“What use was the rule?”: Vance quotes fictional serial killer to explain Trump’s victory

JD Vance invoked a fictional serial killer’s words to explain why Donald Trump’s critics shouldn’t be surprised he won the presidency.

Vance shared in a post to X that the best people he knows “constantly reevaluate assumptions,” adding that liberals and detractors shocked by Trump’s win “should question what else [they] ‘know’ about him.”

The comments were some of Vance’s first since he completed his journey from a staunch Trump critic to his right-hand man and vice president-elect.

Ultimately, Vance left followers with a message from Anton Chigurh, a hitman in Cormac McCarthy’s bloody borderlands noir “No Country for Old Men.” 

“In the words of Cormac McCarthy, ‘If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?’” Vance wrote.

Vance attributed the words of wisdom to McCarthy himself, not the fate-obsessed contract killer he created in the 2005 novel, adapted by the Coen Brothers into a 2007 Best Picture winner.

The cash-hungry hitman’s quote may seem an odd choice for someone soon to take the second-highest office in the land, especially one that essentially reads as a critique of any system of morality. Perhaps the fictional killer quote-drop is Vance’s attempt to align himself with President-elect Trump, who spent his summer raving about the “late, great Hannibal Lecter.”