During Monday’s White House visit by the FBS national champion Ohio State Buckeyes, former Ohio Senator and current Vice President JD Vance attempted to pick up the National Championship trophy and did not succeed. Vance fumbled both the top and the bottom of the trophy, the base of which tumbled to the ground. Here, Defector presents two perspectives on the incident.
POINT: JD Vance Biffed It Big Time, by Tom Ley
Boy, JD Vance sure did it biff it big time when he tried to pick up the National Championship trophy at the White House yesterday. When he reached across the table the trophy was sitting on and attempted to pull it toward him, only to discover that it was far too heavy for him to move, you sure could see all the performative masculinity and competence he carries around fall away, exposing the vicious insecurity that lurks in his heart.
When he then attempted to pick the trophy up, you sure could see a feeling of total helplessness take over his body. You sure could tell that this Baby Huey-looking motherfucker, the one who likes to pretend that he grew up rough in the hollers of Kentucky while surrounded by various side characters from Justified, is nothing more than a soft-handed Ivy League dipshit who has never had to lift anything heavy in his life.
When his doomed method for picking up the trophy resulted in the damn thing coming apart in his hands and crashing to the ground, you sure could see a lifetime of self-loathing flash across his face. Stupid fucking idiot. No wonder Mom couldn’t stand to be around you sober, was shouted so loudly in his head that everyone on the White House lawn could hear it.
This humiliating gaffe sure isn’t a reasonable punishment for all the evil and suffering that Vance is helping to inflict on the world, but it sure was nice to see all the same.
COUNTERPOINT: Look At This Butterfingered Goof, by David Roth
It is one of the few amusing aspects of America’s clanking, dangerous, pollutant-belching mechanism of government that no one really knows what a Vice President is supposed to do. That cludgy, brutal system of checks and balances and hierarchies constructed by the founders and grudgingly expanded over the centuries since was both an improvement upon what came before and infinitely more appealing than the far stupider and more brutal thing currently trying to take its place, but the office of the Vice President has nothing to do with that. It has, by design, nothing much to do with anything. The role is less like being the executive’s backup quarterback and more like being the president’s appendix, and for a role like that in an administration like this one—that is, as a space-filler adrift within a hideous cavity, a vestigial wad prone to irritation and inflammation and bloat—JD Vance is about as good a fit as you can imagine. It is difficult to see what his purpose is, either, and everyone will absolutely deserve some ice cream once he is safely removed.
But if no one knows what the Vice President is supposed to actually do, it is safe to say that “botching some basic blocking-and-tackling shit re: picking something up and moving it a short distance during his alma mater’s White House visit after winning the National Championship” is not that. The job is mostly to exist, not so much as an extension of the president but as a sort of tragicomic human-shaped insurance policy—someone who would become meaningful only in an emergency, the possibility of which functions as a deterrent. Just fucking hang out, quietly, as the embodiment of the threat that any funny business from anyone might cause you to start talking or doing stuff—this would seem to be about the limits of what you want to ask of JD Vance. He is in that sense both a classic VP type and something like the zenith of the form—a stammering, peevish mediocrity happy to be remote-controlled by a cadre of floridly insane Silicon Valley reactionaries who want to turn the country into a series of cryptocurrency-powered plantations; an absolutely amoral striver and transparently cynical creep who emerged on the political scene like a fatberg that had been occluding the sewers under Yale Law School; both the creation of various degenerate and self-serving elites and the living Frankenstein’s monster-style manifestation of how that elite believes people from Ohio should be.
And this greasy, grasping teacher’s pet type, this prissy goof who somehow took the lesson from his difficult and degrading early life that it was his divine calling to make every other American life as difficult and degrading as it could possibly be, has mostly done the job he was hired to do. He gets sent various places and gets upset about all the things that the worst rich people in America are always upset about; he sits in White House meetings or speaks to foreign leaders looking moon-faced and eager and demands apologies from the entire rest of the world on the president’s behalf. He scolds and chides and tells weird lies. He acts like Martin Prince’s adult Wario, and if it is all odious and embarrassing just to have to think about and even worse to observe, that is also what he is there for. To suck around the edges of photo shoots, to project whatever is irritating the demented super-class of pill-popping dunces he serves and whatever might amuse or flatter the drowsy TV casualty shithead he works for, and to be in his abstracted sense The Thing That Might Be Even Worse Than This.
But on Monday, when his alma mater’s football team visited the White House, he still managed to goof it up. This had to be disappointing. Here was Ohio State, an institution that is in its ravenous, reckless, brutal, anhedonic, lavishly disordered pursuit of dominance something like Trump: The College Football Experience, visiting Vance at his work. And it’s perfect, it is all just exactly what Vance or the shitheads that he lets dream for him could have wanted. The U.S. Marine Band is dinking through a celebratory song, the stage is full of big men dressed exactly alike, the mood is reverent and strained and formal and un-fun, and the big trophy—the prize, the biggest prize—is right there. All Vance had to do was pick it up and move it over to the middle of the stage so that everyone could stand around and grimace together while a bunch of awful photographs get taken of them doing that. Even a Vice President could do that!
And you can see Vance believing it in the way he kind of bops over to the table with the trophy on it. He is grooving a little bit, to the extent possible. He is feeling himself. He tries to pick up the trophy and it just absolutely falls apart in his hands. A man in the same suit as him comes over and they try to put it back together and it doesn’t work and so he just kind of shuffles over to the middle of the stage and holds up half the trophy like a weird child presenting a rotten, bug-covered stick he’d found to his disgusted parents. His mouth is moving a lot by then, although you can’t hear it over the sound of the band tootling through the climax of “We Are The Champions.” It is anyone’s guess what he is saying; maybe it is a rough draft of the howling dud of a tweet he posted afterward, the sweatiest possible gloss on “I meant to do that.” You can guess at what he is saying yourself if you’d like.
Here is what I like to believe he’s saying: “I did it, I have the trophy, here it is, it’s fine.” Not really, dude. I hope this is the best moment of the rest of his life.