Where Vance and His Speech Belong

United States Vice-President JD Vance travelled to Germany — a country of national healthcare, state-of-the-art infrastructure, first-class public transportation, solid public services, and conscientiously allocated public housing — to accuse its top officials of destroying democracy.

February 14th through the 16th, European officials had gathered at the Munich Security Conference to discuss worldwide security and Ukraine, important topics. On Friday, however, keynote speaker Vance ignored the agenda to harp on something else, something familiar to election-weary, post-election-stunned Americans but perhaps new to his audience: the enemy within. Vance wasn’t talking about the enemy within the United States, which he knew all about. He was talking about the enemy within Europe, which he evidently also knew all about. The assembly listened stoically as the greenhorn just two years in public office called them to task for retreating from the democratic values the United States cherished and once thought it shared in common with Europe. 

Skipping Europe’s considerable social, urban, cultural, and artistic accomplishments, Vance zeroed in on its disgrace: immigration. Instead of acknowledging that Europe had been up to its ears in the matter since 2015, Vance accused Europe of willfully ignoring the issue. 

His listeners were dumbfounded. Vance hadn’t entered public office until January 2023 so of course he wouldn’t know the issue had been tormenting Western Europe for years. Nor did this newcomer seem to understand that rounding up refugees, immigrants, and asylum seekers and sending them to Gitmo — which President Donald Trump, who likes easy albeit brutal solutions, saw fit to do — was not a humane response. So perhaps it was unreasonable to expect Vance to be acquainted with the enormous challenges responsible democracies face in working out balanced, humane solutions for complex problems like immigration. 

Vance was too inexperienced to realize what he was advocating: that they erase the memory of two devastating world wars and embrace the elements that nearly destroyed it.

Vance then lacerated the Europeans for their repressive regimes. European democracies censured their most vibrant populations, he scolded, the populations represented by the far-right movement. Stodgy and outdated, Europe’s leaders rejected the Nazi slogans, hate speech, and abrasive tactics of, say, Alternative for Deutschland. In censuring that expression, Vance chided, Europe denied its core values. Its democracies would fail and deserved to fail as a result. 

Again, the assembly absorbed Vance’s message in silent alarm. Again, they wondered if he was too inexperienced to realize what he advocated: that they erase the memory of two devastating world wars, expunge the painful lessons learned, and embrace the elements that nearly destroyed it.

Vance’s next attack signaled a shift in his speech from the merely rhetorical to the tactical. He carped at Europe’s flabby vulnerability to misinformation. The barb was particularly bitter, because on that point Vance was no novice. His audience might wink at his ignorance of Europe’s deep engagement to resolve immigration and other complex social problems. They might excuse him for knowing nothing of Europe’s 80-year existential struggle to establish secular democracies on a war-torn continent. But Vance did know something about misinformation. He was the man who had achieved the second-highest office in the United States within two years thanks to powerful, disciplined, well-funded campaigns . . . of misinformation. Criticizing his audience for being vulnerable to the tactic was richly ironic considering he had been using it on them ever since opening his mouth at that podium. His speech had been spectacular proof of both his approval and mastery of it. 

Orbán was the beacon showing the way and the sailor who had been there and back.

For 22 minutes, Vance stood before them and delivered the precise program of one Victor Orbán. The only surprise was Vance’s consummate performance, without gaps, inconsistencies, hitches, or lapses. Those assembled were well aware that the American Republican platform secretly modeled itself on Orbán’s blueprint for Hungary. They knew U.S. Republicans maintained a cordial relationship with a man whose skillful rule as prime minister since 2010 had detached Hungary from the list of the world’s democracies and added it to the list of electoral autocracies. European leaders knew U.S. Republicans were eager to find out how Orbán had done it and keen to learn if it could work in the United States. It was known that the Republicans had invited Orbán to Washington, that they had visited him in Hungary, and that they had encouraged him to contribute to their Project 2025, which President Trump was now busy implementing. Orbán was the beacon showing the way and the sailor who had been there and back. And now, at the podium of the Munich Security Council stood, in the person of Vance, Orbán’s prodigy, lecturing them on misinformation. 

A chill descended as listeners absorbed Vance’s insinuation that mercurial President Trump had already withdrawn from the sullied alliance with substandard Europe.

While his address was altogether unwholesome, a Siberian chill descended as Vance’s listeners brushed off his wholesale condemnation of them to absorb the insinuation that shimmered beneath: mercurial President Trump had already withdrawn from the sullied alliance with substandard Europe and joined hands with someone who scorned misinformation and defended his people like a tiger: Vladimir Putin. 

In getting that message across, Vance adroitly folded in a further layer of misinformation. It was not Orbán, not Project 2025, not Trump, not even Vance who felt America conscience-bound to withdraw from the European alliance, he explained, but the American people themselves. 

The seizure of their identity and their voice had Americans choking in anger. To gain leverage over our European allies, Vance lied about us. He said we despised Europe’s shoddy democracies, we scorned the hypocrisy of its objectives, we doubted its ability to govern fairly for all its people, and for that reason, we no longer considered Europe worthy of our support. Vance was happy to expropriate the voice of the American people to advance Trump’s agenda. In one statement that beggared burlesque, Vance mocked his listeners: “If your democracy can be destroyed with a few hundred thousand dollars of digital media from a foreign country, then it wasn’t very strong to begin with.”

After spitting that into Orbán’s cuspidor, Vance hightailed it out of the Bavarian slum that night, leaving something conspicuous flapping in the wind: Destroying a democracy for $270 million is just fine.