JD Vance's 2028 strategy: Be even worse than Trump

[marmar]

JD Vance’s 2028 strategy: Be even worse than Trump
Vance sees a future in people who call Hitler "a great leader"

By Amanda Marcotte
Senior Writer
Published December 23, 2025 6:45AM (EST)


(Salon) Writing fair headlines in an era of rising fascism is always a challenge, but the New York Times whiffed it spectacularly on Sunday in their weekend coverage of AmericaFest, the alarming Turning Point USA conference. “Vance Refuses to Take Sides in G.O.P. Fight Over Bigotry,” the Gray Lady declared. While that may be true in the most surface sense — Vice President JD Vance has insisted that the MAGA coalition includes “all of you” and denounced “purity tests,” which are presumably exclusive — for those who understand the context, Vance very much did choose a side. He has chosen antisemites and other outright bigots.

As the Times article notes, AmericaFest revealed serious and growing tensions within the MAGA movement over the inclusion of people like Nick Fuentes, “a Holocaust denier and avowed antisemite,” and Candace Owens, a conspiracy theorist who once said Adolf Hitler’s goal “to make Germany great and have things run well” was “fine,” but that his mistake was invading other countries — a comment that, accidentally or not, implies the Holocaust was an acceptable domestic policy.

Vance may say he’s not taking sides, but that is impossible in this situation. “White nationalists: good or bad?” is a binary question, and by accepting neo-Nazis and other far-right groups into the MAGA tent, the vice president is inherently rejecting everyone who thinks that’s a bad move. As Donald Trump himself learned in 2017 when he described folks who marched with neo-Nazis as “very fine people,” there’s simply no way to side with Nazis and not side against the people they hate.

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Vance’s rhetoric is a barely cleaned-up version of the “heritage Americans” idea that white nationalists are peddling, which argues that the only legitimate Americans have ancestry that predates the Civil War. It only takes about three seconds of examination to see, however, this is just a tortured way to justify a belief that only white people are real Americans. C. Jay Engel, who popularized the euphemism “heritage American,” acknowledges that most Black Americans do have roots going back centuries, but he argues “the majority of Blacks have demonstrated that they cannot function within the old European cultural standards” and insists that this conception of Europeaness is the foundation of America. As Adam Serwer wrote in the Atlantic on Sunday, there’s a growing movement on the right to denounce the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution, which banned slavery and created birthright citizenship, allowing former enslaved people to have citizenship. .................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2025/12/23/jd-vances-2028-strategy-be-even-worse-than-trump/