J.D. Vance should count his blessings that his boss is a bigger jerk than he is, because if something were to happen to Trump, Vance would instantly become the world’s most loathed person.
On Tuesday night, Vance — the man who obnoxiously believes himself qualified to correct the Pope of the Catholic Church — strutted into the Akins Ford Arena in Athens, Georgia for a Turning Point USA rally. And fittingly, no one showed up to hear him mouth off.
The 8,000-seat venue was, according to MS NOW journalist Jake Traylor’s now-viral video, less than 25 percent filled for the Vice President. No one bothered to show up to hear the motor-mouth opine.
It was there that Vance had the vile audacity to lecture Pope Leo XIV — the leader of 1.4 billion Catholics, successor to Peter, the Vicar of Christ — about the importance of being “anchored in truth.” The slithering snake of a man once told CNN, “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention… then that’s what I’m going to do.
Yesterday, he snarkily frothed — from his oozing spittlebug mouth — that the Pope should be “very, very careful” when speaking about matters of theology.
If I were J.D. Vance’s priest — and thankfully I am not — I would give him a penance of 1 million “Our Fathers” and 2 million “Hail Mary’s.” And then I would tell him when he was done with his prayers to do his fellow mankind a solid, and jump off a bridge.
Vance, regrettably to all of us who call ourselves Catholic, converted to Catholicism in 2019, and now apparently believes his few years in the pews give him the theological standing to school the Bishop of Rome.
Vance’s irritating ego was bent out of shape after Pope Leo’s condemnation of the escalating war in Iran and his declaration that “God is never on the side of those who wield the sword.”
Vance, who is caught up in the pompous perfidy Pete Hegseth’s “Holy War,” reached for the liberation of Nazi concentration camps as his rebuttal — a grotesque historical analogy.
And true to his slimy and duplicitous character, the one time Vance decided to keep his fat-trap shut was when Trump said he was going to erase a civilization. Because any truthful Catholic is fine with wiping people off the face of the earth.
As I wrote previously, Vance, with the tedious reliability of a presumptuous coxcomb, constantly reminds everyone he is the Vice President. Even in attempting to dress down the Pope, he couldn’t resist brandishing the title like a six-year-old Cub Scout who just received a Bobcat badge, “Even as vice president,” he intoned, suggesting that his office requires him to weigh his words carefully about policy.
He is the nugatory vice president, the office which Franklin D. Roosevelt's first vice president, John Nance Garner IV, famously described as "not worth a bucket of warm spit.” In this case, JD Vance is both the bucket and a salivating Trump sycophant, albeit Catholic.
I am a lifelong Catholic. And as a lifelong Catholic, I know well that we are not supposed to judge our fellow man. Matthew 7:1 says, “Do not judge, or you too will be judged.”
But honestly, I believe Jesus, a man who had his own strongly worded things to say about Pharisees, might extend me a little grace here. Vance humiliates the word truth.
Since converting, Vance has waged an unrelenting war on the very values his adopted Church professes. He spearheaded the spread of the debunked lie that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio were eating pets, and when city officials told his own office the rumors were baseless, he doubled down.
Maybe someday Vance will visit Haiti, and they will eat him. But Haiti has enough ingestive disease, so a meal of Vance would only make things worse.
Vance routinely calls legal residents under Temporary Protected Status “illegal aliens,” a deliberate linguistic slapdown designed to strip human beings of dignity. He campaigned for the evil and repressive Viktor Orbán in Hungary and watched his second favorite (Trump is #1) diabolical dictator lose — badly.
He led talks in Pakistan for nearly a day and returned home having failed to broker any resolution with Iran, blaming Tehran for his failure. Because JD is a Catholic vice president who is without fault and sin.
He is, by almost any measure, an epic political failure, a laborious loser, who has managed to be an unfaithful failure at being a Catholic.
The Church he claims to belong to is not silent. Even in that sparse Georgia arena, a lone voice cut through the air: “Jesus Christ does not support genocide!” Vance tried to wave it away, insisted he agreed with the sentiment, and then lied to the heckler’s face, claiming the Trump administration had “solved” Gaza.
But do you think any of this bothered the supercilious, sanctimonious, simple-minded sad sack? Hell no, as he might say, using a word that he’s destined to experience someday.
Pope Leo XIV should not waste a moment of his papacy acknowledging this man. The distance between the two of them cannot be measured in miles or rank or years of theological training. It is the distance between heaven and hell, the place the Church reserves for profane blasphemers like Trump — and his warm bucket of spit.
