The 538 polling average shows JD Vance firmly in unfavorable territory by 10.5 points. The most recent poll, the Wall Street Journal’s, was done by Trump’s own pollster, Tony Fabrizio, has Vance down by 10. By way of comparison, Walz is up by 4.5 points… and up by 6 points in Fabrizio’s poll. Short version: people like Walz and dislike Vance. In Trump’s lizard brain, he knows he’ll be blamining Vance when the ticket goes down in flames in November and drags GOP candidates for Congress and local offices down with them.
The NY Times, though, offered another reason why Trump likes Vance despite the “bad ratings.” Michael Bender reported how Trump— who probably didn’t bother to read his own campaign’s opposition research report on Vance— “was unaware of the most incendiary remarks that opponents were rapidly unearthing from Vance’s past, and the former president told allies that he was troubled by the idea that more comments would come to light as Democrats savaged his heir apparent as weird and anti-women.” But Trump isn’t bothered. Bender asserts it’s because “Vance’s relentless pace of full-throttle performances as Trump’s well-trained attack dog has pleased the former president and instilled a sense of stability inside [the] campaign… Trump had instructed his young sidekick to fight forcefully through those initial attacks, and later said Vance’s execution exceeded his expectations… In a quintessentially Trumpian display of bravado, the former president has privately praised Vance by comparing himself to Vince Lombardi, telling people that his eye for political talent was now on par with the Hall of Fame football coach’s ability to find Super Bowl-caliber players.”
Bender reported that “the nation’s least educated and poorest voters” do like Vance— they also like Trump— but among college graduates and independent women his approval is in virtual free-fall. The baseless, Trump-style accusations that Vance constantly hurls at Kamala and Walz are the kind of nonsense that only people with low IQs— who filter information to reinforce their preexisting beliefs (severe confirmation bias)— could take seriously. He also noted that Dan Quayle’s former chief of staff, Bill Kristol said that “Vance has gone out of his way to adopt a set of views from an ideological, right-wing milieu on things like child-rearing and how women should more or less stay home. That is harder to understand from someone who is 40,” than it is from someone elderly, doddering and obviously senile like Trump.
Yesterday, Jason Wilson reported that new recordings of Vance from 2021 have surfaced in which Vance claims “that professional women ‘choose a path to misery’ when they prioritize careers over having children… he also claimed men in America were ‘suppressed’ in their masculinity,” two common fascist aspersions that have been used by authoritarians to gaslight audiences for at least a century. “The Ohio senator and vice-presidential candidate said of women like his classmates at Yale Law School that ‘pursuing racial or gender equity is like the value system that gives their life meaning … [but] they all find that that value system leads to misery.’”
Hitler’s regime promoted a very rigid idea of gender roles, where women were primarily seen as mothers and homemakers. The Nazi slogan “Kinder, Küche, Kirche” (Children, Kitchen, Church) epitomized this view. Nazis in the 1930s and ‘40s believed, like MAGA does today, that professional careers for women detracted from their “natural” roles and led to societal decline. The Nazi regime's policies, such as the Law for the Encouragement of Marriage, incentivized women to leave the workforce and focus on motherhood, even as the Nazis constantly propagated an ideal of aggressive masculinity tied to militarism and strength. Any deviation from this—whether it was men who did not conform to these roles or those who were seen as insufficiently masculine—was met with, at best, scorn and viewed as a threat to Germany’s goals.
In the early days of the Nazi Party, this worship of hyper-masculinity, was put on a pedestal by the homosexuals who played a key role in the rise of Naziism. Today, you take a Republican best known for running away, the not at all masculine Missouri senator, Josh Hawley, and you find his much-mocked book, Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs, that could have easily been written by Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, who prioritized as ideology the message that women should focus on childbearing and home-making. He was instrumental in portraying professional women as enemies of the state’s moral and racial goals, depicting them as selfish and detrimental to the Aryan race, while, again, reinforcing Nazi ideals of masculinity, promoting the image of the Aryan male as strong, dominant, and committed to the defense of the Volk. Men who failed to conform to these ideals were depicted as weak and degenerate, unworthy of their place in the Nazi state.
Even earlier than Hawley and Hitler, Mussolini was also emphasizing traditional gender roles, insisting the way Republicans do today, that women’s primary role was to produce children for the state, calling for large families and glorifying motherhood. Professional women were depicted as neglecting their “natural” duties, which Mussolini claimed would lead to their unhappiness and societal decay, almost word-for-word, the way Vance does. And, of course, fascist ideology in Italy also promoted a hyper-masculine image of men, idealizing the warrior figure and framing masculinity as essential to the strength of the nation. Men were expected to embody toughness, discipline, and a readiness for violence.
Ditto in Spain, under Franco, whose regime imposed strict gender norms, emphasizing that women should remain within the domestic sphere as wives and mothers. Francoist propaganda glorified women who devoted themselves to child-rearing and the home, while professional aspirations were portrayed as selfish and unnatural for women. Next door in Portugal, António de Oliveira Salazar's Estado Novo regime emphasized the same patriarchal values and norms, implementing policies that encouraged women to focus on domestic duties, while depicting women who pursued careers as contributing to society’s moral decay.
Ion Antonescu was doing the same thing in Romania and so was Brazil’s fascist leader, Getúlio Vargas (1937–1945). More recently, today’s fascist leaders— from Pinochet in Chile, Duterte in the Philippines, Bolsonaro in Brazil to GOP-beloved Orbán in Hungary and Putin in Russia— openly express disdain for women who prioritize careers over traditional family roles and rail against feminist movements while violently downplaying issues like gender equality and limiting reproductive rights. All of them also work to project a hyper-masculine image, glorifying aggression, toughness, and military values, making derogatory comments about men they perceives as weak or effeminate, reinforcing a conservative ideal of masculinity that aligns with their broader authoritarian agendas. This version of masculinity— like Hawley’s and Vance’s— is tied to nationalism and the idea that strong, dominant men are essential for the nation’s strength.
It’s funny that two very un-masculine men, both insecure in their own masculinity— Vance and Hawley— are the ones yelling about it most loudly. This is today's sick, weird MAGA Republican Party. In his report, Wilson noted that “In the recording, Vance repeatedly offered a dark vision of the lives of women who prioritized their professional careers… [W]hen asked what he saw inside elite institutions like Yale Law School that made him view them as corrupt, Vance answered: ‘You have women who think that truly the liberationist path is to spend 90 hours a week working in a cubicle at McKinsey instead of starting a family and having children.’ Vance added: ‘What they don’t realize— and I think some of them do eventually realize that, thank God— is that that is actually a path to misery. And the path to happiness and to fulfillment is something that these institutions are telling people not to do. The corruption is it puts people on a career pipeline that causes them to chase things that will make them miserable and unhappy,’ Vance said. ‘And so they get in positions of power and then they project that misery and happiness on the rest of society… OK, clearly, this value set has made me a miserable person who can’t have kids because I already passed the biological period when it was possible,’ Vance began, ‘And I live in a 1,200 sq ft apartment in New York and I pay $5,000 a month for it.’ He continued: ‘But I’m really better than these other people. What I’m going to do is project my, like, racial and gender sensitivities on the rest of them… even though the way that I think has made me a miserable person, I just need to make more people think like that.’”
God only know how Vance's wife, who he was clearly describing, felt about his comments. Last weekend, though, Vance made a half-assed effort to clean up his ugly misogyny about childless women by claiming it was “sarcasm.” Women already don’t like Trump. Vance (and Hawley and others like them) are giving women a reason to dislike Republicans in general.
Putting aside Vance's confusion of empathy for misery, is the young woman churning out 4 or 5 kids, half of whom will be men and ready for military service in say 15 years, really contributing more to the war effort than Rosie the Riveter churning out Mustangs and Corsairs to fight on the front lines today? And what does it do to the morale of young men in the fighting force to know that the guys who stayed behind are siring all these children? How did societies fall for this obvious lie?
Trump is among humankind's most despicable hominids ever. And vance is vying to join the list.
Among the deductions from the fact that trump and vance get ANY favorables in polls AND head a political party's ticket AND STILL MAY WIN is this: American voters are pure evil and dumber than shit.