JD Vance just asked me to be stupid

The vice president was on the TV this week and said something that was not only stupid but a bald-faced lie made more disgusting by the fact of its stupidity. “As we've kicked illegal aliens out of our country,” JD Vance said, “you actually see housing costs start to level off."

Though the regime is snatching more immigrants from our streets, housing costs are not leveling off here in Connecticut. Someone like me, who makes a modest living, cannot find a modest house for under $350,000. Rents are worse, and they keep going up. Mine did. And none of this is due to the presence, or absence, of “illegal aliens.”

Vance is lying but he’s also asking us to be stupid. Are we supposed to blame the most vulnerable people for a policy problem? That’s what the housing crisis is. For one thing, there’s not enough of it. (State and local laws inhibit new construction.) For another, bad actors are gaming the system (private-equity groups gobble up properties and use AI to gin up rents.) One more thing: much of the blame for the housing crisis can be laid at the feet of the president. And JD Vance knows it.

High inflation leads to higher interest rates, which means people are not selling, because there are not enough buyers who want to buy at higher rates, which reduces an already-reduced housing supply. Meanwhile, people like me, who cannot afford to buy, must compete for apartments, which drives up rents. And lying beneath all that is something the vice president would prefer you did not think about.

Tariffs.

Donald Trump’s illegal national sales tax is keeping inflation high, because it pushes prices higher. The Federal Reserve won’t cut interest rates with inflation as high as it is, which means borrowing is more expensive, which means people are not buying, which means people are not selling, which means the housing supply keeps getting smaller.

In theory, I suppose you could say, as Vance does, that a solution to the housing crisis is just getting rid of “illegal aliens” so there are fewer people competing for housing. But that’s stupid. A better solution is to stop taxing the essentials of life so inflation can ease, so interest rates can fall, so people can start putting their houses up for sale again. But it’s not just stupid. It’s disgusting. Getting rid of people should not be the solution to a policy problem. What we need is better policy.

To hear the vice president tell it, the Trump regime isn’t to blame for these problems, only a Democratic Party that allegedly puts “the rights of foreigners over the interests of American citizens.” And while they search for scapegoats for the problems they create, the problems they create continue to impoverish people like me. And that makes me mad.

Let me put it this way.

In the coming months, my health insurance premium is going to spike. By how much? I don’t know exactly, but it will be more than double. I buy coverage through Connecticut’s insurance exchange (Obamacare). In his “big, beautiful bill,” the Republicans in effect repealed the federal subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act. They are set to expire at year’s end, at which point I will face a kind of Sophie’s choice: Either I pay impossible rates every month or I just go without health insurance.

I won’t be alone. “Nearly all of the roughly 24 million Americans enrolled in healthcare coverage via the ACA exchanges will face massive premium hikes – in many cases, three and four times higher than what they’re paying right now,” Charles Gaba told me recently.

“Millions will be priced out of being able to afford coverage at all,” Charles said, “while most of the rest will have to either eat the higher premiums, downgrade to a lower-quality plan with higher deductibles, higher copays, a worse provider network or all of the above. Or they’ll have to move to non-ACA coverage via so-called ‘junk plans,’ which have few if any of the patient protections required by ACA plans.”

Millions will be priced out. That almost certainly includes me.

The vice president would have us believe that whatever problems the people of this country face, the solution is getting rid of “illegals.”

Let me tell you something: no immigrant ever taxed me, illegally. No immigrant raised my rent. No immigrant made it prohibitive to buy a house. No immigrant made choices that resulted in my grocery and electric bills going up and up. No immigrant forced me to give up my health insurance. No immigrant lied about the injuries he caused.

And no immigrant tried to silence me.

The regime has established checkpoints in Washington, DC, to demand that residents prove who they are. It’s a model that could be replicated nationally at next year’s midterm elections. “This will not start and end in DC,” said Attorneys General Kathy Jennings of Delaware and Kwame Raoul of Illinois in a statement. “The president has made his intentions very clear that he wants to abuse his powers to take over other cities, using these troops as a tool to advance his political agenda.”

If voter intimidation and harassment don’t work, there’s always cheating. Texas passed legislation last night that would redraw its congressional maps, giving the president five more House seats. Other red states are following suit. The governor of Texas has said he will sue in federal court to prevent blue-state leaders from counterattacking.

In a democracy, we are supposed to be able to complain when our leaders and their policies do us harm. But Trump is creating conditions that are tantamount to those of rape, so he can do whatever he wants, whenever he wants, and all the rest of us can do is shut up and take it.

As you can imagine, I’m not in the mood for Democratic leaders to be equivocal about the injuries that are being committed by this regime.

I’m not receptive to Hakeem Jeffries, for instance, for saying New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s rent-controlled apartment is a “legitimate” subject of public concern, not when my own extortionate rent is very much a burden to me for the fact of it being out of control. I’m not warm to Democrats accepting as true the total falsehood that Americans actually like the military occupation of Washington, DC. And I’m not open to Democrats who pretend to believe the lies told by their enemies about virtually anything – whether the subject is crime or immigrants or other Democrats – not when inflation would be down, interest rates would be lower, housing would be more affordable and I would still have healthcare coverage had Kamala Harris been elected.

I am, however, interested in resentment, which is to say, I’m interested in any Democrat who can tell the difference between resentment based on nothing (the kind the vice president panders to) and resentment based on something (like mine). I’m interested in any Democrat who has the spine to come to his own conclusions for the purpose of putting all that energy to good use. And I’m interested in any Democrat who is willing to speak the whole truth, saying that no immigrant has hurt Americans the way this president is hurting us.

No immigrant told me lies.

And unlike JD Vance, no immigrant asked me to be stupid.

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