helped Democrats a bit, for all we know. But do they constitute stealing an election in anything like the way that Trump means the word? No. Legally speaking, as endeavors of private individuals and companies, would they have justified reversing the results of the election in the way Trump called for? Also no.
It appears that Vance—who once sold himself to the public as an empathetic conservative intellectual—is making a sort of compromise with himself in order to justify his career-advancing change of heart. He’s like a walking National Review, following Trump around to retroactively undergird his pronouncements with a rational structure. (Which is funny because Trump couldn’t care less whether the stuff he does is justified by “evidence” or “laws”!)
New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait noticed something in this vein in Vance’s June New York Times interview, when he justified Trump’s instigation of violence on Jan. 6 itself. “Challenging elections and questioning the legitimacy of elections is actually part of the democratic process,” Vance argued to the Times’ Ross Douthat. Attempting to overturn the results of the election by force, Vance says, was an expression of “palpable and actionable frustration” on behalf of Trump voters, who were “pissed off” about not having been taken seriously over the “very legitimate grievance” that they had about “our most fundamental democratic act as a people.”
This was all a long way of saying that they were mad because the candidate they had voted for didn’t win. As Chait observed:
“People are pissed off,” he explains. Well, yes, that happens. People are always pissed off. Humans have constructed various ways of working around this reality. One of them, a constitutional republic with fair elections and robust liberal protections, has worked fairly well. I propose we keep it going, even if Vance has calculated that his continued advancement might require putting it aside.
Vance has a law degree, and he likes to present things in terms of principles and philosophies. But the fancy talk is just a way of weaponizing his feelings, which are actually the ultimate arbiter of fact vs. falsehood and right vs. wrong.
That brings us to Wednesday, when Vance publicly refused to stop referring to Haitians in Ohio as “illegal aliens.” A few weeks ago, after rumors began circulating on the right-wing web that Haitian immigrants in Springfield were stealing and eating the city’s cats, Vance posted on Twitter: “Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country.” Donald Trump then brought up the rumor at his debate with Kamala Harris as an example of the harms wreaked by illegal immigration. When authorities in Springfield said that the rumor was untrue—something they communicated directly to Vance’s staff almost immediately, according to new Wall Street Journal reporting—Vance backpedaled slightly, saying that the accusation, even if not verifiable, was fair game to talk about because it brought attention to the legitimate issue of illegal migration.
But that still doesn’t quite track: The Haitians in Springfield, it turns out, are for the most part in the United States legally. They’ve been granted something called temporary protected status, a designation extended by the executive branch to individuals fleeing dangerous conditions in their home countries. As the name suggests, the program does not grant beneficiaries the right to stay in the U.S. permanently. But they can live and work in the country legally for as long as the status is extended.
Here’s what Vance said when he was asked about this in North Carolina, according to NPR:
“What is fundamentally illegal is for Kamala Harris to say we’re going to grant parole, not on a case by case basis, but to millions of illegal aliens who are coming to this country,” Vance said. “That does not magically make them legal because Kamala Harris waved the amnesty wand. That makes her border policy a disgrace, and I’m still going to call people illegal aliens.”
By using policy jargon like parole and amnesty and case-by-case basis, Vance kind of makes it sound as if he knows what he’s talking about. But temporary protected status is by definition not amnesty (which means allowing those who lack legal status to become permanent residents) or parole (which means releasing individuals into the U.S. while their residency status is being adjudicated).
Temporary protected status is also not a power that liberals in the White House have claimed out of thin air. As this report by the Congressional Research Service explains, “TPS was established by Congress as part of the Immigration Act of 1990.” The law, signed by (Republican) President George H.W. Bush, grants a member of the Cabinet—initially the attorney general, but now the secretary of homeland security—the authority “to designate a country for TPS.”
Vance describes TPS as “fundamentally illegal” because it is granted by the executive branch, at its discretion, on a categorical basis. In fact, however, the TPS program was created by an act of Congress that grants the executive branch the power to issue the status, at its discretion, on a categorical basis. It’s fundamentally legal, if you will. A pretty clear-cut case of full legality, honestly. But did the Framers of the Constitution ever stop to consider that it might be used to do stuff that J.D. Vance doesn’t like?
