JD Vance Couldn't Define Socialism. Because the Real Answer Would Have Been a Confession.

A movement that stopped caring what words mean was always going to end up here.

JD Vance lost the meaning to his words a long time ago. Yesterday was another reminder of how this administration has undermined the power of the office.

On Thursday, Vice President JD Vance stood at the White House to announce that the administration was suspending Microsoft, Adobe, and a handful of other companies from a program that helps skilled foreign workers get green cards. Then a reporter asked him a simple question: “How do you define socialism, personally?”

Here is the vice president of the United States, a graduate of Yale Law School, answering it.

“Oh man, you know, I guess it’s, honestly, it’s a hard term to define these days,” he began. He allowed that classically, you’d think socialism was about prioritizing workers. Then he admitted, “I don’t know what the term means anymore.” And then he defined it anyway. “I think in reality what it actually means in the American context is that you want to replace American workers with foreign workers, and you want boys to play in girls’ sports.”

Socialism, according to the second-highest official in the land, is immigration and transgender athletes. Nonsense. Utter nonsense.

Obviously, this isn’t a gotcha question. Socialism has a definition, and it isn’t particularly complicated. Generally speaking, it’s an economic system in which the government or workers control the means of production, the factories and the companies and the industries that make things.

You can be for it or against it. And most Republicans have spent decades using the fear of socialism as a bludgeon against Democrats during election season.

Why Vance Couldn’t Say It

Ironically, Vance couldn’t give the real definition because it describes his own preferred economic theory.

The Trump administration has spent the last year and a half defying traditional free market orthodoxy by buying pieces of American companies. The government now owns roughly 10 percent of Intel. It owns about 15 percent of the rare earth miner MP Materials. It holds a “golden share” in U.S. Steel that gives Washington veto power over key decisions. By this summer, the government’s stock portfolio spanned about thirty companies.

The president told Nvidia’s CEO he wouldn’t let the company sell certain chips abroad unless the United States got a cut, and just last week he floated taking stakes in the country’s leading AI labs.

And then there’s the tariffs, which put Washington in the business of deciding which industries win and which ones lose.

I’m not going to call that socialism, because, as this column is arguing, words should mean things. But it looks a lot closer to the textbook definition than anything Vance described at that podium.

Vance was clever enough to realize that with an honest answer he’d have been describing his own economic program.

So, he reached for the culture war instead.

When Words Stop Meaning Anything

Donald Trump’s abusive relationship with the truth didn’t start in politics. Back in 1987, in The Art of the Deal, he gave his method a name. He called it “truthful hyperbole,” a “very effective form of promotion.” For decades that worked for selling condos and casinos.

Then he brought it into the presidency, where The Washington Post counted more than thirty thousand false or misleading claims in his first term alone. And the most dangerous of all of them, the lie that the 2020 election was stolen, sent a mob into the Capitol and put people’s lives at risk. I was in that building and saw exactly where lies like that lead.

But there’s something else more corrosive that has happened over the last decade. The GOP become a movement that rewards the most extreme rhetoric, regardless of how detached from reality it is.

The outcome? Every word becomes a weapon, and the only question Republicans ask is whether it helps their side. Socialism means whatever hurts the Democrats this week. So does fraud. So does patriotism.

Hannah Arendt, who fled Nazi Germany and spent the rest of her life studying how free societies fall apart, saw where this goes. “If everybody always lies to you,” she said in a 1974 interview, “the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer.” And a people that can’t believe anything, she warned, can’t make up its mind, can’t think, can’t judge. “And with such a people you can then do what you please.”

That’s the the toxic feedback loop Trump built. And for a while, it worked for him.

But it doesn’t work forever. The president can say a war is won, when it clearly isn’t. He can tell people the economy is great when prices never stop going up. What he can’t do is prevent the sinking feeling so many families encounter at the end of the month when the dollars in the bank account don’t cover the bills on the table. Or the way it feels to watch politicians and their families getting rich while inflation eats away at working class incomes.

So let me say something to you, from the heart:

I’m proud of the people who are part of this community. You saw through the hateful rhetoric and lies from the very beginning, long before the polls turned. And you kept insisting that facts still matter.

Keep insisting.

It’s the foundation everything else is built on. A free people can argue about almost anything, but only if we’re still willing to agree on what’s true.

— Adam