The world has become a very dangerous place because the most powerful country is under the control of a ten-year-old boy,” wrote Californian political scientist Francis Fukuyama last month. “The boy discovered a flamethrower in his backyard and is now enjoying the power to burn things with it. His parents need to keep him under control.”
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Since the parents cannot control him, another Californian resorted to a more drastic plan last weekend. Cole Tomas Allen traveled to Washington with the purpose, it seems, of assassinating the flamethrower boy. Let’s be honest: many people will regret that he did not succeed, people who believe that the sacrifice of one would mean saving the lives of many.
I reflected a bit upon seeing the news and decided it was better that Allen failed in the attempt. For several reasons. One: although my father used to say (jokingly, I think) that the best system of government was “autocracy moderated by assassination,” one should adhere to the moral principle of “thou shalt not kill.” Two: the probability that a revenge massacre would break out in the United States, the only country in the world that has more guns in private hands than inhabitants. And three: that the alternative to Trump is his vice president, J.D. Vance.
Well, I confess that my reflections did not arise in this order. My most immediate reason for wishing Trump to remain alive was that, if not, Vance would become the most powerful person in the world. But I may be wrong. I suspect I was already wrong when I said in this column once that I prefer a madman (Trump) to a fanatic (Vance) in charge of humanity’s destiny. I am reconsidering.
Based on Vance’s statements and actions, one can only conclude that he is on the path to fascism, in the strict sense of the word. He is a racist, in favor of expelling people of inferior races from the United States, who shares with his main mentor and sponsor, Peter Thiel, a disdain for democracy. Thiel, a tech world megamillionaire and undoubtedly a clear fanatic, believes that the masses should be under the control of enlightened people like him.
The question is whether Vance really believes these things or if he represents a kind of suit he puts on to please the MAGA world and to keep receiving money from Thiel with the primary goal of one day ruling the White House. I believe that, to achieve this, Vance would do whatever it takes. He would leave the Catholicism he converted to seven years ago and join another religion, like Buddhism or communism, if he calculated that he would get more votes.
In other words, thinking it over, he is not so much a fanatic, which implies having a rigid belief system, but the most extreme embodiment of cynicism. Nothing has value, everything has its price. Morality does not exist, only self-interest.
Does the U.S. vice president believe what he says or is he trying to please the MAGA world to reach the presidency?
So, I am already backtracking. I feel compelled to reconsider my notion that Vance would be a worse option than Trump. One would have to choose between a madman and, not a fanatic, but a cynic. Of the three options, I prefer a cynic in power. At least he thinks. He has some intelligence. He is a strategist, not an impulsive child. That is why Vance changed his discourse about Trump. In 2016 he compared him to Hitler; in 2019 he declared him the savior of the homeland.
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But now another factor comes into play that complicates everything even more. For a person with a law degree from Yale University and the sole author of a bestselling autobiography, he has been saying incredibly stupid things lately. Three examples.
First, the recent convert to the Vatican dogma said that the Pope “should think twice before speaking about theology.” It’s like saying Pep Guardiola shouldn’t talk about football, or Ferran Adrià about gastronomy.
Second, the vice president of the United States said that Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz was “an act of economic terrorism” and added, in the same television interview, that “two can play this game.” It was his way of justifying the subsequent U.S. blockade of the strait; therefore, he was stating—unintentionally, presumably—that his country was also a terrorist state.
Third, when he flew to Budapest to campaign for the failed re-election of Hungarian president Viktor Orbán, he declared that he had gone with the purpose of condemning “one of the worst cases of foreign electoral interference I have ever seen or read about.” Excuse me??
The question is how to explain the descent into the most contradictory idiocy of a person endowed with the cerebral lucidity of a top lawyer. Limiting it to cynicism no longer suffices. I believe it has more to do with the confusions and irreconcilable tensions that emerge in a human being when he sells his soul to the devil. A columnist from the not exactly progressive The Wall Street Journal wrote this last week: “Everyone makes moral concessions, but they are manageable because there is at least some essential identity, an irreducible core that is more than the sum of our appetites and ambitions. But the singularly strange trajectory of J.D. Vance’s career strongly suggests that there is no identity there, only appetites and ambitions that serve those principles that work best.”
In his absolute amorality, Vance has caught the contagion of his boss, a character who naturally falls into incoherence twenty times a day, often in the same sentence or the same post on social media. Absolute amorality is a form of madness, a serious deviation from what it means to be a normal person. So, to conclude this dialectical process and reach a new conclusion, both Vance and Trump are psychopaths. Trump always was; Vance, after his latest of countless conversions, is today.
Vance and Trump are psychopaths: Trump always was; Vance, after his latest conversion, is today
Returning to the initial question, would I wish Trump to be killed? Answer: no. The right, sane, humanitarian thing would be to send the president and vice president of the United States, both flamethrowers with access to the nuclear button, to spend the rest of their lives locked up in a hospital for criminals with mental disorders.
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