JD Vance's Week In Literally Glaring Racism, Civil War History Lessons, And Cats

And this was a quiet week.

Our awkwardly boyish vice president had a quiet week. A couple of speeches, getting sued by an Instagram influencer, perhaps a trip into the Oval Office while Donald Trump was away to daydream about how he’ll redecorate it if the president’s 80-year-old heart, which was in the process of flying on Trump’s bribe jet to the NATO summit in Turkey, should give out sometime in the next two years.

Imagine it: JD Vance sprawled in Trump’s desk chair, feet up on the Resolute Desk, eyeing the boatload of gold filigree Trump has glued to the walls and wondering if he’ll get Trump’s support for the 2028 nomination if he agrees to leave it all up, when Susie Wiles walks in, sees him, and chases him out of the room by swatting him with a rolled-up newspaper and yelling, Bad Vice President! You know you’re not supposed to be on the furniture! That’s a very bad Vice President!

The highlight of Vance’s week has to have been the speech he gave in Milwaukee — which some of you may recall is Algonquin for “the good land” — on Wednesday. Vance was in America’s Dairyland to talk about the administration’s efforts to combat waste and fraud in government programs while completely ignoring that the president was at that moment high above Turkey in a very prominent example of it.

No, Vance meant the fraud committed by people he hates: immigrants, the poor, people of color, and anyone with politics to the left of Supreme Leader Snoke. He managed to invoke an updated specter of Ronald Reagan’s “young bucks buying T-bone steaks with food stamps” canard, this one involving a woman who was recently convicted of Medicaid fraud in Wisconsin.

Granted, this has been the Republicans’ governing strategy for 45 years at this point. It’s just that this example happened to be particularly glaring. Literally.

Check it out starting around the 14:54 mark:

The glare off the photo means you only have a second to see that “the woman with the smug look and the Louis Vuitton bag” is Black. Her name is Markita Barnes. She used to run a Milwaukee-area prenatal care coordination company (PNCC), which “are meant to help connect low-income pregnant women and mothers with badly needed health, counseling and referral services,” as described by The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

A couple of things here. One, how does JD Vance know that’s not a knockoff Louis Vuitton bag that Barnes bought off the back of a truck for $20? He doesn’t.

Second, Barnes was sentenced this past March to 10 years in the pokey for swiping approximately $2.3 million in Medicaid funding and pocketing it herself. You know when she was indicted? In 2023, when Joe Biden was the president, and before the Trump administration absolutely gutted the Justice Department by eliminating thousands of jobs and driving out thousands more who decided they would rather upend their careers than work for a bunch of Trumpist assholes. Despite the Trump administration setting up a dedicated fraud unit, the fact is that understaffing at DOJ is likely to make it harder to prosecute these crimes.

JD Vance Is Not A Crook

And she’s not the only one. The Journal Sentinel lists a half-dozen other cases of PNCC owners being convicted on federal fraud charges in Wisconsin as a result of the same investigations that snagged Barnes. These were joint investigations between state and federal law enforcement agencies.

The point here is that the pursuit of charges in these cases has long been a nonpartisan issue that JD Vance, with all the subtlety of a plumber’s wrench to the nuts, is trying to make into a partisan one while invoking that old “BLACK PEOPLE ARE STEALING YOUR TAX MONEY TO BUY LUXURY GOODS” chestnut. That he’s doing it on behalf of an administration that has cut nearly $1 trillion in Medicaid funds nationwide is particularly galling. Vance and the Republicans are responsible for far, far, far more damage to the health of poor young mothers and their babies than Makita Barnes and the other recently convicted PNCC owners combined.

Besides, if the administration is looking for fraudulent theft of tax dollars, we’ve got a few other places they can look. Starting with that fucking plane Trump was on while his VP was making noises with his mouth hole in Wisconsin.

Vance also gave a speech on the Fourth of July from the USS Kearsarge, an amphibious assault ship that was docked in New York for a bit. The speech was your usual rah-rah patriotic July Fourth argle bargle, but one moment was particularly funny.

Vance was talking about James Eads, the 19th-century inventor and civil engineer who had built the Eads Bridge over the Mississippi River. Eads also built ironclads for the Union in the Civil War, which led to this moment at the 14:24 mark, when Vance claimed he had built 700 ironclad ships in 100 days:

That sounded wrong to us, so we looked it up. It turns out Eads built seven ironclads in about five months in 1861. Either Vance misread his teleprompter, or his speechwriter made an absolutely absurd error. Or he was purposely trying to make American ingenuity sound even more expansive than it already is and didn’t think anyone would notice. Sorry, JD. Wonkette remembers.

Finally, and obviously most important, is that JD Vance got the government sued by an Instagram influencer because his aides couldn’t stand a little trolling at a public appearance.

JD Vance Has New Book To Convince You He Isn't A Shameless And Thirsty Political Hack

Amanda McGonicle runs an account called @CatsOnACouch, which she says “exists purr-ly to troll the current administration & have more followers than J.D. Vance.” (Over two million followers, she claims.) McGonicle started it as a petty joke after Vance’s infamous “childless cat ladies” comment during the 2024 campaign. Her goal was to see if a few cats lying on a couch could get more Instagram-famous than the Vice President of the United States. Which seems to us like probably not a very hard thing to do, frankly.

McGonigle’s account has trolled Vance with a variety of gimmicks, from sharing memes about him getting intimate with a couch, to printing out mock “Wanted” posters depicting him as a suspect in the death of Pope Francis. She also uses the account to engage in mutual aid efforts with her followers, which she calls her “petty besties.”

Back in May, McGonicle was attending a Vance speech in Maine, where the VP was set to brag about the Trump administration’s efforts to combat healthcare fraud. She claims it was a public event, though she still registered and received “advance guest guidance” for attending from Vance’s office.

Then, while standing in line to get in, McGonicle says she was approached by five armed Secret Service agents who told her the event was private after all and they couldn’t let her in because “we know where you stand.”

McGonicle is now suing the Office of the President and the Secret Service for violating her First Amendment rights. And she’s got the ACLU behind her:

“It’s absurd that the Secret Service is wasting their time tracking a satirical cat account on social media,” McGonigle said in a Tuesday statement released by the ACLU, who represents her.

It is absurd, and may we add, the fact that this woman’s free speech is being abridged should give all her fellow Americans paws.

[YouTube / YouTube / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel / NBC 4 Washington]

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