The below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial.
Hypocrisy is the fuel of MAGA. It decries “crooked” politicians, but its leader is a lying cheater and convicted felon who has flouted numerous ethics guidelines and been found to have engaged in fraud. It relies on the political support of conservative Christians who profess family values, but it worships a narcissist who has engaged in immoral and crass conduct (including sexual assault) that violates the core tenets of Christianity and who has demonstrated no sincere allegiance to faith.
It claims to be a movement for hard-working, middle-class Americans, yet it embraces a politician and party that has provided whopping tax cuts for the wealthy elite and threatened to eliminate health care coverage for millions of Americans.
Consequently, it’s no surprise that Donald Trump and JD Vance have plunged neck-deep into the muck of hypocrisy, as they exploit the two recent attempted assassinations of Trump to accuse the Democrats of debasing the public discourse with harsh rhetoric that casts Trump as a threat to democracy and of encouraging political violence.
This is particularly rich after Trump and Vance whipped up the phony and racist claim that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were purloining pets and turning them into meals. Their baseless demagoguery—in which the pair demonized legal migrants as illegal—led to bomb threats against schools and government agencies in that town. Yet, as I noted a while back, Trump, like any autocrat-wannabe, is a master of rubber-and-glue tactics.
So now his line is: I’m not a threat to democracy. The people calling me a threat to democracy are the real threat to democracy. He knows that he doesn’t need to win this argument to defuse this line of criticism. Trump only has to muddy the waters and create a debate over who’s a danger in order to undercut this fundamental argument against his restoration. Debating this may seem absurd.
After all, if a fellow who refused to accept legitimate election tallies, secretly schemed to overturn the results, and with his lies incited an insurrectionist mob to storm the Capitol to prevent the peaceful transfer of power isn’t a threat to democracy, who is? But this I’m-not/you-are bullshit could work, especially with low-engaged voters who might absorb the impression that there’s a fight to be had on this front.
Vance has taken point on this mission.
In a very long social media post, he slammed Democrats for degrading the national discourse by depicting Trump as a menace and blamed them for the assassination attempts: “The rhetoric is out of control…It nearly got Donald Trump killed twice…Kamala Harris has said that ‘Democracy is on the line’ in her race against President Trump…For years, Kamala Harris’s campaign surrogates have said things like ‘Trump has to be eliminated.’”
And in the same breath, Vance defended his assaults on the Haitians and his circulation of the “the infamous pet stories—which, again, multiple people have spoken about (either on video or to me or my staff),” ignoring that these stories have repeatedly been proved false. He even had the chutzpah to suggest that criticism of his dissemination of this disinformation was the equivalent of censorship.
For years—long before his campaign to vilify the legal immigrants of Springfield—Vance has eagerly engaged in culture warring that involved dehumanizing and delegitimizing his fellow citizens.
