JD Vance Has One Real Job and He Sucks at It

Unlike many people, I do not underestimate JD Vance’s political savvy. It’s all he’s got, really.

I still marvel at the way he neutralized Tim Walz in the vice presidential debate. JD managed to appear "normal" as he was the point person for launching horrifically absurd slanders against his own constituents ("eating the pets"). This political pogrom sits on the same throughline as the Supreme Court ruling that has now cleared the way for the likely deportation of 330,000 humans, ripped from their homes and lives solely because of their skin color. It put the entire race on Trump's turf and helped dozing great-grandpa recover from the first debate, which was so bad that the geezer would never debate again. That, along with global anti-incumbent sentiment and the tens of billions spent on the GOP's behalf by the richest man alive, proved to be decisive in the 2024 elections.

And I think Vance is smart to make himself the face of ending the likely-to-be-forever Iran war. It’s better to get caught failing to end it than to seem to endorse it in any way. And Vance has been positioning himself this way since he made Trump’s “not starting any foreign wars” the basis of his early and savvy endorsement of Trump in January 2023, back when only Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene really wanted to be the face of a Trump 2024 campaign. This disaster is Trump’s greatest political blunder yet, especially given how Trump ran against Bush/Cheney as much as he did Obama/Clinton/Biden, pretending to oppose the Iraq war and savaging the region’s losses while still asserting his lust for stealing oil.

If the rumors are true that Vance is Trump’s heir over Rubio, it makes sense. Vance helped broker a tentative memorandum toward ending the Iran war in June, the kind of paper progress that gets you praised in the West Wing without actually ending anything in Tehran. Rubio is chained to the regime’s endless foreign policy failures, which will only get worse if Marco gets his way and unleashes a massive wave of refugees after the US hits Cuba. And unlike Vance, he doesn’t have the political operation to survive it, lacking what one Rubio ally called the “pipe hitters” Vance already has.

So Vance has launched his 2028 campaign with a book. It’s a book, as the author of the forthcoming Nerd Reich, Gil Durán, has been hilariously explaining on Bluesky.

The screed attempts to recast his lifelong devotion to Peter Thiel as some sort of Catholic conversion. And it gives Vance a chance to do what he loves most: talk about himself and rip on women and minorities in coded ways in a million TV and podcast interviews.

There’s something I figured out about Vance that helps explain why he’s so effective as a communicator and social climber, something I wrote about when he offered Ukraine a surrender written in civilian blood. Everything he says sort of makes sense, but only in a vacuum, on its own, with no context. This gives him the freedom to say anything people want to hear and mean absolutely nothing. Meanwhile, we never have to wonder what he believes, because it’s all the gospel of Peter Thiel.

He met Thiel in 2011, at a Yale Law talk on stagnation and elite decline that Vance later called the most significant moment of his time there. Thiel hired him at Mithril Capital. In February 2021, the same year Vance was still privately calling Trump “a cynical asshole” who might be “America’s Hitler”, Thiel personally walked him into Mar-a-Lago and introduced him to the man he’d spend the next several years learning to worship. The following year, Thiel wrote his Ohio Senate campaign a $15 million check, the largest amount any individual has ever given to a single Senate candidate. Every position Vance holds now, he inherited from the man who financed his way into the room.

That makes what Weird O. Vance said to Mike Rowe all the more obnoxious.

This shows how Vance interprets the particular polarizing magic of Trump after spending the years since studying Donald’s racist, misogynistic trolling as if it were Thiel’s takes on the antichrist.

Of course, dude has never had a real job in his life.

He’s been a suit filler for Thiel, an apologist for “working class” racism, and the guy willing to take the job as Trump’s running mate because Trump tried to have the last guy in that position lynched. But he is a good student, his secret power. And notice how those jobs he calls “real” are all white male coded.

I wrote in 2024 how Trump’s bet on Vance was a bet on the incel vote. Which was true. But it was also part of a society-wide attack on women that hit overdrive when Kamala Harris was elevated to the Democratic nomination, funded by Elon Musk and Thiel and pushed into every podcast, MMA fight, and Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden you could find.

Just as some men scream divorced even when married — Trump, Russell Vought, Jesse Watters — some men scream incel even when fathering their fourth brown kid while screaming about the dangers of brown kids in America.

And Vance’s involuntary inability to actually close that deal — twice, since the tentative memorandum from June still hasn’t produced anything binding — is how he’s showing his impotence to the world. Ending this disaster of a war that did nothing but terrorize millions, slaughter girls, and give Iran the deterrence of a superpower is the first real job of Vance’s life. It’s tough, almost impossible, which is why even George W. Bush wasn’t foolish enough to get tricked into starting it.

Vance should be working on nothing else. Instead, dude is going on The View so he can pretend to be sorry about mocking “childless cat ladies” while actually just recirculating the slur again to remind the GOP base what they like about him.

One real job. And he is busy with the one thing that made him: yapping for billionaires’ pleasure.

JD, shut the fuck up and get to work.

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