Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, in a letter Wednesday to Attorney General Merrick Garland, raises concerns about a recent Washington Post op-ed warning that a second Trump presidency would become a dictatorship. Vance’s concerns are about not the potential dictatorship, mind you, but about the part of the opinion piece where the author speculates about what form resisting that hypothetical dictatorship might take.
“Based on my review of public charging documents that the Department of Justice has filed in courts of law, I suspect that one or both of you might characterize this article as an invitation to ‘insurrection,’ a manifestation of criminal ‘conspiracy,’ or an attempt to bring about civil war,” Vance wrote.
Wednesday’s letter is what you get when such a troll is elected to the Senate.
If you’ve spent even a little time in corners of the internet where debates occasionally break out, you’ve encountered plenty of trolls. The most pernicious are those who are “just asking questions,” the ones who pretend they aren’t necessarily arguing for any specific point of view or outcome but are just bravely bringing thorny subjects up. Wednesday’s letter is what you get when such a troll is elected to the Senate.
In this case, Vance is asking questions about Post contributing editor Robert Kagan who, while a staunch anti-Trump voice, isn’t a “left-wing journalist,” as Vance’s news release refers to him. Kagan, a neoconservative at heart, is a conservative at the Brookings Institute who left the Republican Party in opposition to former President Donald Trump’s rise, not out of a sudden admiration for, say, single-payer health care.
Over the course of many, many words, very few of which Vance actually refers to in his letter, Kagan made the case that would be few institutional checks on Trump if he were to make it back to the White House that Americans should be honest about what that means. He implores those who’d pretend that former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, for example, could beat Trump for the nomination or that the judiciary is bold enough to jail him to “stop the wishful thinking and face a stark reality.”
Kagan’s is one of several op-eds and news articles dealing with the well-documented plans for a future president Trump to transform the federal government into an instrument of his will. But Vance calls out Kagan’s piece for a single section and then misrepresents its point:
Resistance could come from the governors of predominantly Democratic states such as California and New York through a form of nullification. States with Democratic governors and statehouses could refuse to recognize the authority of a tyrannical federal government. That is always an option in our federal system.
“Excuse me? I must have missed that day in civics class,” Vance scoffs. “Our system of federalism prescribes a robust role for state governments and often allows for local resolution of local matters. […] According to Robert Kagan, the prospect of a second Donald Trump presidency is terrible enough to justify open rebellion against the United States, along with the political violence that would inevitably follow.”
Except Kagan doesn’t say that. The quoted paragraph is part of Kagan’s explanation for why any such attempts to thwart federal power are likely to falter. In particular, he notes that “not even the bluest states are monolithic, and Democratic governors are likely to find themselves under siege on their home turf if they try to become bastions of resistance to Trump’s tyranny.” Vance also conveniently disregards the very next line after the section he quotes: “(Should Biden win, some Republican states might engage in nullification.)”








