Jane Coaston: JD Thinks Trump Voters Are Stupid

Tim Miller opens by previewing The Bulwark’s election-night and pre-election livestreams, then turns to President Trump’s decision to cancel rallies in Kansas and Iowa before reversing himself. Jane Coaston says the episode is not simply about Trump’s erratic schedule: Kansas has not elected a Democratic senator since 1932, while Iowa is competitive but still not a state where a campaign should be scrambling at the last minute. The campaign is also putting more money into South Carolina, giving up on North Carolina, and generally behaving as though the race is not going “A-plus totally awesome.” They mock Iowa Republican Joe Mitchell, a 29-year-old Trump-endorsed candidate whom Tim compares to Ron DeSantis without the skincare and describes as a strange figure who gave Trump a homemade-looking award. Tim says leaked video of Mitchell included him crying over his penis and making hostile comments about Black women. Trump’s return to the trail, in Tim’s telling, amounts to “daddy” coming to give Mitchell his “binky” for the final two days. They also note that Ken Paxton canceled an El Paso rally, which leads to the joke that he must be in the mental hospital in Ohio.

The hosts next examine Vice President JD Vance’s planned appearance in Rome, New York, a district Trump won by 21 points but which has become competitive because Republican candidate Anthony Constantino is unusually extreme. Constantino recorded a rap album with Roger Stone, previously sold bumper stickers, lived in Mexico, and posted photos of his opponent’s Black and brown staffers while calling attention to their supposed foreignness. He also hired a private investigator to fly drones over the opponent’s barn and accuse him of illegal dumping; the allegation proved false, and Tim says Constantino apparently paid a woman $30,000 to file the complaint. Jane connects this behavior to a broader progression on the right. Conservatives used to deny being racist while claiming liberals were the real racists or that they were merely defending “fairness” against reverse discrimination. Now, she says, candidates and influencers such as Constantino and Chaya Raichik are openly treating the race of staffers and children receiving awards as suspicious. Tim and Jane argue that the same pattern produces “Goldilocks racism”: some minorities are portrayed as inferior, while others are attacked for being too successful. They cite Trump’s renewed use of “shithole” language about Somalia and Ilhan Omar as evidence that the old “I’m not a racist” disclaimer has been replaced by openly performing the bigotry itself.

Jane and Tim spend much of the episode dissecting a story JD Vance told Jesse Watters. Vance said that he and his wife took their child to an emergency room, even though the child turned out to be fine, and that he saw nine translators serving nine different languages. His reaction was that if everyone spoke English, the hospital could hire more doctors and fewer translators. Jane calls this a problem Vance invented: no one in the story failed to receive care, and the child was healthy. Instead of feeling relieved—or embarrassed that he had brought a well child to the ER—Vance supposedly looked around for someone else to resent. The hosts defend medical translators as a valuable service that helps patients and relatives understand their care. Jane imagines an elderly Italian relative, “Sophia Petrillo,” arriving at a U.S. hospital and being able to speak with a translator in her own language. They argue that this is evidence of a country with enough resources to provide better care, not a threat to English-speaking patients. They also connect the story to Vance’s broader performance of resentment: although he wrote about people supposedly trapped in a culture of resentment, he now manufactures grievances about immigrants, foreign languages, and even his inability—or refusal—to pronounce places such as Jordan and Kuwait. Tim says he wants to interview Vance for 30 minutes about nothing but the hospital story.

A young woman asks Vance how the right expects people to start families when the average American home costs more than $400,000. Instead of answering immediately, Vance says he has been asked only one question about John Fetterman’s “ass,” thanks the questioner, and launches into jokes about James Talarico being gay. Jane recognizes the behavior as heavily media-trained stalling: say the interviewer’s name, thank her for the question, and delay the answer while making a joke that assumes the audience will laugh at anything. When Vance eventually addresses the substance, he suggests that people should simply fall in love, have children, and figure out the rest afterward. Tim and Jane reject that as an unserious response to housing costs and family formation. Tim asks Jane to guess Vance’s policy proposal, and she correctly predicts “mass deportation.” They say Vance’s logic is that removing millions of people would create more housing, even though he never explains how that would solve the questioner’s immediate economic problem. They also discuss a staged-looking Fox News question about a daughter receiving information on transitioning without parental knowledge. Jane says the letter was part of a Republican-created trans-panic cycle: activist groups produced the material, conservative activists amplified it, and the same ecosystem then used it as evidence of a supposed crisis.

Tim returns to the Michigan Senate race, where Democrat Haley Stevens announced that she would appear with fellow Democrat Abdul El-Sayed after spending the final days of the campaign attacking him over alleged antisemitism and his associations. Tim says Stevens then issued an extremely long statement revisiting Hassan Piker’s uncle and arguing that El-Sayed had not adequately condemned a video, despite El-Sayed having released a statement against it. Tim and Jane agree that the video was stupid and trafficked in antisemitic tropes, but they question why Stevens would endorse El-Sayed and immediately provide a lengthy list of reasons voters should distrust him. They argue that the campaign should focus on Michigan voters’ concerns, including electricity and healthcare, rather than making Stevens and her fiancé the center of the final days. Tim notes that El-Sayed discussed Michigan electricity at length when he appeared on the show. Jane also points to religious bigotry from Republicans, including Bernie Moreno’s claim that people who do not believe in Jesus Christ should not serve in the Senate, and Ted Cruz’s warning that voting for Kansas Democrat Adam Hamilton would bring “the Islamists.” The hosts conclude that if El-Sayed continues to traffic in antisemitic material, Democrats can criticize it after the election; there was no need for Stevens to make a qualified, self-undermining endorsement at the last moment.

Tim admits that he has been consuming early-vote data too obsessively, including a memo about Florida that made Democratic performance look better than expected. He even checked Texas weather and worried that storms in Houston and Dallas might affect Election Day turnout, before Jane tells him to step away from the forecast and eat barbecue. Jane’s actual takeaway is simpler: turnout is high, including strong Black turnout in places where Republicans had worked to discourage Black voting, and people should vote both in the top-of-ticket races and on down-ballot contests and ballot initiatives. They discuss a Washington Post poll showing Democratic Kansas governor Laura Kelly—or, in the Senate discussion, Democrat Adam Hamilton—leading Republican Roger Marshall 52–43, while acknowledging serious methodological uncertainty. The pollsters made more than 85,000 calls and sent 50,000 texts, but 32% of Democrats who began the survey completed it compared with only 12% of Republicans. The Republican and independent respondents were so sparse that weighting became difficult. Jane wonders whether there are really “shy Roger Marshall voters,” or whether the refusal to answer is itself evidence of a broader Republican turnout problem. Her final position is “anxiously optimistic,” not a prediction of a Democratic landslide. Tim is entertained by Republicans suddenly sending money to states they assumed were safe, including South Carolina, Mississippi, and Louisiana.

The conversation’s “Jane stuff” segment addresses Nicki Minaj’s attacks on New York Governor Kathy Hochul and her apparent support for Trump-aligned politics. Jane says the explanation may be transactional. Minaj’s older brother was convicted of repeatedly sexually abusing an 11-year-old girl and is serving 25 years to life in New York. If he serves roughly half his sentence, he could become eligible for clemency around 2029, meaning a New York governor could potentially shorten his sentence. Minaj’s husband also has a criminal issue relevant to presidential clemency: he was convicted of a sex offense from 1994 and, after moving to California, failed to register as a sex offender, making that failure a federal offense. The president can pardon federal offenses, so Jane and Tim suggest that Minaj’s enthusiastic pro-Trump posture may be aimed at securing help for her husband, while opposition to Hochul could be aimed at the New York pardon. They joke that this explanation is preferable to the inevitable commentary claiming Minaj’s politics prove the left abandoned Black Americans, since Jane says Minaj is a permanent resident and, based on the available evidence, cannot vote. Their conclusion is that the apparent political conversion makes more sense once the two possible pardons are considered.

Tim and Jane revisit Melania Trump’s April press conference in which she declared that “the lies linking me with the disgraceful Jeffrey Epstein need to end today.” A House Judiciary report has since highlighted conflicting accounts of how Melania met Donald Trump. Italian modeling agent Paolo Zampolli has claimed credit for introducing them, but two women connected to Zampolli and Epstein separately said Epstein made the introduction. Melania’s statement denied that Epstein introduced her and said she met Trump by chance at a 1998 New York party. Jane and Tim argue that a straightforward statement acknowledging Epstein’s role while condemning his crimes would have avoided creating more questions; instead, the press conference made the disputed introduction a continuing subject. They then praise Tom Hoyle, a former Republican who became an independent, for telling Fox News at a Trump rally that he attended because he was too young to join the Jonestown massacre in the late 1970s and wanted to get as close as possible. Tim calls it an excellent spontaneous troll, but Jane explains why the joke is also disturbing: 918 people died at Jonestown, including children, many of them forced or coerced into consuming cyanide-laced Flavor Aid. She recounts Congressman Leo Ryan’s murder while investigating the compound and argues that the historical reality should not be forgotten merely because “Jonestown” has become shorthand for a cult. Finally, Jane remembers former Hawaii and SMU football coach June Jones, who once patiently discussed her theory that teams could throw deep on every play and hope for pass-interference calls. Jones told her teams already effectively did this on desperate third downs, and she remembers him for taking her idea seriously.