My reflections on JD Vance’s speech in Munich

My post criticizing Vance went viral on X. And It has been an interesting 32 hours to say the least.

Let me begin by saying Vance attended this conference to represent his country. A country led by a convicted criminal, who was as he spoke, questioning the authority of the judiciary to uphold the U.S. constitution. They are pushing back on his attempts to exert absolute power. They have now become an obstacle he intends to remove.

Trump has unilaterally decided, speaking one criminal to another, to negotiate his own version of ‘peace’ and bring the illegal occupation of Ukraine to an end. He is doing this WITHOUT consulting any of the stakeholders.

FACT - Trump lied that the US has provided $300 billion in aid to Ukraine. Data from Statistica shows, from January 2022 to December 2024, the US committed $119.2 billion (0.6% of GDP). Other nations collectively committed $132.2 billion, with the EU committing $52.1 billion the total.

If we analyse this data by aid to GDP, the US is NOT the largest donor, that would  be Denmark at 2.2%, followed by Sweden and the UK at 0.9%, then the US at 0.6%.

The truth is, the U.S. is at best an equal contributor to Ukraine aid, so Trump has absolutely no right to unilaterally negotiate a peace settlement without input from allies who have collectively provided more aid. More importantly, without the presence of president Zelenskyy in the room. I would also note, had it been left to Vance and the Republicans, US aid to Ukraine would have been no aid provided to Ukraine.

Vance’s speech was his opportunity to clearly define US foreign policy in relation to security. Instead, he chose to chastise his hosts with a litany of false assertions that the real threat to security did not come from a convicted war criminal, but rather from an implied Muslim invasion of Europe. Were it not preposterous, it would be comical. I will be doing a piece in the coming days to analyze the impact of ‘immigrant crime’ in Europe.

I thought it might be useful to break down  his speech in detail, especially for those at the back of the room in the red hats. So settle down for another verbose, if less emotional literary offering.

It is worthy of note, the overwhelming response to my criticism of the speech was positive. This also aligned with global press reporting that the speech was a diplomatic car crash, in which he delivered a veiled threat that the US no longer had interest in supporting Europe through NATO. A short sighted policy from a country that clearly has a foreign policy stupidity problem.

On the same day Vance gave his lecture on FREE SPEECH, Trump revoked the press credentials of an AP reporter because AP refused (in line with the rest of the world), to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America.

Here was a man whose own government has threatened to invoke the insurrection act against any widespread protests. A man who has persistently said he would have refused to certify the 2020 election. Given five chances in a NYT interview to admit Trump lost in 2020, Vance refused to answer five times. He said he was focused on the future not the past. I can understand why he didn’t want to focus on the past, given he previously called Trump an "idiot", saying he was "reprehensible." Going on to compare him to Adolf Hitler.

I think it safe to say the Vice President of the United States is an election denier. He is also a man who on Friday, met with a leader of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party. Chamberlain would have been mighty proud of him. The man has absolutely ZERO credibility. His is a government that has terminated thousands of career civil servants and replaced them with loyalists that have sworn an oath not to the constitution, but to Donald J Trump. A government obsessed with CONTROL, not free speech. Yet here he was lecturing Europe on responsibility.

Vance stated, “The threat that I worry the most about vis-a-vis Europe is not Russia, it’s not China, it’s not any other external actor. What I worry about is the threat from within” Yes the Vice President of the United States actually said that to his European hosts. He was staring them straight in the face, blaming them a not an indicted war criminal, for the threat they faced.

This is a man whose own boss incited an insurrection to prevent the lawful transfer of power in 2021. His supporters broke into the building, the sacred seat of American democracy. They assaulted police officers, built a gallows while chanting ‘Hang Mike Pence’. People Trump said had attended a ‘Love-in’, hunted the Speaker of the House shouting chillingly, and I quote, ‘Nancy, oh Nancy. Where are you Nancy? we’re coming for you. These so called tourists on a day out, were hunting elected members of both Houses with a message from Trump. Yet Vance has the bare faced cheek to lecture European democratic leaders on responsibility.

He was speaking, as his government was stripping away the rights of his own citizens. Attempting to introduce a nationwide abortion ban and removing access to earned benefits like Medicaid. That’s not democracy, it’s tyranny.

He went on to say, ‘For years we’ve been told that everything we fund and support is in the name of our shared democratic values. Everything from our Ukraine policy to digital censorship is billed as a defence of democracy.’ (One of the few truths he shared). Then he went on, ‘…But when we see European courts cancelling elections and senior officials threatening to cancel others (I assume referring to some UK County Council’ elections which can’t take place at the moment because of boundary changes), we ought to ask whether we’re holding ourselves to an appropriately high standard?…’ Coming from a man whose government is living at the sub basement when it comes to the gold standard.

His key point, was a direct reference to the Romanian elections held in 2024.  On 6 December Romania’s Constitutional Court annulled the outcome of the country’s presidential first round elections. Before I continue. Let’s not forget Trump fought a campaign on so called ‘election integrity’ despite ZERO evidence that voter fraud was a problem.

In Romania’s case, the constitutional court concluded that the outcome was unsafe, as a result of the impact of the extensive deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) and coordinated election interference by state actors, namely Russia. You can find a report by the International Foundation for Electoral System here :

As with a number of Vance’s assertions, he uses the classic authoritarian playbook of wrapping the smallest element of truth in a ball of deliberately misleading lies. Nobody was arrested for just praying outside an abortion clinic. He reeled off a litany of part truth’s in the build up to declaring war on immigrants in Europe, just as his own government has in America. He knows and understands immigrants are a soft target for right wing political violence. He was delivering a campaign speech for like minded political forces to use as red meat for their base.

The reason it works, is because immigration is a legitimate concern. This is the fragment of truth, the rest is just political gasoline to throw on the fire the far right has already built. I live in the UK and I am VERY switched on to domestic politics. Vance’s pal Nigel Ferage runs a limited company masquerading as a political party doing exactly the same thing. These politicians are all cut from the same cloth. Spread fear, then blame immigration. It’s an age old hard right winning formula.

In World War 2 governments had censorship to protect national security. It’s not what anyone would want, but it worked. What the right has done successfully, is weaponise steps taken to protect civilians from harmful content and paint it as authoritarian. Let’s not forget, Trump persistently claims the ‘fake media’ is the ‘enemy of the people’. There is NOTHING and I mean NOTHING he will not do to control the political narrative. Now, with the cooperation of Musk and Zuckerberg and no doubt TikTok shortly, he will control around 85% of social media ecosystem. Given this is where more and more people go for their news, the dangers are very evident. It is this is what the EU are trying to address not restrict free speech.

What Vance and other hard right talking heads seek to do, is to legitimize the lie, they believe the truth is what you can convince vulnerable low educated voters it is. Sprinkle it with permission to hate immigrants and bingo, you have a new truth that bears no resemblance to the reality.

Yesterday, I was called everything from a c*nt to a commie and much worse, simply for stating the truth. Friends we are living through very dangerous times when the Oligarchs are using Trump as their useful idiot to export a tsunami of disruptive right wing propaganda to destabilize governments. Musk is doing this in Germany and the UK. Vance is proud to be their Joseph Goebbels. I do urge everyone to read the transcript of his speech here.

He is declaring a Christofascist war on immigrants while a convicted war criminal is murdering innocent civilians by the thousand in Ukraine. We are being urged to ignore the illegal invasion of the sovereign territory of a European ally, and instead focus on a holy war against Muslims. This was a Christian Nationalist call to action. He’s echoing the Heritage Foundation’s call for a 21st century holy crusade to defeat Islam. He didn’t even have the decency to tell you the truth to your face.

It is worthy of note that this global declaration of war on immigrants is all the more disgusting, given that the level of mass displacement is in no small part, the result of US and western foreign policy. We raise towns and villages to the ground, only to be surprised by mass immigration. That’s before we discuss climate change.

Trump will be judged by historians in the same breath as dictator’s throughout the ages. I write this with a real fear that democracy as we knew it will breathe its last breath under Trump rule, if the world does not put a stop to it. May God help us all if we fail.