JD Vance is a smart fellow. That’s why he’s often infuriating — too smart not to know that the nonsense he spouts is nonsense. Well-framed nonsense, to be sure. Demagoguery, to be effective, has to be well framed: A grandiloquent rationalization for shredding the Constitution has to be pitched as a defense of constitutional principle if, as the speaker intends, the former is to be taken by the listener as the latter. All the while, though, the speaker knows exactly what he’s doing.
Vice President Vance issued one of his claptrap-laden diatribes on social media Wednesday, slamming “the media and the far left” who are “weeping over the lack of due process” in the Trump administration’s illegal deportations of people it alleges — probably correctly in most instances — are members of criminal gangs. Vance spotlights Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, the illegal alien and Salvadoran national whom — the Trump Justice Department itself has confessed to the Supreme Court — the administration unlawfully deported to El Salvador.
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