Americans have become plenty familiar with Machiavellian politics during the Donald Trump era. The president is certainly a practitioner, regularly ignoring morality, facts and the law in his pursuit of raw power and other goals. And Vice President JD Vance is cut from the same cloth.

The main difference is that Vance will operate that way and then happily explain how that’s exactly what he’s doing.

The most recent example is Vance’s remarkable defense of Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy’s widely panned ad featuring the estranged mother of his opponent, Democrat Amy Acton. The ad is controversial because Acton has said she hasn’t seen her mother since she was 12 years old, when her stepfather was indicted for sexually abusing her and her mother stayed with him.

The ad basically amounts to politically weaponizing a family trauma involving alleged child sex abuse.

Many Ohio Republicans are practically climbing over one another to distance themselves from it. They include Gov. Mike DeWine, Secretary of State Frank LaRose and Sen. Jon Husted, who is on the ballot alongside Ramaswamy on November 3.

But not Vance. He stepped forward Wednesday to urge Republicans to put on their big-boy pants and do what it takes to win.

“Well, I’ll be honest with you: Whether the ad was appropriate or not is not really my concern,” Vance began, citing a bunch of alleged offenses Democrats have committed against Republicans.

“Politics is a tough business, and my message to my fellow elected Republicans,” Vance added, “is if you actually believe in the things you say you believe in, stop whining about an and go win the race in 13 days.”

At a later campaign rally in Ohio, Vance said the ad “calls it out like it is, and calls Amy Acton a liar.”Vance’s defense of Ramaswamy included plenty of whataboutism. But his comments also came with a healthy dose of amorality — i.e. saying he was indifferent to the propriety of the ad.

Trump is no stranger to that kind of shamelessness. And he can be pretty blunt about it, too. But Vance has more of a tendency to explain his political calculations and say why he’s downplaying moral considerations. And he’s done it a lot.

His comments Wednesday sounded like another major defense he offered of a highly controversial campaign tactic: the false 2024 claim that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, were stealing and eating people’s pets. In an interview with CNN’s Dana Bash back then, Vance said he was willing to “create stories” to draw attention to the negative impact of mass migration on places like Springfield. When Bash pressed him on that phrasing, Vance didn’t concede that the particular “story” he and Trump were telling was false. But he argued that the ends (drawing attention to an important issue) justified the means (surfacing wild rumors).

Vance offered a similar calculation a few weeks later while defending Trump’s false claim that a Venezuelan gang had taken over large swaths of Aurora, Colorado. When ABC’s Martha Raddatz noted that the GOP mayor of Aurora had called the claims “grossly exaggerated,” Vance responded: “That means there’s got to be some element of truth here.”He again suggested Trump’s wild, false claims were usefully drawing attention to the much smaller kernels of (arguable) truth behind what he was saying.

After the Trump administration admitted it had wrongly deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia last year, Vance exaggerated the evidence that Abrego Garcia was tied to a gang, which remains unproven. He added that it was “gross to get fired up about gang members getting deported while ignoring citizens they victimize.”Amid GOP debates over whether to more forcefully denounce antisemites like Nick Fuentes and to distance the party from Tucker Carlson, Vance refused to take a side.

Vance said around that time that “antisemitism and all forms of ethnic hatred have no place in the conservative movement.”But he also delivered a speech in which he said he didn’t “bring a list of conservatives to denounce or to deplatform.”He added that “we have far more important work to do than canceling each other.”And after revelations last year about young GOP leaders in a group chat saying vile, racist things, Vance signaled he would ignore the issue because of what Democrats had done.

He specifically pointed to violent text messages from then-Democratic Virginia attorney general candidate Jay Jones. “This is far worse than anything said in a … group chat, and the guy who said it could become the AG of Virginia,” Vance wrote on X. “I refuse to join the pearl-clutching when powerful people call for political violence.”It was a far cry from how Vance used to talk about these issues.

Back in 2017, some Republicans defended Trump’s controversial comments about the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, by pointing to supposed extremism on the left. But Vance urged them to get their own house in order. “I think we need to be able … to point the finger at that evil and name it without trying to point the finger at somebody else,” Vance said on CNN at the time.

Nine years later, the potential 2028 presidential hopeful has not only embraced a much more zero-sum view of politics; he’s also copped to it — and repeatedly so.