Five Things to Know About J.D. Vance

GOP Vice Presidential nominee J.D. Vance is married to a daughter of immigrants and not that long ago took a stand against his now current running mate Donald Trump, calling him “a moral disaster,” a “total fraud,” and possibly “America’s Hitler.” Vance also took a stand against rising xenophobia in his party, in 2012 writing a blog post that criticized the GOP for being “openly hostile to non-whites,” including the GOP's support for failed presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s “self-deportation” agenda. 

But recognizing an opportunity to advance in Republican politics, Vance moved to delete that blog post – along with changing many of his other stances. 

Now joined at the hip with the man he once derided as a con man, Vance has failed to fully push back on racist lies even when they’ve become personal. Earlier this month, Trump ally and 9/11 conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer claimed that if Vice President Harris wins in November, the White House “will smell like curry & White House speeches will be facilitated via a call center.” Despite being a racist insult that also denigrated his wife Usha, a daughter of Indian immigrants, Vance offered a weaksauce response. “I don’t like those comments,” he said. “What Laura said about Kamala Harris is not what we should be focused on.” So let’s focus on what Vance has said – and what he hasn’t said.

Vance refuses to discuss the ugly details behind his ticket’s signature campaign promise: We already know that Vance has way more than the “concepts of a plan” to round up and purge millions of long-settled immigrants from the U.S. – just look at former Trump aide and noted white nationalist Stephen Miller excitedly blabbing to right-wing media about mass camps and detention flights “greater than any national infrastructure project” in our history. Despite being their signature campaign promise of the 2024 race – who can forget thousands gleefully waving “MASS DEPORTATION NOW” signs at this past summer’s Republican National Convention? – both Vance and Trump have refused to discuss the ugly details behind their plan. During an August interview with Meet the Press’ Kristen Welker, Vance dodged questions about family separation not once, not twice, but three times. Vance “evaded multiple questions Saturday about whether Trump’s proposed ‘zero tolerance’ policy on immigration would lead to family separation,” NBC News reported August 25. Seeking to minimize the devastating human and economic costs of their Project 2025-endorsed mass deportation agenda, Vance instead claimed that “I think that families are currently being separated.” Cravenly wrong, because the family separation memo was authored by Gene Hamilton, a former Trump Justice Department aide and Project 2025 architect. Miller, however, has laid out more than the concepts of a plan, down to the flight schedule. “Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday are our flights back to the Northern Triangle. Every Tuesday and Thursday are our flights to South America. Every Saturday and Sunday are our flights to Africa. Right once a week we do a flight to India. Once a week we do a flight to China, so on and so forth,” he told a right-wing podcast last year. The plans are out there. Vance just won’t discuss them.

The Big Lie 2.0: Vance has been a prolific promoter of the deadly white nationalist replacement conspiracy theory (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here, do we need to go on?), echoing domestic terrorists describing non-white migrants as invaders. “Mr. Vance has made the conspiracy claim a staple of his stump speech,” The New York Times said, “and in interviews has gone so far as to suggest that Democrats believe they can altogether ‘replace’ native-born Americans, language that has been used by perpetrators of several mass shootings,” the Times assessed. This conspiracy theory has since been used by top Republicans like Vance to shape the Big Lie 2.0, the bigoted fiction that noncitizens are polluting the ballot box. “[W]e believe the only people who get to vote in our elections are the people who have a right to be here, not illegal aliens,” Vance said this month. Once again: noncitizen voting is very rare and very illegal. Don’t be fooled by GOP claims that this is simply about voter integrity. “They’re using this lie to justify voter suppression and intimidation tactics against U.S. citizens and set the stage to use immigrants as an excuse to stage another attack on democracy should they lose in November,” AV Senior Research Director Zachary Mueller recently wrote. “Plan A is to use the lies to justify voter suppression and intimidation tactics ahead of the election. Plan B, if they lose, is to use the nativist lies to mobilize a segment of the MAGA base to wage another violent assault to overturn winning results.” You don’t have to believe us, just listen to Vance’s own statements that he would have refused to certify the 2020 election results. “I would have asked the states to submit alternative slates,” he said in September. “That's what I would have done. Again, I've said that publicly many times.” Believe him.

Vance knew his anti-Haitian attacks were lies but ran with them anyway for attention and to score cheap political points: Vance knew that his racist fiction targeting Haitian immigrants with legal status in the U.S. was completely made-up but ran with it anyway, telling astonished CNN anchor Dana Bash that if he has “to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention … then that’s what I’m going to do.” Beyond being completely and totally baseless, the lies have endangered an entire community beyond the Haitian immigrants initially targeted by Vance - constituents living in his own state. “More than 30 bomb threats have shuttered schools, businesses and City Hall,” Ohio-based immigration attorney David Leopold wrote in his op-ed at the Cleveland Plain-Dealer. “What’s more, the ugly racial overtones of the anti-Haitian blood libel have riled up the extremists in Trump’s political base, and attracted the Proud Boys to Springfield.” Vance has refused to backtrack from his outrageous lies, but not without forceful denunciations from a broad slate of prominent voices – including his state’s own Republican governor (and a supporter of his campaign). ”This rhetoric hurts the city and its people, and it hurts those who have spent their lives there,” Gov. Mike DeWine, a native of Springfield, wrote in an op-ed in The New York Times. Vance, who converted to Catholicism as an adult, has also been scolded by Catholic bishops in Ohio, who called for “respect and dignity” for Haitian neighbors. “As the residents of Springfield, Ohio, struggle with violent threats and life disruptions fueled by unfettered social media posts, we exhort the Catholic faithful and all people of goodwill not to perpetuate ill will toward anyone involved based on unfounded gossip,” the bishops wrote. In a scathing editorial, hometown paper Springfield News-Sun called Vance’s intentional lies “unbecoming of a U.S. Senator and violates the public’s trust in the esteemed office.” Vance’s response? To say that he’ll continue to describe Haitian immigrants legally in Springfield as “illegal,” The Trump-Vance agenda is clear and consequential: make as many immigrants as possible deportable, no matter their current legal status or their deep roots in this nation.

Vance is a fentanyl fraud: While Vance positioned himself as a “savior of the Rust Belt,” he turned the opioid epidemic “wrenchingly” described in his “Hillbilly Elegy” memoir into a political issue, including by falsely blaming immigrants for this crisis (fact check: U.S. citizens and permanent residents are largely responsible for trafficking fentanyl into the U.S.) and even  falsely suggesting that President Biden has intentionally allowed fentanyl to enter the country in order to kill off MAGA voters. The reality is that on the very real issue of fentanyl, Vance is a fraud. Just look at some of the facts around his so-called anti-drug charity and Big Pharma ties. In the midst of his Senate run, an investigation by the Associated Press revealed that Vance’s non-profit, Our Ohio Renewal, was closely tied to a shadowy group that sought to cover up big pharma’s role in the opioid crisis. “An AP review found that the charity’s most notable accomplishment — sending an addiction specialist to Ohio’s Appalachian region for a yearlong residency — was tainted by ties among the doctor, the institute that employed her and Purdue Pharma, the manufacturer of OxyContin.” This included a total of $800,000 in donations from Purdue to a think-tank where the specialist, Dr. Sally Satel, served as a senior fellow and that “sometimes cited Purdue-funded studies and doctors,” the AP said. “Longtime Ohio political observer Herb Asher cast the charity’s shortcomings, including Satel’s links to Big Pharma, as a ‘betrayal.’” Rather than taking good-faith steps to tackle the opioid crisis and help save the lives of constituents in Ohio, he’s chosen divide and distract politics and to point the finger at immigrants. 

He’s weird: Vance supports mass deportation and equates asylum-seeking moms and dads at the border to invaders and has zero plans to address the fentanyl crisis in Ohio but he also can’t couch the fact that he’s really weird. For starters, look at his claim that America has been overrun “by a bunch of childless cat ladies, who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made.” Vance was directing his insulting remarks at Vice President Harris, the highest-ranking woman in our nation’s history. The reactions have not gone well for him: besides unleashing a sea of childless catlady memes and catladies for Harris endorsements (including from perhaps the world’s most famous catlady), one poll showed that 64% of Americans either strongly or somewhat disagreed with his statements. Vance has also attacked childless teachers by claiming that educators who don’t have children disturb him, said that the way to tackle the childcare crisis is to just have relatives babysit for free (wow, why didn’t anyone think of that one before?), is obsessed with women’s bodies (let’s just face it, he has weird views about women overall), managed to make eggs awkward, tells awful jokes and can’t even seem to buy some sprinkled donuts without being weird. Rolling Stone reported that Trump “can't seem to get over Democrats calling him and his running mate ‘weird,’” including claiming that it's actually his political opponents who are “the weird ones.” Sure, Don.