Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, in a letter Wednesday to Attorney General Merrick Garland, raises concerns about a recent Washington Post op-ed warning that a second Trump presidency would become a dictatorship. Vance’s concerns are about not the potential dictatorship, mind you, but about the part of the opinion piece where the author speculates about what form resisting that hypothetical dictatorship might take.
“Based on my review of public charging documents that the Department of Justice has filed in courts of law, I suspect that one or both of you might characterize this article as an invitation to ‘insurrection,’ a manifestation of criminal ‘conspiracy,’ or an attempt to bring about civil war,” Vance wrote.
Wednesday’s letter is what you get when such a troll is elected to the Senate.
If you’ve spent even a little time in corners of the internet where debates occasionally break out, you’ve encountered plenty of trolls. The most pernicious are those who are “just asking questions,” the ones who pretend they aren’t necessarily arguing for any specific point of view or outcome but are just bravely bringing thorny subjects up. Wednesday’s letter is what you get when such a troll is elected to the Senate.
In this case, Vance is asking questions about Post contributing editor Robert Kagan who, while a staunch anti-Trump voice, isn’t a “left-wing journalist,” as Vance’s news release refers to him. Kagan, a neoconservative at heart, is a conservative at the Brookings Institute who left the Republican Party in opposition to former President Donald Trump’s rise, not out of a sudden admiration for, say, single-payer health care.
Over the course of many, many words, very few of which Vance actually refers to in his letter, Kagan made the case that would be few institutional checks on Trump if he were to make it back to the White House that Americans should be honest about what that means. He implores those who’d pretend that former U.N….
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