Why Does Vance Lie Even When It Undermines His Own Supposed Goals?

What is the deal with the "app" that Donald Trump and J.D. Vance are so upset about, the one that supposedly allows those dastardly foreigners to enter the country illegally at Kamala Harris's invitation?  That is all a lie, of course, but it goes beyond the kind of constant lies that Republicans now rotely repeat everywhere they go.  This is not, after all, like Trump's obviously false assertion that every legal scholar -- no matter their ideological priors -- wanted Roe to be overturned.  It is not even the kind of sleazy lie that Vance tells so easily, such as his claim that Trump "salvaged Obamacare" or the whopper that Trump left office peacefully on January 20, 2021.

That latter lie, by the way, is exactly the kind of word play that is a con man like Vance's stock in trade.  People of that ilk love it when they can say that they are technically correct, which means that they consciously choose not to understand why legal systems define perjury by reference to a broader intent to mislead.  A more complete understanding of lying is the source of legal standards like being required to tell "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth."  Similarly, legal systems routinely use phrases like "knew or should have known" and specify that (to take a randomly selected jurisdiction, in this case Hawai'i) "'[i]ntent to deceive' means an intent to mislead, to cheat, to trick another, or to cause another to believe as true that which is false."

Vance's "on January 20th" lie is not even a particularly clever example of that type of deception.  One of the oldest gotchas out there is when a scam artist says to a sap: "I'll bet you a hundred bucks that I can tell you the score of tomorrow night's Royals-Yankees game before the game starts."  When the sucker puts down his Benjamin, the grifter grabs it and says: "Nothin' to nothin' -- before the game starts!"  Yet when Vance does the equivalent of that grift in a political speech, some people admiringly call him "smooth" or "articulate."  If that is all we are to expect of our would-be leaders, then we are in big trouble.

And as I argued in my Dorf on Law column yesterday, we do seem to be in that kind of trouble.  It is one thing for the Republicans in the spin rooms to immediately declare Vance to be the winner of Tuesday's non-debate against Tim Walz, but even people who seem to understand that Vance is a pathological liar expressed what sounded unmistakably like praise for his performance.  One commentator claimed that Vance "won the first 88 minutes" but lost only at the end when he dodged Walz's question about whether Trump had won or lost the 2020 election.  (For anyone who missed it, Vance was at the ready with this: "Tim, I'm focused on the future."  Good one!)

But that evasion might have been the one and only time in the evening when Vance was not lying.  It was just a blatant non-answer.  For those who have already forgotten the blur of dishonesty coming from Vance, the first two minutes of this clip from Chris Hayes's show last night lists only a few black-is-white-and-up-is-down Vance moments, including the bizarre claim that guns are being run from Mexico across the border into the US -- because, you know, it is so hard to get guns legally in the United States these days.  But again, those blatant falsehoods are only part of Vance's full menu of lying, because to have any meaning in this context at all, lying must include deliberate deception.

The main point of my column yesterday was to express astonishment at the idea that people -- again, not merely Republican shills but also supposedly neutral sources and even Vance's critics -- could call Vance "normal" and describe the non-debate as "substantive."  This apparently means that a person can simply lie and say nothing of substance but do so in a faux-friendly tone without stuttering and be deemed part of polite society, with everyone quickly forgetting Vance's established record of cruelty, racism, misogyny, xenophobia, and overall bigotry.

In the balance of this column, I want to turn the focus to one of the more egregious lies that Vance, Trump, and others have been pushing.  Naturally, it is a lie about immigration.  It also might seem on its surface to be difficult to understand in the context of "addressing substantive policy" -- which, we must recall, is the other compliment that non-Republican commentators bestowed upon Vance after the non-debate.

Vance at one point was lying about "Kamala Harris's open border."  To be clear, however, he did not tell that lie only at one point. According to the transcript, Vance used that exact four-word phrase three times in the non-debate before he even got to the point that I am addressing here.  The idea that the Biden Administration has opened the borders is an obvious lie about a matter of fact that is so brazen that it somehow is no longer even noted by fact-checkers.

In any case, as I mentioned briefly yesterday, Vance petulantly complained about being fact-checked during the non-debate, saying that "since you're fact checking me, I think it's important to say what's actually going on."  OK, so he seemed to be admitting that during the time when he thought that he would not be fact-checked, he did not need to say what is actually going on.  Good start.

But what was the bulletproof, factual claim that he thought would save his case?  He, like Trump, has decided that an app, CBP One, is a "Kamala Harris open border" scheme to let immigrants into the country illegally.  Specifically, Vance said this:

So there's an application called the CBP One app where you can go on as an illegal migrant, apply for asylum or apply for parole and be granted legal status at the wave of a Kamala Harris open border wand. That is not a person coming in, applying for a green card and waiting for ten years.  ... That is the facilitation of illegal immigration, Margaret, by our own leadership. And Kamala Harris opened up that pathway.

Leaving aside the absurd framing by Trump and Vance that everything that has happened in the Biden years was done by Harris personally, and leaving aside the fact that that app was introduced in 2020, when Trump was still in the White House, and even leaving aside Vance's repetition of his crazy idea that a legal alien is illegal because the law that made them legal is merely a magic wand (a claim that I mocked extensively in a column last week), I think it is fascinating that Vance is claiming that regularizing a chaotic process is a bad thing.

After all, one of the things that Republicans have complained about most bitterly is the scenes of people massed around entry points, trying to cross the border.  Those scenes are indeed concerning, to say the least.  They are a vivid reminder of the level of desperation of the people who are escaping violence and crushing poverty at home and have given up everything in their lives to try to start a new life in the US.  Even for Republicans who have no sympathy for such people, however, that kind of chaos is dangerous for border patrol officers, with the constant possibility that pushing and shoving in close quarters could get out of hand and lead to violence, with gates and fences being trampled, and so on.

Given all of that, anyone who was honestly and competently trying to deal with people showing up at the border would want to do everything they can to make the process sane, predictable, and as unlikely as possible to spiral out of control.  Enter an app.  We have apps that make it unnecessary to stand in line at the bank.  We have apps that allow college students to register for classes, which is a huge improvement from the old days, when we would rush from line to line and be elbowed by other students.  People used to sleep in tents outside ticket offices, and although there are stories about app-related fails, those are far better than actual riots breaking out as people rushed doors of concert venues.  Most people spend far less time at the DMV than they used to, because license plates and drivers' licenses can be renewed online.

In short, having an app to submit immigration-related information and to check on one's status after the application is submitted is simply good management.  It means that we need fewer government employees at the border physically barring disorganized groups of people from spontaneously spinning out of control.  It reduces paperwork.  It saves money.

One of the seemingly puzzling aspects of Republicans' attacks on government actions is that they are so often especially eager to criticize successful and sensible policies as much as -- if not more than -- they decry nonsensical policies.  It is one thing to say that, for example, there should not be a three-step process to apply for, say, a homestead exemption on local property taxes when it could be done in one step.  Once we have reviewed the situation and concluded that the two extra steps are truly superfluous, we sensibly change the procedure.

That is easy.  But as we see with Vance's complaints about CBP One, that is not what is happening.  He is lying about something that brings some semblance of order to disorder.  Why?  Yes, he is attaching his all-purpose attacks on Harris to this particular complaint, but given that those attacks are just as useful (and dishonest) in one context as another, why would he make the app a centerpiece of his story about "what's actually going on"?  I suppose that he is in part trying to tap into people's fears about computer technology (which would be especially prominent among Republicans' older target voters), but can that be the whole story?

To be clear, at a high enough level of generality, it is not a puzzle at all that Republicans would complain about a useful government program or policy.  A political party that is committed to the core idea that government is inherently incompetent, corrupt, and untrustworthy is a political party that will lie about Social Security, the FDA, the Weather Service, and on and on.

But at a more granular level, why complain about things like app-based efforts to rationalize government operations?  One can still lie about "open borders" without putting border patrol officers needlessly at risk of physical violence.  Of course, Republicans' dismissal of the January 6, 2021, violence against Capitol and DC Metro police officers has exposed their "back the blue" rhetoric to be a cynical lie.  And Vance specifically has shown -- most tellingly through his pitiless use of the citizens (including schoolchildren) of Springfield, Ohio, as disposable props in his sick morality play attacking Haitian immigrants -- that he simply does not care about the innocent victims of his lies.

You: "But J.D., you could achieve the same political ends without inciting violence and bomb threats against kids."

Vance: "Yeah, I could.  What's your point?"

In the end, Vance's lies can be as simple as blatant untruths, as slimy as obviously deceptive misdirection scams, and as pointless and damaging as turning sensible problem-solving policy innovations into nefarious plots.  If some people are so deluded as to think that any of that counts as "substantive debate" or "normal," where do we go from here?

Vance is not merely a glib Trump enabler.  He represents his own unique threat to the US constitutional order.  Anyone who is taken in by how "friendly" he seemed on Tuesday evening has lost the plot.