Vice President JD Vance has been left out of the "room where it happens," ceding his vice presidential role to posts usually considered more junior and acting as Donald Trump's social media cheerleader, a New York Times columnist wrote Wednesday.

Locked out of real power while Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller runs deportations and Director of the Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought terrorizes federal workers, Vance has become Trump's "official fanboy," spending his time crafting sophisticated arguments for the administration's cruelty, wrote Jamelle Bouie.

But his recent speech at the right-wing Claremont Institute revealed that he's bringing something to that role that's far more sinister than typical MAGA rhetoric.

"America is not just an idea," Vance declared at Claremont. "It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future" — meaning your passport might say American, but that doesn't make you equal, Bouie wrote.

Vance explicitly rejected what he called the "over-inclusive" nature of founding ideals, arguing that believing in the Declaration of Independence's principles would mean admitting "billions of foreign citizens." But his alternative is chilling: a hierarchy where "the people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War have a hell of a lot more claim over America than the people who say they don't belong," Bouie wrote.

This isn't just nativism—it's a direct echo of Chief Justice Roger Taney's infamous Dred Scott decision, which argued that Black Americans could never be citizens because the founders never intended it, Bouie argued. Taney, too, found the Declaration's egalitarian language "over-inclusive."

Vance's tiered citizenship extends to immigrants, who he says must show proper gratitude. He savagely attacked New York City's Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani for describing America as "beautiful, contradictory, unfinished" on Independence Day.

"Has he ever looked in the mirror and recognized that he might not be alive were it not for the generosity of a country he dares to insult?" Vance sneered. "Who the hell does he think that he is?"

The message is clear: there are Americans who can critique their country, and Americans who cannot—determined by bloodline and deference, Bouie wrote.

Perhaps most grotesquely, Bouie finished, Vance invokes Civil War soldiers while rejecting everything they died for. Abraham Lincoln called the Declaration's promise of equality the "electric cord" linking all Americans. Vance wants to cut that cord, replacing it with what he calls connection to "soil and the dead," Bouie wrote.