After sifting through Vice President JD Vance’s new book titled “Communion,” author Colin Dickey found a startling theme that appears to “telegraph” the impending implosion of the MAGA movement — an apparent precursor to a presidential run that Dickey warned may ultimately backfire.
“It’s hard to say how he thinks this is going to work out for him, but Communion makes clear how he sees his path ahead – even if, by releasing this during Trump’s reign, he may be playing his hand a bit too soon,” Dickey wrote in an analysis published Friday in The New Republic.
Dickey wrote that reading Vance’s new book was “one of the strangest experiences imaginable” given that “every premise of the book defies any kind of known reality.” In particular, Dickey flagged what appeared to be Vance’s “attempt to tack suddenly to the center-right” as inconsistent with the current administration’s tenure.
“Does Vance think his readers have the attention span of goldfish?” Dickey asked. “Communion seems to telegraph that MAGA will not last beyond Trump, that the raw nativism and brutality that have defined the past 18 months have an expiration date, and that Vance himself may only be buying into it because he’s good at following orders.”
For instance, regarding the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, Vance carefully avoided litigating the topic “on these pages,” he wrote in the book, and instead issued a generic statement that any controversial policies required “constant evaluation of trade-offs.”
“Certainly Communion is not a full-throated, impassioned case for the righteousness of MAGA,” Dickey wrote. “Instead the book is a chickens--- attempt to have it both ways by appealing to some rational middle that hasn’t existed in this country since at least 2014.”
