JD Vance Cannot Defend Trump's Cruelty — So He'll Lie About It Instead

The vice president isn't defending the worst parts of Trump's agenda. He's just creating a new reality.

Reporter, HuffPost National Desk

There are two ways to lie about President Donald Trump’s immigration policies, and JD Vance has mastered both of them.

The first: muddy the waters, refuse to acknowledge reality and dismiss facts as inaccurate.

The second: dehumanize people targeted by the US government, and describe them as inherently criminal and un-American to justify a policy of mass detention and deportation.

Now on his third week of promotion for “Communion,” his memoir about converting to Catholicism, Vance is using his faith to sanitize the worst aspects of Trump’s second term — and possibly previewing how he’ll campaign on immigration during a likely presidential run of his own.

Trump’s agenda relies on cruelty. The administration set a new record for people in immigration detention earlier this year, though the vast majority of detained people have no criminal convictions at all. Only a tiny percentage of immigration detainees have convictions for violent crimes. Many people in detention don’t even have a final deportation order, but rather are in the middle of applying for asylum. The administration has asserted the authority to jail millions of people indefinitely, and recently asked the Supreme Court to bless that unprecedented “mandatory detention” policy. Trump officials have admitted to using the misery of detention to pressure people to give up their legal cases and “self-deport.”

Vance can’t run from that record. Instead, he’s doing what he’s done for years — talking his way beyond the pale.

“Communion” lays out the debate over immigration policy in the most general terms possible — presumably because anything else would be damning for Vance.

“Law enforcement is an inherently difficult business,” Vance writes. “If you arrest a person illegally in the United States, that person will sometimes resist arrest. Even if they don’t, and even if everyone agrees their deportation is lawful and moral, there will still be some measure of separation and heartache.”

These lines are all about the art of the straw man: The issue at hand isn’t the “heartache” of a lawful, moral deportation — it is the question of whether the vast majority of this administration’s immigration arrests and deportations are lawful or moral in the first place.

And despite the book being about why he aligned with Catholicism as an adult, Vance is evasive about the fact that two popes in a row have criticized Trump’s immigration agenda at length. He doesn’t engage on the substance of the policies that have been criticized and instead somewhat ironically wishes for “an........

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