Since this is being written following an afternoon spent at the Berlin Raceway in Ottawa County, Michigan, watching JD Vance speaking to the MAGA faithful it seems only right to use raceway language to explain the senator’s stealth status as the real threat to the America we have come to know and sorta, kinda love.

He is high-octane fuel in juice box packaging. He is Lewis Hamilton making out like he’s grandpa driving through the neighbourhood. He is a Le Mans Porsche pretending to be a Toyota Corolla. He is NASCAR trying to pass itself off as the fairground dodgems.

I could go on but you’ve got the picture.

Vance is good. Really f***ing good. But not good in a good way. He’s good in the worst way possible, so self-knowingly cynical and profoundly disingenuous that you are tempted to admire his gall but then your emotional roller coaster keeps ticking on, thankfully, and doesn’t stop until you get to the place where you should have been all along. Stunned. Horrified. Scared.

If you think Donald Trump is a sociopathic liar, honestly, you really should get out more. Toodle along to a JD Vance campaign rally and, like I did, type every fib he tells into the Notes app on your phone until the tendons in your fingers give up through overuse.

Kamala Harris wants to force everybody to drive electric vehicles. She wants to tax ordinary people like you so she can give money to the rich to buy EVs. She came into office saying she was going to promote asylum fraud. She’s rolling out the red carpet for illegal aliens. She wants to give them your homes. Donald Trump has built the biggest, most diverse tent in the history of American politics. Kamala Harris flooded our communities with Fentanyl. She wants to make it easier for illegal aliens to vote. She covered up Joe Biden’s inability to do his duties as President. Donald Trump was strong and smart and kept the world at peace … NO MAS!

JD Vance (left) with Donald TrumpJD Vance (left) with Donald Trump (Image: free)

Listening to JD Vance speak at a rally, I’m reminded of the scene in Inglorious Basterds when Aldo Raine calls Donny Donowitz - The Bear Jew - from out of the tunnel, except Peter Thiel is Aldo and Donald Trump is Donowitz.

“Hey Donny, I’ve got myself here a Yale Law School graduate who wants to lie for his country. Oblige him!”

It requires sacrifice to bag a prime spot at a MAGA rally. You’ve got to get there early, promise to stay to the end and always wave your Trump/Vance placard when the applause line drops. In return, you get to stand behind the candidate and be on television although in the case of a JD Vance rally on a Wednesday afternoon in a small media market you get to be streamed on YouTube by Fox17 WXNI, “the station that brings the most local news, weather, traffic and sports from Grand Rapids to Kalamazoo.”

There I am circled in the photo above, at your service, trying to frame a photo of JD in the space between the guy in front of me with the rubber Trump face mask and the kid to his right with the placard. It’s a prime spot, although not if you are interested in what Vance has to say or the expression on his face as he says it. It was no loss, to be perfectly honest. I’ve seen the act before. Like you, I watched the vice-presidential debate on TV the other night and drew my conclusions. Donald Trump’s running mate is a Newmarket Heath thoroughbred when it comes to intellectual sparring and a Blackpool beach donkey when it comes to hiding just how pleased he is with his own brilliance.

It must be difficult being so preternaturally smart in a stupid world but JD navigates this terrible burden through the sheer force of his high IQ and sky-high shamelessness. You can see better from behind how he pulls off his act, this Yale-educated charlatan in his $10,000 suit, with his billionaire friends and the running mate he once compared to Hitler, telling the folks out front in their $10 MAGA caps that he’s just like them. Perhaps he once was but that’s all behind him now, reduced to a potted biography and used as a bludgeon in service of a boss he so clearly holds in contempt.

JD WALKS towards the stage like the high school debating champion he is, stiffly, failing to connect with simple fistbumps offered by a couple of kids in the front row. He reaches inside his jacket for his notecard, which he throws on the lectern and never looks at again. And begins.

“I think what Donald is trying to say is …”

Read more from Lawrence Donegan in America:

Not really, but I bet he wants to. Instead, he says things he doesn’t believe but knows will keep the big guy upstairs - meaning Trump, not God - happy. “It is my job to remind people that it was only four years ago that we had the great leadership of Donald Trump and that if we work hard in the run-up to this election we can have it again.”Thirty minutes later he is done, bringing the (small but not embarrassingly small) crowd out of their seats and leaving me out of my mind. The guy is an impressive performer, no question. He speaks off-the-cuff in perfectly formed sentences, bringing the veneer of coherence and intelligence to the most incoherent and anti-intellectual vision of America laid before the electorate in any of our lifetimes.

In doing so he drills through the many layers of incomprehensible, racist horseshit spouted to Trump to extract what these people in Western Michigan have come to believe is the truth. They have been stripped of their identity and dignity. And standing before them right now is the guy who will bring both of these things back.

“I will fight for you every day,” Vance tells them.

Does he mean it? As Nick Hornby once wrote, “Who cares when the acting is this good?”

You never know in politics, of course, so there could be another “childless cat-lady” oppo-drop coming any day, but those clips are from Vance’s past when he flirted with the truth and said what was really in his dark and venomous heart. He’s put that honesty nonsense behind him now and says what needs to be said - truth, lie or whatever. The 2024 version is impressively disciplined and, I hate to say, is evolving as a communicator every day. He’s even ditched the eyeliner.

Will all of these lies and all of this wretched cynicism be enough to propel him into the vice-presidency, a mere coronary thrombosis away from the highest office? The simple answer is the electorate will decide. But the more interesting question is would Vance care either way? If Trump wins, he will be cast out into the wilderness of the vice presidency, diminished and ignored, left with the ceremonial roles of going to funerals the boss doesn’t want to attend and refusing to certify election results the boss doesn’t like. If Trump loses next month, no one will be better placed or better equipped for 2028 than JD Vance, the undisputed leader in polishing the turd of Trumpism and selling it back to America like it’s freshly baked apple pie. As I said. Scary.