JD Vance, who to prove a point this weekend, quoted a fictional murderer. Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images

By PJ Grisar November 11, 2024

Donald Trump and J.D. Vance’s playbook seems to have a weird rule: When in doubt, quote a fictional murderer.

Following the lead of his running mate, who likes to refer to the bon mots of cannibal serial killer Hannibal Lecter, vice president-elect J.D. Vance took to X to chide those who didn’t see his ticket’s victory coming.

“If you were confident that Donald J. Trump was going to lose, maybe you should question what else you ‘know’ about him,” Vance, who previously referred to Trump as “America’s Hitler,” posted on Friday. “Maybe the people who misled you about his electoral chances have misled you about other things. In the words of Cormac McCarthy, ‘If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?’”

It seems like a quote well-picked, until you realize McCarthy didn’t say that so much as his character, Anton Chigurh, a sociopathic killer who, in the Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men, rocks Prince Valiant hair and dispatches innocents with an air-powered bolt gun. But hey, it’s not really Vance’s fault for not clocking the origins exactly if he read the book first. McCarthy’s signature style eschewed quotation marks and speaker identification.

But it’s worth looking at the context of the scene where this dialogue was exchanged, memorably recreated in the Coens’ film as Chigurh stares down flop-sweating bounty hunter Carson Wells in a hotel room. Chigurh’s there to collect money and Wells tells him to “go to hell.”

Chigurh, as played by Javier Bardem in an Oscar-winning turn, then trots out the aphorism about rule following, and how if the rule “brought you to this,” meaning sharing a seedy hotel room with someone about to lead you to a violent end, it may be worth reconsidering assumptions.

Wells (played by Woody Harrelson), replies to Chigurh “Do you have any idea how goddamn crazy you are?”

The phone rings, Chigurh looks at it, and then casually ends Harrelson’s screen time with a silenced shotgun.

If Vance meant to capture a deep nihilism in our politics, he’d be hard pressed to find a better quote or scenario. But, if he really just meant to say something as banal as “maybe it’s good to question our assumptions,” there’s an Einstein quote for that (though likely apocryphal). Also “question everything,” variously ascribed to Einstein and Euripedes.

But as Vance’s post averred, before it went on to celebrate the wisdom of a fictional madman, “successful (and good) people” trust others “not because they’re always right,” but because if  “you’re constantly seeking the truth it’s easy to identify those who are doing the same.”

Chigurh may not always be right, but he may, on this one point, be speaking the truth. In the meantime, while we’re challenging our certainties, we can all regard McCarthy’s title with some skepticism. If this election proved anything, this is a most hospitable nation for old men.

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