JD Vance in the Confessional

Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.

Not in the common way. Not with the ordinary, slapdash sins of appetite.

I have sinned jurisdictionally.

Other men lie to the world they are given. I wanted to decide what the world was.

I. The Host Body

I did not join Trump because I mistook him for a great man. I saw him clearly from the beginning: appetite without conscience, vanity without depth, grievance without memory, cruelty without doctrine. A man so inwardly vacant that each passing impulse could occupy him completely and call itself destiny.

They saw a titan. I saw a host body.

They saw strength. I saw appetite so shameless that simpler people would mistake it for honesty.

They saw a tribune. I saw an opening.

He lacked what all appetites eventually lack: a world in which they no longer appear ridiculous.

Trump can consume. He cannot compose. He can threaten, preen, boast, lie, whine, point, and teach a room to howl on cue. He can create heat. He cannot create order. He cannot make his appetites durable except by repeating them more loudly. He cannot build a reality in which his impulses look necessary.

That was the opening. I was the one who needed a theory, because appetite alone cannot rule for long unless someone teaches the world to kneel.

So I entered the lie not as a dupe, nor merely as a servant, nor even as a parasite. I entered it as a would-be founder. I looked at the chaos — grievance, racial panic, imperial nostalgia, class resentment, online filth, exhausted faith, masculine humiliation, billionaire management — and I thought:

This can be made into a world.

He degrades what he touches because that is his nature. I wanted to make degradation structural.

He lies because truth obstructs him. I wanted truth itself to look vulgar — an interruption, a breach of decorum, a kind of betrayal.

I said I was disciplining energy, giving coherence to anger, architecture to resentment, destiny to improvisation. I said I was rescuing submerged truths from the contempt of their betters.

But what I wanted was simpler and fouler.

I wanted a world in which humiliation could be renamed persecution, cruelty recast as candor, prejudice elevated into heritage, tantrum into sovereignty, lie into “deeper truth.” I wanted nouns themselves to defect from reality and enlist under feeling. I wanted nation to stop meaning a constitutional order and begin meaning a wound with borders. I wanted truth to stop meaning correspondence and start meaning usefulness to power. I wanted faith to stop judging the strong and begin blessing them.

I did not wish to write speeches.

I wished to move the furniture of the mind.

II. The Habitable Lie

And then there were the followers.

I did not love them. I read them.

I knew what they wanted: not policy, not truth, not even victory in any intelligible sense. They wanted a place to live where the truth could not follow them. They wanted a story in which their injuries were innocence, their resentment was wisdom, their ignorance was authenticity, their suspicion was patriotism, and their cruelty was merely the honesty from which weaker ages had flinched.

And I knew how to make that shelter feel like home.

Reality had not flattered them, avenged them, or explained them to themselves. Why should they be loyal to it? They required a place where private embarrassment could be promoted into public grievance. A place where failure could be called betrayal, and disappointment conspiracy, and every wound evidence that they were the true nation all along.

They wanted a cosmos with culprits in it. And I knew how to provide culprits.

I knew that if you flatter people long enough for being persecuted, they will forgive you for falsifying the terms of their existence. I knew that if you teach them to prefer interpretation to fact, feeling to evidence, symbolic revenge to material improvement, they will defend the system that uses them because it has finally made them legible to themselves.

So I did.

I did not merely manipulate them. I invited them indoors.

I sold contempt as home.

That is what is most obscene, Father: I was not content that the lie should win an election. I wanted it to become the setting in which elections, churches, schools, wars, neighbors, memory, and the future itself would henceforth be understood. I wanted not a faction but a habitat. Not a slogan but an atmosphere. I wanted the people who entered Trump’s world to discover, gradually, that there was no longer any air outside it.

That is not ordinary corruption.

That is the domestication of unreality.

III. Against Judgment

Which is why even my piety became filthy. The conversion, the solemnity, the appeals to Just War Theory, the little lectures about truth and moral seriousness — all of it served the same appetite in me. Not Trump’s appetite. Mine.

I did not merely want to excuse the world we were making.

I wanted to be recognized as its intelligence.

When war was being discussed, I was prudent in the tasteful way ambitious men are prudent: just enough to resemble conscience, not enough to interrupt advancement. Then policy ripened, and I became its explanation. When the Pope spoke plainly, I did not rebuke the appetite that had brought us there. I rebuked the shepherd for refusing to enter the world I was building.

When blood and judgment both arrived to rebuke us, my instinct was the same: not to submit the design to judgment, but to make judgment itself submit to the design.

Trump posts himself as Jesus because he is what he has always been: appetite with a ring light. He reaches for the robe, the halo, the pose, because even blasphemy looks to him like branding. He does not ascend to sacrilege by conviction; he wanders into it by narcissism.

He only profanes the image. I build the world in which the profanity is sacred.

He posts himself as Christ because he cannot distinguish worship from publicity. I go to work on the more serious task: teaching the nation that nausea is weakness, that blasphemy is authenticity, that disgust is elitism, that the grotesque is only the latest form of truth.

His appetite and impulse would smash a civilization. I would remain behind to rename the wreckage order, inheritance, and home.

I am not the hammer. I am not even the chaplain of the hammer. I want the world after the blow.

IV. No Absolution

And even now — even now, kneeling here in the dark — I can feel the old temptation stirring. Part of me is not sorry. Part of me is revising. Part of me is still arranging the clauses so that my damnation may at least be memorable.

I do not merely want absolution.

I want the last word.

Trump wants to be adored. I wanted reality to take instructions.

Trump lies because truth obstructs him. I wanted truth to look like treason.

Trump desecrates symbols because appetite knows no bounds. I wanted a system in which desecration could pass for renewal.

That is why his vulgarity is easier to survive than my seriousness.

There is a long silence behind the screen.

Then the priest says:

“Enough.

You have not come to confess sin. You have come to admire its scale.

Leave.

When you can name the souls you injured without enlarging yourself, return.”