Shakespeare’s Iago is a smooth talker. He knows just the words to nudge Othello, his boss, into a jealous and ultimately self-destructive fury. Less clear, however, are Iago’s motives; the whisperer’s intrigue ends in his own destruction. Samuel Taylor Coleridge defined Iago as a figure of “motiveless malignity,” an agent of chaos for chaos’s sake.
Watching the blow-up in the Oval Office between Presidents Trump and Zelensky and Vice President JD Vance—whose unasked-for intervention set everything spinning out of control—I smelled Iago. The vice president knew just the words to say—wasn’t that Zelensky in Pennsylvania shaking hands with…Democrats?—to push his boss into a fury. For a second, I wondered if we shouldn’t take another glance at Mr. Vance’s birth certificate to be sure we weren’t living in a reboot of “The Americans.”
The vice president’s interests are perhaps not so opaque as Iago’s. Before being chosen as Mr. Trump’s No. 2, Mr. Vance’s accomplishments in public service—a third of a Senate term—were thin. But he drew media attention—and Mr. Trump’s eye—for his jarring position against Ukraine. “I gotta be honest with you, I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another,” the future senator said during his campaign. When it comes to American foreign policy, at least we’re safe from overthinking.
To be fair, I once found much to like in JD Vance. I enjoyed his book Hillbilly Elegy and the account of his 2019 conversion to Catholicism. His speech at a security conference in Munich a week before the Oval Office meltdown turned heads here in Europe in ways that needed turning. He raised issues like the growing intolerance for Christian beliefs on the continent, the West’s demographic crisis and the hypocrisy of a ruling elite willing to use undemocratic means to protect democracy. An establishment quick to paint any challenger as a new Mussolini, like crying wolf at every kitten, has left huge swaths of the continent’s voters alienated and distrustful. Mr. Vance, it seemed to me, might be one of few politicians to have thought through the deeper dynamics behind what has become a self-destructive malaise.
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With thanks to America and Anthony R. Lusvardi, S.J, where this article originally appeared.
