JD Vance is famously addicted to social media, to a degree that one wonders if he has any job duties as vice president at all. It’s almost certain that he’s well aware that the late Charlie Kirk has not become the movement martyr MAGA hoped for. On the contrary, the memory of the Turning Point USA founder has become a joke on social media. The cringeworthy efforts to deify Kirk are irresistible bait for online jokesters, who spent months turning his image and even an AI-generated song about him into fuel for irony-drenched memes mocking the deceased right-wing leader. Trying to shove Kirk on the public backfired for MAGA, causing most people to rebel with mockery.
But even though most Republicans have quietly moved on, Vance is still hoping to get enough juice out Kirk’s death to sell books. In early June, the Wall Street Journal published an excerpt from Vance’s latest memoir, “Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith,” which is officially released tomorrow. In it, Vance credits Kirk’s widow, Erika Kirk — who is even more hated than her dead husband — for convincing his wife, Usha Vance, to have a fourth child. No, it’s not as a response to the embarrassingly intimate hug Erika Kirk and JD Vance shared at a TPUSA event last November, despite online gossip speculating otherwise. Instead, the vice president claims “Erika told Usha between sobs that she regretted having only two kids with Charlie,” and that’s what changed his wife’s mind.
It’s hard to oversell how nauseating the entire excerpt is, especially since it’s replete with Vance’s overbearing efforts to inject religious language into every beat of his story about his allegedly great friendship with Kirk. It’s hard to read sentences like, “Charlie taught me to love all parts of our Christian communion,” while imagining Vance’s voice, especially as his only gear as a public speaker is to use a snide tone, even when talking about his supposed higher aspirations. But these are granular annoyances. The real question is why did Vance choose a passage about Kirk, who is beyond old news, as a represenation of a book people are supposed to want to buy now?
The 41-year-old Vance makes great hay out of his relative youth on Capitol Hill, right up to bragging as often as possible about his pregnant wife. But this opening to his book tour has reflected how out-of-touch Vance actually is, not just with young people, but with Americans generally. He’s a fuddy-duddy, and he only makes it worse his habit of making bad jokes and then reacting petulantly when people don’t laugh at them. As Donald Trump’s vice president, Vance enjoys the presumption that he’s a shoo-in to be the next Republican nominee for president. But he’s so bad at politics that it increasingly seems he will get trounced in the primary, even as his potential challengers are also sorely lacking in charisma.
Vance also floated the idea of letting Epstein’s former girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell, out of prison for a day to sit in an interview with Tucker Carlson, having set the expectation that she would say Trump did nothing wrong.
The book tour for “Communion” is already showcasing Vance’s incompetence as a politician. He sat for a telephone interview with USA Today last week that was clearly meant to read as “heartfelt,” but only makes him sound like a phony. He tries to cast his days of “blindly chasing ambition” behind himself, insisting now that his conversion to Catholicism has changed him into a man who tries to “focus on the good.” He swears to USA Today that he tries to “make wise decisions and moral decisions.”
Sadly for Vance, that interview was overshadowed by a New York Times story revealing how devoted Vance was to minimizing the relationship Trump had with deceased sex predator Jeffrey Epstein. The story, written by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, relies heavily on sources — possibly Vance himself — who are doing their level best to make him seem like the adult in the room, as the White House top staff convenes to cover for a boss who is cagey about his reasons for wanting to bury documents collected by the FBI on Epstein, who called himself “Don’s best friend.”
But while Vance is portrayed as wanting to release the files, it’s not for noble reasons, but in hopes that the illusion of transparency would prevent people from asking further questions about Trump and Epstein’s long and deep friendship. Vance also floated the idea of letting Epstein’s former girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell, out of prison for a day to sit in an interview with Tucker Carlson, having set the expectation that she would say Trump did nothing wrong. The fact that she would be contradicting credible sources, including another ex-girlfriend of Epstein’s who says Trump assaulted her, didn’t matter to Vance.
Vance comes across as someone who doesn’t really care what his boss did while partying with Epstein, who died while awaiting trial for sex trafficking over 1,000 women and underage girls. He only cares about manipulating the politics of this for his benefit. No matter how many interviews he gives reassuring reporters that his days of amoral ambition are over, he just can’t seem to back it up with actions that would prove his alleged new virtue.
Vance’s religious conversion and book about it only serve as further evidence that the man cares for little else but his own striving for power and status. He picked Catholicism in 2019, in the midst of a lot of online chatter that created the illusion that “trad” Catholics were the next big political trend. That never really amounted to much, despite Vance’s longtime benefactor, billionaire Peter Thiel, pouring an unholy amount of money in trying to manifest the trad-Cath trend.
Instead, white evangelicals still dominate the GOP, and the marketing of Vance’s book suggests he’s harboring regrets that he didn’t make the safer political choice when it came to his much-ballyhooed conversion. The cover of “Communion” eschews the grandeur of a Catholic cathedral, in favor of a photograph of a humble Methodist chapel in a rural part of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The image is far more evocative of white evangelical self-mythologizing as a folksy faith than the way the Catholic Church presents itself as both ancient and awe-inspiring — qualities that Vance used to say he loved about his newfound faith.
But these days, he’s been attacking Pope Leo XIV, even going so far as to chide the pontiff to “to be careful when he talks about matters of theology.” Questioning the religious credentials of the pope isn’t what Catholic believers tend to do, but it is a longstanding tradition for conservative Protestants, especially of the evangelical sort that Vance wants to appeal to. In the Wall Street Journal excerpt of his book, Vance goes even further, praising the evangelical Kirk as a major influence on Vance’s Christian faith, and insisting, “As Christians, we are all, together, part of the same Church.” Vance has also begun talking about belief in demons, which, in America at least, is more of an evangelical fixation than a Catholic one.
On paper, this pandering might seems politically smart. After all, Trump is forever pretending to be an evangelical Christian, though he avoids going to church, even on Easter. But ironically, Trump gets a pass for being a phony because his efforts at feigning faith are so perfunctory. Vance puts so much effort into proclaiming Christianity, and at such great and tedious length, that he only ends up drawing attention to how false it all sounds, even as, unlike his boss, he does darken a church door on occasion.
Vance just can’t help but come across as a try-hard. Certainly, it must be frustrating to be seen as less authentic than Trump, a man who lies so often that even Vance, who admitted he will “create stories” for political attention, struggles to keep up. But Vance is in a downward spiral. The more people dislike him, the more loudly announces he’s actually a deeply moral person, which is an obnoxious and off-putting lie that alienates people more. Yes, even MAGA voters, for whom unapologetic evil is more attractive.
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It’s gotten so bad for Vance that he’s starting to tie with Secretary of State Marco Rubio in polls of potential Republican voters asked about who they want as a 2028 nominee. This is not because Rubio has suddenly discovered some font of charm he was previously lacking. As Jamelle Bouie of the New York Times recently said, Rubio ” is one of the most juiceless politicians in American politics.” It’s just that Vance is so bad that Rubio looks better. A bag of stale chips gets more appetizing if the alternative is a 3-day-old Big Mac pulled out of the trash.
This book tour looks like it will only make things worse for Vance. He’s grown so desperate that he booked an interview tomorrow on “The View.” No doubt he’s hoping for a conflict with the mostly liberal hosts that will go viral, since “triggering the liberals” is still what MAGA primarily craves from its politicians. But the odds are equally good that instead of looking “tough” against a panel of women, he just comes across as pouty when he, inevitably, gets pissy about whatever issue they press him on. Vance can’t help himself. No matter how many conversion memoirs he writes, he will always be the same annoying little brat.
