Holy Trumpus of the Latter Days – How JD Vance Is Rewriting the Gospel of White Salvation

Sometimes history is not written but barked into existence. Saturday was one of those days. JD Vance, Vice President of the United States and a passionate virtuoso of right-wing rhetoric, picked up his pen – or rather, his smartphone – and revealed to the world what had previously only been whispered as secret gospel inside a MAGA hat. Donald J. Trump, according to Vance, is the greatest savior of Black lives in American history. Not a joke. Not a quote from some alternate Simpsons universe. But an official statement on X, addressed directly to columnist Jamelle Bouie. Amen. Just picture it: Rosa Parks gets up to give Trump her seat on the bus. Martin Luther King, in his famous dream, declares, “I have a deal!” Malcolm X is arrested by ICE but is timely bailed out by Eric Trump. And while Frederick Douglass is somewhere applauding – because, according to Trump, “he’s getting recognized more and more” – Vance wields his rhetorical watering can and coats reality with a layer of thick, syrupy cynicism. What lies behind this grotesque liturgy of reinterpretation? Maybe JD Vance is just a lost prophet who had a vision in the steamy catacombs of the RNC retreat in Los Angeles: a golden Trump, arms outstretched, stopping Hurricane Katrina, resurrecting George Floyd, and baptizing every second rapper at Mar-a-Lago. Or maybe it is exactly what it appears to be – an attempt to make the unthinkable speakable. The reversal of political gravity. The ascension of the gaslighter to sainthood.

Because of course Trump saved Black lives. By first disenfranchising, dehumanizing, and criminalizing them. He deployed the Justice Department against Black civil rights organizations, weakened the Voting Rights Act, drained resources from schools in disadvantaged communities – but hey, he had dinner with Kanye West. And apparently, according to JD Vance, that’s enough to qualify for sainthood in the white savior’s calendar. The rhetoric isn’t new, but it is telling. It follows the old technique of every cult leader: reinterpretation, transgression, dehistoricization. What matters is not reality but performance. The Black population is not seen as subjects but as props – chess pieces in the game for moral supremacy. And Vance? He remains the well-groomed court preacher, reciting the New Testament of Trumpism in front of every camera: “And behold, the king did great things. And the people were confused.” Perhaps Vance was simply drunk on the incense of his own power. Perhaps he’s merely testing how far the public will bend before it cries out. But the more often such sentences go unchallenged, the further the window of what’s sayable shifts. A lie becomes a thesis. A thesis becomes a talking point. And a talking point becomes a textbook passage in the “Patriotic Education Initiative” that Trump’s Department of Education will soon roll out.

In the end, there is only one bitter conclusion: JD Vance is not speaking about Black lives. He is speaking about white power. About its self-image, its legends, its immunity to shame. He is speaking about the willingness to force history into a costume that fits his party – even if it means suffocating reality in the process. And while police sirens wail outside and children sleep in cages, the Vice President of the United States proclaims the gospel of Trump the Savior.