We all know a nice bully like JD Vance

The rage I feel could lift a car

Last night, JD Vance stood at his lectern, smiled like an imp, and made the most draconian policies of our time seem like folksy good sense and the rage I feel could lift a car.

Vice Presidential debates are the worst kind of political theater. They are jousting contests on behalf of their lords. There have been some historically memorable zingers — most recently Harris’s “I’m speaking,” and most legendarily Lloyd Bentsen’s “I knew Jack Kennedy and you are no Jack Kennedy” — but ultimately, the night does little but capture a news cycle for a half day.

What JD Vance did last night was showcase the obvious: The only consistent position JD Vance has held in his adult life is JD Vance should have the floor.

He talked over the moderators, who had to cut his mic.

He openly whined about fact-checking.

He smiled and invoked Christ when asked about children killed by gun violence.

When asked a straightforward question about Iran, he launched into a monologue about growing up with in Appalachia. “Introduce yourself to America,” you could hear his strategists tell him. “Get em on your side.”

It was the JD Vance show, and it was excruciating to watch as he smoothly delivered his rehearsed deflections to every question with such ease.

I knew narcissists like JD Vance when I was in college. They haunted the halls of the Ivy League and were quick to call me by my first name during arguments as if it were a diminishment. They held their (always) brilliant, accomplished, gorgeous girlfriends by their waists at parties and saw their ambition as a reflection of their own ability to tame and claim someone so incredible.

I saw them all in every aspect of JD Vance last night. Assuming the room was on his side until the room itself had to mute him. Assuming he was fooling us. Assuming nobody could tell his arguments were flimsy and unmoored from reality because he delivered them with total confidence.

It is chilling to see someone as seditious and sexist and racist appear so calm as he denies the 2020 election results, tells women they don’t deserve the right to terminate a pregnancy in an abusive relationship, and blames school shootings on mental health and, bizarrely, Mexico.

It was all so horrible because it was familiar to any of us who ever stared down the guy who didn’t do the reading, but knew enough of the bullet points to skate by. Men whose need for approval was matched only by their need for power. Their need to hear their own voices no matter who else was trying to speak.

Men like JD Vance don’t belong anywhere near the White House. His comments about January 6th alone should bar him from a *tour* of the White House.

May we all rise up and mute his mic in November. Our votes are the collective “f*ck off” the moderators meant when they thanked him for explaining the political process to them. And may the young men who watch him fail learn from his defeat, and choose to be better.