We begin with this clip of Vice President Vance excusing the Young Republicans who sent racist, homophobic, and violent messages and misidentifying them as “boys” and “kids.” The organization he seems to be referring to is College Republicans. Young Republicans, founded in 1856, is an organization designed for “young professionals” as old as 40, and jumpstarts political careers.

Vice President JD Vance and Second Lady Usha Vance (right) confer with U.S. Space Force Col. Susan Meyers, 821st Space Base Group commander, left, in Pituffik, Greenland. Meyers was removed from her post almost immediately after the visit for repudiating Vance’s derogatory remarks about the governance of a Danish territory that President Donald J. Trump covets. Photo credit: Staff Sgt. Jaime Sanchez/Wikimedia Commons

News Summary:

* Amazon Web Services went down early in the week due to a system flaw at a data center in Northern Virginia, taking a range of services offline, from educational software to Wordle. Critics point to this moment as a warning about how vulnerable the cloud services we rely on really are.

* Donald Trump is literally destroying Washington D.C. In what appears to be an impulsive project, the president launched a demolition of the East Wing on Monday. The project has already expanded beyond its original scope. Trump says the ballroom he intends to build on the site will cost $250 million—or more! Originally built in 1902 by Theodore Roosevelt, and expanded by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1942, Trump’s project is only the most recent renovation done to the White House’s structure over two centuries. This is only the most recent episode in Trump’s history of destroying historic sites.

* Taxpayers have footed the bill for numerous Trump vanity projects over the last 10 months. The President has suggested he might pay for this one with $230 million he expects to receive from the federal government in so-called “damages” from having been investigated and prosecuted for crimes he committed in the first term. As a not-irrelevant aside, Trump has a long history of promising charitable donations that never arrive.

* GOP congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (GA-14) is still “carving her own lane” on issues like healthcare, Gaza, Ukraine, and the Epstein files. But why? A former Republican strategist has told The Daily Beast that Greene is angry because the White House refused to back her potential 2026 bid for governor. On Wednesday, Greene told Tucker Carlson that she sometimes “hate(s) my own party” and blames Republicans for government dysfunction. She has also publicly complained about how women are treated in the GOP.

Your hosts:

Claire Potter is a historian of politics and media, a writer, a podcaster, and the sole author and editor of the Political Junkie Substack. Her most recent book is Political Junkies: From Talk Radio to Twitter, How Alternative Media Hooked Us on Politics and Broke Our Democracy (Basic Books, 2020), and she is currently writing a biography of feminist journalist Susan Brownmiller.

Neil J. Young is a historian of religion and politics, a journalist, and a former co-host of the Past Present podcast. His most recent book is Coming Out Republican: A History of the Gay Right (University of Chicago Press, 2024).

Our focus: JD Vance is normalizing the Republican sprint to extremism. But will it carry him to the presidency?

* Who is Vice President JD Vance? We begin with a profile of him as a candidate, and then discuss his role in the Trump administration: you can read about it here and here. During the campaign, Robert Reich dubbed Vance a political chameleon who will do, or say, anything to succeed.

* During the 2024 campaign, Vance went viral for misogynistic comments about “childless cat ladies.” This crude characterization of women who work aligned him with the Christian nationalist wing of the GOP, and a pro-family politics that relies on women staying home to raise children. Despite this, in 2024, Vance polled significantly better among young women than young men.

* Vance’s favorability rating is currently hovering at about 43%, slightly lower than Donald Trump’s. He was also the least well-liked of any recent Vice Presidential candidate; Vance was even less popular than Sarah Palin. Two months ago, The Washington Monthly speculated that Vance was also the least popular new VP in history, in part because of his “obnoxious” style.

* Vance has consistently driven the GOP culture wars, although in a less aggressive and crude way than many MAGA politicians. A convert to Catholicism, he prevaricated when Pope Francis criticized the cruelty of the Trump deportation agenda, and Vance appears to see no conflict between the administration’s policies and his own marriage to attorney Usha Vance, a daughter of immigrants.

* Vance’s role seems to be to soften the edges of Donald Trump’s erratic behavior and decision-making, sometimes by doing belated walk-backs of extreme positions. For example, Vance was one of several administration normies to urge pregnant women to speak to their doctors about Tylenol after Trump and RFK Jr. linked its use to autism.

* Vance is also part of the administration outreach to young men. He grew a beard during the campaign, reportedly to enhance his masculinity; Ms. Magazine devoted an essay to Vance’s manspreading body language. But these efforts have only been partly successful. He has been widely mocked for an awkward running style some call the “Vance Prance,” and photos have circulated of Vance, as a young man, cross-dressing at a Yale Law School party.

* Vance downplayed the seriousness of the Young Republicans group chat by diverting attention to ugly texts sent by a Democratic candidate for attorney general in Virginia, and by arguing that they were “just kids” and that “young boys” specialize in “edgy, stupid jokes.” Some of the participants are only a little younger than Vance, while making claims to humor do not mean a statement is “just a joke.”

* CNN pointed to this incident as representative of the GOP’s shift from moralism to “whataboutism.”

* Notably, the second Trump administration no longer distances itself from the so-called mistakes, infelicities and jokes that animate MAGA political culture. The GOP seems divided on this question. The party has shut down Young Republicans chapters in the aftermath of the texting scandal, and Attorney Paul Ingrassia’s nomination to the Office of Special Counsel this week was withdrawn when Senate Republicans agreed that his text messages and social media posts were too extreme for them. Yet, in response to the “poop video” Trump posted to Truth Social on No Kings Day, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson said the President was “using satire to make a point.” He did not explain what the point was.

* Can Vance lead the GOP and MAGA into the permanent majority that it craves? Some say yes, while others say he will have trouble fending off fringier primary candidates like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Donald Trump. Jr. on one side, and a more mainstream, seasoned candidate like Marco Rubio on the other. Betting markets show a 55% likelihood Vance will be the nominee.

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What we want to go viral:

* Neil points us to the Netflix series, “Love Is Blind,” a reality show now in its ninth season, in which competitors develop a romance, separated into pods and without seeing each other. If that isn’t creepy enough for you, this season has turned very dark: you can read about it in Stephanie Sengwe’s story, “I Thought the Ed Gein Story Would Give Me the Creeps, but Love Is Blind 9 Is the Scariest Thing on Netflix Right Now,” (People, October 11, 2025)

* Claire wants you to revisit what it meant to become a woman artist in the 1960s and 1970s by reading Lili Anolik’s Didion and Babitz (Scribner, 2024). Fans of both Joan Didion and Eve Babitz (who, as it turns out, were friends) will find new material; new perspectives on both women’s sexuality; and a new story about their sense of themselves as potentially iconic figures—and how they used men to further their own careers.

Short takes:

* “Given the scale of the crisis facing New Yorkers, voters deserve significantly more ambition,” New York Times journalist Mara Gay writes about the big talk about housing the city’s mayoral candidates engage in. But where is the big thinking? “Mr. Mamdani, whose campaign was built around the rallying cry `freeze the rent,’ is the only candidate in the race who has shown significant urgency around housing over the course of the year,” Gay writes. “But the most pressing question is what he would do to make housing more affordable for the millions of residents who don’t live in rent-stabilized homes. Mr. Mamdani has said he would build 200,000 affordable new units over 10 years. That’s a fraction of what the city will need when 85,000 people are already in shelters and the market is pricing longtime residents and young families out of the city.” (October 23, 2025)

* Why are college students drawn to conservatism? “Debates in the classroom, whether about socialism or Plato or the Quran, felt highly delicate, as if everyone was afraid of offending everyone else,” recent campus right-winger Julia Steinberg writes in The Atlantic: students pretended to agree with each other even when they were actively disagreeing (as a former college teacher, I can vouch that this is true.) “ But when she joined the conservative Stanford Review, Steinberg found a milieu where people argued honestly. “Preachy, judgmental authority has never sat well with young people. The young people of today see that authority in the establishment left, not the right,” she writes. “At Stanford, this translated to a vibrant conservative scene and a lackluster liberal one.” (October 23, 2025)

* At Abortion, Every Day, feminist Jessica Valenti reports that Wyoming Republicans are advancing a bill that “would effectively outlaw the regulation of anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers, even allowing the groups to sue state leaders who try to stop them.” CPC’s are fake clinics that exist to steer women towards carrying unwanted pregnancies to term: some coerce clients into exploitative adoption networks. “The goal is simple: to make crisis pregnancy centers unregulated and untouchable, freeing them up to spread conservatives’ extremist agenda nationwide. And a tremendous part of that agenda is quietly and informally banning birth control.” (October 22, 2025)

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