J.D. Vance Can't Mask His Dead Soul

Vance is a man of a thousand faces, each one wearing a mask.

If you were to crack open the skull of JD Vance (if that’s his real name), you wouldn’t find a soul, a moral center, or even a modest collection of gears and wires. Instead, you’d find a rancid black ichor, a lost boy who became a lost man, a damp puddle of Silicon Valley Yarvinite neo-monarchism, and a handwritten mash note to Stephen Miller.

There is no there, there.

In the long, sordid history of American political grifters, we’ve witnessed a panoply of carpetbaggers, con men, snake-oil salesmen, degenerates, and garden-variety sociopaths. Trump is sui generis in his repulsive character, but his Vice President is something new, something modern, something almost unrecognizable in comparison to past aspirants for the highest office in the land.

Vance represents a new, more terrifying breed: the post-identity zealot.

He is a man who has changed his name four times, yet still hasn’t found a personality that fits. He is the ultimate code switcher, a shape-shifting wraith who can play the Appalachian martyr for the red-state rubes and the tech-bro nihilist for the donor