These days, it’s hard to tell if Donald Trump is mocking JD Vance again, or if the president is just sleepy. “He looks like Eliot Ness,” the president declared of his veep in a televised Cabinet meeting in May while high-level administration officials pretended to laugh. “You ever see Eliot Ness,” Trump continued, saying Vance’s posture “looks like a movie.” It appears the nearly 80-year-old president confused the infamous Prohibition agent with Kevin Costner’s portrayal of Ness in the 1987 film “The Untouchables.”
Trump, who is reportedly growing ever more impatient with the vice president, was probably taunting Vance with such an implausible comparison. Still, the reference to 1930s-era Chicago law enforcement was apt, because it was an era of police lawlessness, where unconstitutional practices like the third-degree were justified as necessary to stopping organized crime. Vance, along with White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, are similarly embracing the view that law, morality and ethics should not get in the way of their radical political agenda. But unlike Ness, who did have real crime to deal with, the justifications Vance and Miller deploy are baseless nonsense.
