Hello and happy Thursday. 46 days until the election and today I visit Haiti. J.D. Vance apparently thinks Haitians come from here. It is said that spring is beautiful on Mermaid Island, located one mile from Atlantis.

It may be easy to deny “Haiti” As a slip of the tongue (after all, Donald Trump deporting Haitians to Venezuela(This is even more nonsensical) Comments During Tuesday's Michigan performance This is part of a week-long investigation into Vance's woes and lies, and racism, so I'm not going to forgive him.

If you haven't been in Haiti all week, you probably don't need me to tell you about the turmoil in Springfield, Ohio. But on Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal ran a great article. After Vance's campaign filed a police report with WSJ reporters about a missing cat named Miss Sassy, ​​whose owners suspected she'd been kidnapped by neighbors in Haiti, the intrepid reporters did something journalistic: They knocked on Miss Sassy's door, only for the owner to say the cat hadn't actually been kidnapped by Haitian residents. Griohiding in the basement. Oops.

Miss Sassy's owner, with the help of her daughter and a translation app, had already apologized to her Haitian neighbors.

Following a tearful apology, The New York Times detailedA few months ago, a woman posted on Facebook about Haitians eating cats, based on a rumor from another neighbor, but that post also turned out to be unfounded.

The discovery was Black man holding two dead geese In fact, it wasn't a Haitian who killed the bird in the park; it was a man from Columbus, Ohio, who was clearing a bird off the road that had been hit by a car.

And of course, the report Woman kills and eats cat In another Ohio town, a man with no ties to Haitian immigrants, just a good, old-fashioned American, pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity.

So the ugly pet-eating metaphor was just a series of false claims amplified by the far-right internet, but that doesn't matter to Vance, who is not giving up on sending Springfield's legal immigrants back to Haiti, even if it means deliberately spreading propaganda and lies.

Well, today's topic is the SAD politics of JD Vance.

Grumpy, angry, demanding

For those of you who don't live inside my head, SAD means Sulky, Angry, and Demanding. The SAD playbook was created, of course, by Trump and honed to dizzying perfection by this rambling man.

I've seen many others apply this lesson, but none as fervently or relentlessly as Vance. There's been a lot of discussion about how unpopular Vance is (surprisingly, he rates his unpopularity at 100%). 16 percentage points in three months), and what a poor choice he was as a running mate, but Trump likes to say he's a genius, so it makes sense he picked Vance.

Vance is proving to be a loyal man for whom there is nothing else but loyalty, something that seems to be missing in Vance and being part of this group of candidates fills that gap.

This can be seen in his reaction to the crowds at the rallies.When people praise his vindictive meanness, he puffs out his chest and tries to look tough for a second, before a smile quickly breaks into a look of genuine satisfaction. If you look closely, you'll see this reaction repeated over and over again on his moneyline. The glory of that moment, filled with powerful affirmation of being Trump's attack dog, seems like a reward in itself.

He is chillingly reminiscent of Mr. C., the man in Dorothy Thompson's 1941 essay for Harper's Magazine about why people join dictatorships. She's talking about the Nazis, but her description has poignant resonance in today's political turmoil. Read the articleit's worth your time.

About Mr. C., a poor but successful man who was not accepted into the elite society he coveted, Thompson writes: He has a burning ambition: to rise to such a position that no one can humiliate him.

Chic M

Vance's fierce loyalty, wherever it comes from, must please Trump immensely, especially after Mike Pence's post-hanging defection.

But it also serves a larger purpose. Propaganda works best when it comes at us from multiple angles. For a while now, Trump has been forced to sell his bullshit largely alone. Yes, he has Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, and even Tucker Carlson, who has his own podcast, his underground radio show, etc. But these people have their own agendas, and I can't trust them to stay true to the message. I can't trust them to use the spotlight for Trump all the time.

Vance has an extraordinary devotion to his boss that even his wife cannot match.

Recently, Laura Loomer, a Trump aide with enough racism to make David Duke blush, wrote to X that if Kamala Harris wins, “the White House will smell like curry, White House speeches will be delivered via call centers, and Americans will only be able to give feedback via customer satisfaction surveys at the end of the phone that no one can understand.”

I'm South Asian, so to provide a little background, the trope that Indians and Muslims stink is real and widespread. This isn't some one-off joke she came up with, it hints at deep, harmful prejudice, an act of shaming and marginalizing people for whom cumin and mustard seeds are the scents of comfort and home.

As we all know, Vance is married to a South Asian woman with immigrant parents, so one might assume that he would take offense on behalf of his family.

But it's not okay to be upset about the racism that Trump built his campaign on, especially coming from a woman who is very close to Trump.

When NBC's Kristen Welker asked him about it, He said:

Kristen, I make great chicken curry. I don't think it's offensive to anyone to talk about food preferences and what you like to do in the White House…

I think what Laura Loomer said is not what we should be focusing on, but the policies and the issues. So do I agree with what Laura Loomer said about Kamala Harris? No, I don't agree, and I don't think this is really an issue of national importance.

And Trump's choice of Vance is a testament to his genius: a man for whom no lie is too brazen, no attack too excessive, no excuse too humiliating, no compromise in the pursuit of excellence.

Woof woof. Good boy.

What else to read

Must Read: The Trump campaign spread rumors about immigrants eating pets, despite being told it wasn't true
Upside Down World: Trump's indictment talk rattles election officials
LA Times SpecialTeamsters union will not endorse Trump or Harris for president

Stay golden,
Anita Chhabria

P.S.: This week, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill that, as my colleague Wendy Lee wrote, “aims to curb manipulated content, except for parody or satire, that could damage a candidate's reputation or public confidence in the election results. Under the law, candidates, election boards and election officials can seek court orders to remove deepfakes.”

In response, Elon Musk, who has become one of the most influential and powerful disseminators of far-right propaganda and misinformation, tweeted a deepfake video of Harris.

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