JD Vance: Mob Lawyer

If you’re serial felon, Ponzi schemer, and adjudicated sexual abuser Donald Trump, there are only three reasons to hire a lawyer from the Yale Law School of the J.D. Vance variety: to stay out of jail, screw your partners or the IRS, or pay off a mistress.

Otherwise, lawyers (in Donald Trump’s mind) are hired guns, and never give Trump the brilliant advice he would give himself if he was allowed to represent himself in court.

If you’re Vance, the only reason you agree to take Trump on as a client is the hope that he will pay your seven-figure fees before you, yourself, end up in jail.

Alas, as the history of broken dreams isn’t one of the subjects taught at Yale Law School, Vance seems to be missing the point that most of his predecessors—Michael Cohen, Sidney Powell, Kenneth Cheseboro, Jenna Ellis, Rudy Giuliana, John Eastman, Jeffrey Clark, and Alina Habba (to list only a few Trump attorneys who are drifting up the river)—never got paid and will probably end up in jail long before Trump himself is fitted with an oversized orange necktie.

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For his opening statement as a mob lawyer, Vance was asked to represent his client (Trump) at what was billed as the one-and-only vice presidential debate in 2024, held in a network studio (not unlike The Price is Right, although in this case what was up for auction was the soul of a nation).

The primetime broadcast was little more than an arraignment hearing (“Isn’t it a fact, Mr. Vance, that your client conspired to kill off the democracy? Isn’t it a fact?”) at which Vance had only one assignment: to have Trump released on his own recognizance, so that he can get on with the business of the presidential campaign, which, despite all of Vance’s Yale phrases about immigration, inflation, and Israel, is to bilk the American people of millions (in campaign contributions, soft PAC money, watered shares in Trump Media, crypto currency coins, gold sneakers, Trump cologne, and hollow silver coins).

What makes that even an option is if Trump’s lawyers, Vance among them, can convince the juries of his peers that he’s an upright businessman and a compassionate politician,

As Tony Soprano’s lawyer liked to remind the judge: “Your honor, I take offense to the ‘characterization’ of my client as a ‘Mafioso.’ Mr. Soprano has not been found guilty of anything: he’s awaiting trial for ‘alleged offenses.’”

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Rather than contest the points of the pending Trump “alleged offenses”, Vance employed the time-honored legal strategies of endless mob lawyers, which is to attack the government for having the nerve, the indecency, to charge his client with racketeering, embezzlement, and obstruction of justice.

In the so-called debate, Vance represented that his client was nothing more than a law-abiding citizen, a pillar of the community, and someone who only cares about job creation, women’s reproductive rights, and protecting democracy from the grasps of Facebook, someone who, on January 6th was debating the “issues” in the public square. As Vance said at the debate:

…I think that we’re focused on the future. We need to figure out how to solve the inflation crisis caused by Kamala Harris’s policies. Make housing affordable, make groceries affordable, and that’s what we’re focused on. But I want to answer your question because you did ask it. Look, what President Trump has said is that there were problems in 2020. And my own belief is that we should fight about those issues, debate those issues peacefully in the public square. And that’s all I’ve said. And that’s all that Donald Trump has said. Remember, he said that on January 6th, the protesters ought to protest peacefully. And on January 20th, what happened? Joe Biden became the President. Donald Trump left the White House. And now, of course, unfortunately, we have all of the negative policies that have come from the Harris-Biden administration.

From Vance’s pleadings, you might come to the conclusion that his billionaire client was nowhere near the Capitol when his hired goons attacked Congress with hockey sticks or that, in accumulating his fortune, he always paid more than $750 a year in income tax.

Or you might come to believe that the some 28 women who have accused Trump of sexual abuse now seem to realize all the wonderful things he did as president to defend women’s rights.

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Up against Vance at the Trump arraignment hearing was a veteran prosecutor (well, okay, a football coach and school teacher from Nebraska and Minnesota who graduated from Chadron State), Governor Tim Walz, who did his best to make the case that, if reelected, Trump would carry on with his rackets.

Walz made his points but I am not sure if anyone was listening. He said, for example:

There’s one, there’s one, though, that this one is troubling to me. And I say that because I think we need to tell the story. Donald Trump refused to acknowledge this. And the fact is, is that I don’t think we can be the frog in the pot and let the boiling water go up. He was very clear. I mean, he lost this election, and he said he didn’t. One hundred and forty police officers were beaten at the Capitol that day, some with the American flag. Several later died. And it wasn’t just in there.

Walz (unless at the debate that was Gene Hackman from Hoosiers) tried walking the line between mid-western decency and the horrific realization that he is on the thin blue line between a Trump restoration and the end of the republican government.

But instead of addressing Vance for what he is—the legal heir to election hustlers Rudy Giuliani, Jeffrey Clark, et al.—the vice presidential candidate fell back on some quaint notion of professional courtesy and kept addressing Vance, in effect, as “my worthy opponent,” with whom he could agree that inflation is bad and that Israel has “the right to defend itself.”

If the Democrats lose in November, it will be because the electorate will have come to the conclusion that little makes Harris and Walz angry.

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Perhaps the only consolation is that everyone, except perhaps the gullible Yale ingénue J.D. Vance, knows how this story ends: with Vance on the hook for Trump’s crimes, probably under indictment or with his head in a noose, and the client “a little behind” in paying his fees.

I am sure Vance sees it otherwise—that he’s the political embodiment of the next generation of born-again Republicans who can stand for Trumpism (all those abortion bans and Federalist Society judges) but (someday) without Trump.

Vance is also the legal mouthpiece of the Steve Miller band—which includes the Nazi-apologist Tucker Carlson, the 2025 Project for imposing martial law, and the Supreme Court caliphate—with thesame brief of detaching Trump from Trumpism.

It’s now the Vance dream too, just as it was the dream of Peter Navarro, Michael Flynn, Roger Stone, Steve Bannon, Mark Meadows, Paul Manafort, and so many others.

But as should be clear by now, all there is to Trumpism is Trump’s elaborate con games and financial sleights of hand—wrapped in the flag and offered for sale around midnight on cable television.

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Vance walked off the stage holding his wife’s hand, with the look of a man who had just learned that he is the legal heir to a vast, if dissipated political fortune, and that to cash it in all he has to do is to mouth clichés and deceptions about illegal immigrants streaming across the southern border or alternatives theories of January 6.

The network platitudentists all complimented Vance for how well he spoke during the debate, as if they had seen the future and it works. But I heard something else, which sounded less like Pericles andmore like the conclusion of The Great Gatsby, when even James Gatz realizes that he’s living on borrowed time and money.

As F. Scott Fitzgerald writes:

He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

Vance would also do well to remember that Fitzgerald’s narrator of Gatsby’s decline and fall was Nick Carraway, yet another Yale graduate in the thrall of a criminal fortune, who only at the end (“old sport…”) came to realize that in Gatsby’s glittering universe he was just another lawn ornament.

As Fitzgerald wrote: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that held them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made…”

Vance is one of the “other people.”