superrific
Master of the ZZLverse
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I have a feeling that there are a lot of NYT editorial board members who would like nothing more than to humiliate Vance. They would be coming at him with knives. Much the same way that Vance would dragged if he showed up on this message board.
The folks who actually work at the Times, who would be conducting the interview, have been wanting to put the screws to MAGA for a long, long time. It's hard when the flag-bearer is Trump, because Trump just launches into his word salad and somehow over the years he's managed to define himself as the crazy ignorant motherfucker who people still like. His superpower is that he has no capacity for shame, probably because he has no capacity to fully realize when he is full of shit. But most people are not like that. This is why the MAGA leaders and celebrities are also ignorant. Being Marjorie Taylor Greene would be hard work for any of us, very hard work and probably we couldn't pull it off because the crazy would eventually prove too embarrassing. But MTG makes it work because she doesn't see the crazy. She just thinks that's the way it is.
Anyway, Vance is a particularly juicy target because everyone at the Times knows that he knows better. And if there is lingering concern that going hard after Trump has a bit of a punching down aspect to it (in the sense that Trump shares a worldview with people who didn't attend college, so going after Trump is a bit like going after them), that's not true with Vance at all. You just can't punch down at a Yalie (except in special circumstances, like a trans Yalie). So the editors will line up to grill Vance mercilessly and I don't think there's anything the publisher can do to stop them (even if he wanted). That's especially true because Vance is so unpopular. What conservative is actually going to spend time complaining that Vance was treated too harshly? They will just say Vance was a disaster.
I would think Vance needs to be on his A game, and even then he's going to struggle. Bret Stephens, for instance (the conversative columnist), will grill him on tariffs and isn't going to accept the answer "I think tariffs don't raise prices." Other folks are going to go after him on different points. It will be unpleasant, to say the least.
