JD Vance Approvingly Quotes Fictional Serial Killer

The soon-to-be vice president of the United States on Friday offered words of wisdom for his 2.6 million followers on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.
“One of the most important skills I see in successful (and good) people is to constantly reevaluate assumptions,” Sen. JD Vance wrote on X, adding that people who thought President-elect Donald Trump would lose Tuesday should question some of their other assumptions about him.
“In the words of Cormac McCarthy, ‘If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?’” the Ohio Republican wrote.
The aphorism Vance attributed to McCarthy was not actually worldly wisdom from the late American writer but a bit of dialogue from Anton Chigurh, a vicious killer in his 2005 novel, “No Country for Old Men,” which was turned into a 2007 Oscar-winning film.
In the story, Chigurh says the line right before he blows another character’s head off with a shotgun blast. Chigurh, you see, is a psychopathic hit man who kills people for money but also out of a demented notion that he is an agent of fate and that the victims essentially engineered their own deaths simply by crossing his path.
In a 2013 paper in The Journal of Forensic Sciences, two professors of psychiatry with clinical experience analyzed the portrayal of psychopaths in movies and rated Chigurh, portrayed by Javier Bardem in the movie, as one of the most realistic of all time.
“Anton Chigurh is a well-designed prototypical idiopathic/primary psychopath,” wrote Samuel J. Leistedt and Paul Linkowski of the Université Libre de Bruxelles in Belgium. “We lack information concerning his childhood, but there are sufficient arguments and detailed information about his behavior in the film to obtain a diagnosis of active, primary, idiopathic psychopathy, incapacity for love, absence of shame or remorse, lack of psychological insight, inability to learn from past experience, cold-blooded attitude, ruthlessness, total determination, and lack of empathy.”
In other words, Chigurh is not a good guy. His quip about the peril of rules is a self-serving justification for his murder habit.
It’s possible Vance likes the line because he has repeatedly changed the course of his life, most recently switching from an anti-Trump Republican who considered the former president an almost Hitler-like figure to a darling of the MAGA world and Trump’s vice president-elect.
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Maybe Vance used the quote as a deliberate provocation, knowing he would be fact-checked by a humorless media. Maybe Vance thinks Chigurh was the hero of the story? Or perhaps it’s a way to ingratiate himself with Trump, who frequently invoked the fictional cannibal Hannibal Lector on the campaign trail.
“The late, great Hannibal Lecter,” Trump said at a rally in May. “He’s a wonderful man. He oftentimes would have a friend for dinner. Remember the last scene?”
Leistedt and Linkowski described Lecter as an archetype of the “unrealistic but sensational” character whose characteristics are not generally observed in clinical practice.
A spokesperson for Vance did not immediately respond to an email Friday requesting comment.