JD Vance sells lies in various shades: Pants on fire, bald-faced lies, falsehoods, conspiracies, half-truths, political lies. The vice president, speaking at the Turning Point USA rally just before Christmas, told more lies in a single speech than any politician not named Donald Trump.
Vance’s opening nudge: “I didn’t bring a list of conservatives to denounce or to deplatform, and I don’t really care if some people out there, I’m sure we’ll have the fake news media denounce me after this speech.”
This is a false statement. “Fake news media” is a Trumpism — a fabricated ad homimen attack on the integrity of American journalists. Vance, like Trump, is so obsessed with “fake news” he mentions it three times in his speech. That ought to be a tell.
“The vice president, speaking at the Turning Point USA rally just before Christmas, told more lies in a single speech than any politician not named Donald Trump.”
Vance packages his packs and cartons of lies in a patriotic, bootstrapping individualism and unfettered capitalism. He offers political clownery cloaked in racist innuendo. He dehumanizes his political opponents with no regard for truth.
Every phrase Vance uttered in that Turning Point USA speech included one shade of lie or another. I counted at least 50, including the example above:
2.“We have got to build, and President Donald Trump is a builder.” Trump is an agent of destruction. Robert L. Ivie, Indiana University, says, “Demolition is …. the rhetorical hammer.”
3. “We’re building a better country right now, and you have a rightful place in the success of your nation and the success of this movement. And we build by adding, by growing, not by tearing down.” Trump and Vance treat the White House as if it were Trump’s reality TV show with its signature phrase, “You’re fired!” They are not building anything except an unwanted ballroom but they are tearing down the foundations of the country.
4. “Charlie Kirk was a great builder, too. He understood that any family can have its disagreements, its tough conversations.” This hagiographical bit covers the dark side of Kirk’s radical right-wing agenda and ignores his hateful rhetoric and sermons masquerading as debates.
5.“Kamala Harris used the government to censor you.” And how exactly? Nothing irritates the Right more than an American civil morality that denounces right-wing racism, sexism and homophobia. Civility should not be confused with censorship.
6. “We’re using …. the government to protect your free speech, whether it’s on college campuses or in the digital marketplace of ideas.” Pants on fire lie. Trump uses the power of the presidency to silence dissent, not to promote free speech.
7. “Today our military is welcoming patriots instead of firing them for refusing to accept an unlawful vaccine mandate.” The Trump administration has fired more than two dozen admirals and generals including women and people of color — apparently for not being white males. And it was on Trump’s first watch that the COVID-19 vaccine was created.
8. “I’m so proud of the accomplishments of the president and the entire administration. In just a year, we ended Joe Biden-Kamala Harris’ border crisis. December marks seven months straight of zero releases at the southern border. More than 2.5 million illegal immigrants have left the United States, the first time in over 50 years that we have had negative net migration, and it’s just the start.” In this bundle of lies, Vance takes credit for the harsh, inhumane immigration practices of Trump. He brags about net migration, exaggerates the number of immigrants deported, and admits America is closed to people of color. He turns what should be shame into pride.
9. “When you restore sanity at the border, it shows up everywhere else. Rent prices are dropping four months in a row, and more native-born Americans are working than ever before.” Real wages are up 0.5% according to The Employment Index, and cumulative wage growth has been 3% below zero since 2021.
10. “It’s the rogue district judges who issued nationwide injunctions every time the president lifts a finger.” The attack on our judicial system is a clear and present danger to democracy. These “rogue” judges are upholding the law.
11. “We’re working to end the scourge of left-wing violence in the United States of America.” There is no evidence of an epidemic of left-wing violence in the USA. But there is evidence of more violence motivated by the right wing.
12. “You don’t have to apologize for being white anymore.” This is a wholesale fabrication of the conservative mind. Vance plays the victim card. White people want the kinds of special privileges they deny others.
13. “We believe in hard work and merit.” In a wealth-soaked administration of corruption, hobnobbing with the Saudis, taking billions in bribes and pardoning grifters, grabbers, and con artists, there’s no appeal for hard work and merit.
14. “We don’t persecute you for being male, for being straight, for being gay, for being anything. The only thing that we demand is that you be a great American patriot. And if you’re that, you’re very much on our team.” Violating every right gained by women, gays, transgender people, African Americans and others in the name of patriotism is disgusting. MAGA has redefined “patriotism” to include only its kind.
15. “Unlike the left, we stand against treating anybody, and I love what Nikki said about this, we don’t treat anybody different because of their race or their sex.” An example of Orwellian language. Vance says the opposite of the truth.
16. “We’re going after the far-left crime networks, but we’re also going after the monsters that fund them.” This is more right-wing mythology and conspiracy theory. It is a straw man.
17. “We don’t just want to go after the Antifa member who threw a brick at an ICE agent. We want to know who bought the brick, and we’re going to prosecute them, too.” Antifa is not an identifiable movement, and it is not the terror group Vance implies. The number of people who have thrown bricks at ICE agents is miniscule in comparison to the number of citizens ICE agents have abused and arrested.
18. “We’re making America healthy again with our great HHS secretary, Bobby Kennedy.” Hilarious if not so dangerous. I wonder how Sen. Cassidy (R-LA) feels about being the deciding vote that made the most dangerous health conspiracy lunatic the director of HHS.
19. “We’re bringing drug prices down.” While the price of 15 prescription drugs is set to drop, only 5.3 million Americans will benefit. This is more braggadocio than actual benefit. The president issued an executive order on prescription drug prices dropping as much as 400%, 500% and even 600%. If the president magically got the companies to reduce the prices of all of their drugs to $0, that would be only a 100% cut.
20. “Purging our food supply of the poison that it built up over a generation. … Don’t delude yourselves. It’s the activist groups who want to poison your kids with hormone replacement therapy and toxins in your water supply.” Never trust a right-wing politician who favors the word “poison.” This is pure conspiracy theory.
21. “Greatness awaits every single one of you in the ‘America First’ movement we are building together.” There is zero evidence the Trump administration wants every single one of us to be great. Quite the opposite.
22. “Do you want more prosecutions? Great, so do we.” Here Vance speaks a cruel truth in demanding and supporting more prosecutions, especially the attempted prosecutions of Trump’s political enemies and government prosecutors who put Trump on trial.
23. “Do you want faster deportations? So go to ICE.gov slash join, because we’re building an army of patriots and we need good people who care about the country to help us secure the border and do it even faster.” Aside from the authoritarian, dictatorial use of federal troops in the streets of our cities, now Vance wants more ICE agents and hints at deputizing American citizens. Sen. Mike Lee has a bill to make American citizens “pirates” on the high seas seizing drug cartel boats. An army of “Captain Jack Sparrows?” What could go wrong?
24. “Do you want rents to keep dropping and wages to keep rising as they have over the last few months?” This is a political claim that is more exaggeration than truth. Apartment rents are down 1% this year. And illegal immigrants are not taking apartments and houses away from American citizens, as the Trump administration has charged. As typical for a politician, Vance makes complex economics sound like simple math.
25. “It looks like (Democrats are) going to nominate a California liberal who’s presided over rolling blackouts, open borders and unchecked violent gangs. They’re just trying to settle on whether it’s going to be Gavin Newsom or Kamala Harris.” This is more exaggerated political propaganda. There is no 2028 Democratic nominee for president yet, as the race is nearly three years away.
26. “(The Democrats) are not sending their best. Omar Fateh was Ilhan Omar’s candidate for mayor of Mogadishu, I mean Minneapolis. Little Freudian slip there.” The Democrats lining up to run for the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives include strong candidates such as former North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, Rep. James Talarico and Jasmine Crockett of Texas among many others. Vance shows his racism by calling Minneapolis “Mogadishu.”
27. “And Jasmine Crockett, oh Jasmine Crockett. The record speaks for itself. She wants to be a senator, though her street girl persona is about as real as her nails.” This is a racist attack by an avowed anti-racist MAGA leader who wrote a book about being a hillbilly when he wasn’t.
28. “Democrats are puppets. They don’t actually matter.” Vance ignores that no group is as homogenized and homologous as MAGA, not to mention the evil of a vice president saying any American citizens “don’t matter.”
29. “(Democrats want) to make you less powerful and want to make you less safe in the country your ancestors built.” This is fear mongering and political propaganda with no basis in reality.
30. “Part of the American dream is the idea that we’re all, every single one of us, on the same team, we’re all part of the same American family.” That’s rich coming from a guy working overtime to divide Americans into “patriots” and non-patriots.
31. “It’s the corporate boardrooms pushing diversity quotas while whining about the fact that Donald Trump won’t let them ship American jobs overseas anymore and boo-hoo to that.” Trump and Vance claim to be populists, but beneath the costumes, they are advancing the agenda of corporate capitalists. An administration filled with billionaires is not a movement of “the people.”
32. “It’s the rogue district judges who issued nationwide injunctions every time the president lifts a finger. It’s the Soros DAs who cheered on as their cities burned.” Once again, this is a dangerous lie because it attacks our nation’s system of justice.
33. “What unites them? They win when our country loses. They get rich when you get poorer. They hire the illegals that they bring in to take your jobs. They drink fine wine in the countries they ship your jobs to. They censor you because they’d rather destroy the Constitution than risk losing an argument. They bring in millions of voters because they know they can’t win the argument with the people who are already here.” Vance rises on the hind legs of a true demagogue with this exploding pack of lies. Exactly none of this is true.
34. “And you know what else unites them? We are going to kick their ass next November and every year after that.” Odd for a pietistic conservative to speak in such crude language at an event ostensibly for people of faith. This is a cheerleading stunt more than a statement of any known fact.
35. “Part of the American dream is the idea that we’re all, every single one of us, on the same team, we’re all part of the same American family. If you want to destroy that, do what Democrats have done, not just for the last five years, but for the last 30 or 40. Make one race the enemy of another. Make one gender the enemy of the other. Make Americans suspect and despise each other instead of loving their shared country.” Vance gives new meaning to “reverse the charges.” It is his party and his people who have made enemies of others and denied the humanity of people they don’t like.
36. “Americans are hungry for identity. We’re hungry for belonging. We’re hungry for a sense of our place in the world, and it’s no surprise why.” Vance cloaks his white supremacy in whatever he means by “identity.” His unspoken word is “privilege.”
37. “For many years, our fellow Americans have been dealing with a globalized economy that homogenized cultures and hollowed out our towns. Academics and activists pushing race and gender politics down everyone’s throat 24-7. Big tech overlords using their internet platforms to censor stories that challenge the dominant far-left narrative in our country.” Here Vance attempts to answer the grievances of rural and blue-collar voters by making Democrats the source of all evil.
38. “More than any time I can recount, people are talking about American identity and figuring out what it is that unites us. But I want to say something here. The only thing that has truly served as an anchor of the United States of America is that we have been, and by the grace of God, we always will be, a Christian nation. I’m not saying you have to be a Christian to be an American. I’m saying something simpler and truer. Christianity is America’s creed.” As every American historian has made plain, America was not founded as a Christian nation by evangelical Christians. The lies required to make this claim of America as a Christian nation are legion.
39. “That creed, think about it, that creed motivated our understanding of natural law and rights, our sense of duty to one’s neighbor, the conviction that the strong must protect the weak, and the belief in individual conscience.” This is a bastardization of religious language. The American creed is the Pledge of Allegiance. Vance perverts traditional meanings of words to paint MAGA as an organization of Christian virtue. His audacity in claiming “the strong must protect the weak” boggles the mind as Vance takes part in an administration with a determined “anti-social Darwinism” — only the strong survive.
40. “Our famously American idea of religious liberty is a Christian concept.” Yes, true religious liberty was promoted by the Baptists, among others. But what Vance and his allies mean by “religious liberty” is freedom for some but not for all. Their concept of religious liberty is not what the Founders intended.
41. “But over the last 50 years, there has been a singular focus, a war that has been waged on Christians and Christianity in the United States of America. And let me say, of all the wars that Donald Trump has ended, that is the one we’re proudest of.” The idea that there is a war against Christianity in America is a demented claim. Evangelicals are always howling about the war on Christianity. But for good measure, Vance throws in another pack of lies: “For decades, the Left has labored to push Christianity out of national life. They’ve kicked it out of the schools, out of the workplace, out of the fundamental parts of the public square.”
42. “Freedom of religion transformed into freedom from religion. And in a public square devoid of God, we got a vacuum. And the ideas that filled that void preyed on the very worst of human nature, rather than uplifting it. They told us not that we were children of God, but children of this or that identity group.” Vance appears incapable of grasping the intrusion of the secular on our nation. The case Vance makes is a matter not of fact but of pure intuition, held together by tenuous strands of presupposition, utterly inadequate as an explanation of how secularism has claimed America. And despite his embarrassing incapacity for philosophical reasoning, Vance never fails to entrance his eager readers with his rhetorical recklessness.
43. “They replaced God’s beautiful design for the family that men and women could rely on and return to one another with the idea that men could turn into women so long as they brought the right bunch of pills from Big Pharma.” Here Vance repeats the evangelical lie that transgender identity is not real. Just because he doesn’t understand it doesn’t mean it isn’t real.
44. “Because the fruits of true Christianity are men like Charlie Kirk. The fruits of true Christianity are good husbands, patient fathers, builders of great things, and slayers of dragons. And yes, men who are willing to die for a principle if that’s what God asks them to do. Because so many of us recognize that it is better to die a patriot than live a coward.” More Kirk hagiography distorts the true picture of Kirk’s darker ideology. And what’s with “dragons”? The idea that somehow God asks death of Kirk is heretical.
45. “But what saved me was not lying to myself, but accepting the reality of the fight that we’re in. Charlie’s death was an immense loss, an irreplaceable loss.” Spiritualizing the death of Kirk and making it a battle cry is martyr propaganda. Kirk was neither saint nor martyr.
46. “It wasn’t racial commonality or grievance. It wasn’t some philosophical jargon. It wasn’t a DEI prep course, and it wasn’t a welfare check. It was the fact that a carpenter died 2,000 years ago and changed the world in the process.” Vance effortlessly mixes MAGA conspiracies and cruelty with Jesus and his death. Shameless.
47. “A true Christian politics, it cannot just be about the protection of the unborn or the promotion of the family, as important as those things absolutely are. It must be at the heart of our full understanding of government.” The Trump administration is doing the opposite, especially in going after immigrants. And opposition to abortion is the single most significant motivator of Trump’s voting base.
48. “We believe in taking care of the poor.” This is such an obvious lie, I swear his nose grew a foot when he said it.
49. “We are outraged at the injustice of Tim Walz allowing Somalian immigrants to defraud that program to the tune of billions of dollars.” Vance didn’t mention Paul Walczak, a Florida health care executive convicted last year after pleading guilty to tax crimes, including failing to pay more than $10 million in payroll taxes withheld from the paychecks of over 600 employees. Trump pardoned him. And once again he takes a small incident and projects it to demonize an entire people group.
50. “Wouldn’t you rather lead a movement of free thinkers who sometimes disagree than a bunch of drones who take their orders from George Soros?” Beating the alleged devil is a constant lie of Vance and MAGA who are anything but “free thinkers.” Is Vance kidding? Have you ever seen a Democrat or independent tape a feminine hygiene napkin to their ears in sign of loyalty to a leader?