Photo: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post/Getty Images
At a late-night dinner at Mar-a-Lago days before the Republican National Convention, Donald Trump Jr. made the case for his father to pick J.D. Vance as his vice-president. “I think I’ve seen him on TV,” Trump Jr. said, recalling the conversation with CNN. “I’ve seen him prosecute the case against the Democrats. I think no one’s more articulate than that.”
But less than two weeks after Vance’s nomination at the RNC, the bet on Vance is looking way riskier than it did back when Joe Biden was the nominee — a political reality that, somehow, was just five days ago.
Vance’s faltering image in recent days boils down to two basic factors: questionable things he said in the past and weird things he is saying right now. Republicans always knew that Vance — who called Trump “America’s Hitler” in 2017 — would bring some political baggage with him. Perhaps they underestimated the weight.
Vance’s moody blogging from the 2000s has been only mildly embarrassing. In 2005, he wrote of a day in which he “felt more like a female than I ever have or will” because he was emotional — too emotional, in fact, to watch Garden State. Intriguingly hung up on the gender thing, he later described his blog as “like a diary, only far more masculine.”
On Saturday, the New York Times revealed a number of views Vance had expressed, prior to his MAGA transformation, in private correspondence with a now former friend from law school. Many of Vance’s comments stand in stark contrast with his more recent political rhetoric. In a 2016 email, Vance apologized to the friend, who is trans, for describing them as lesbian in his book. In 2014, after Michael Brown was killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, Vance said, “I hate the police.” And he suggested, when discussing Trump’s anti-Muslim campaign rhetoric in 2015, that Trump was a “demagogue” who was “willing to exploit the people who believe crazy shit.” In a 2016 message, he also wrote that, “The more white people feel like voting for Trump, the more Black people will suffer. I really believe that.”
Vance’s most ill-met comments over the past week have been more recent and involved reproductive health, a political front that is a huge liability for his party’s electoral chances since the Dobbs decision. New audio was released on Thursday of Vance saying that he wanted a “federal response” to women traveling across state lines for an abortion. (Previously he has said that he wants a national ban on abortion.) Another quote of Vance’s has been going around, in which he said in 2021 that Democrats are a “bunch of childless cat ladies with miserable lives.” People responded to the resurfaced comment by sharing stories of their own challenges becoming parents. Transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg discussed a “heartbreaking” setback in his adoption process and that Vance “couldn’t have known that, but maybe that’s why you shouldn’t be talking about other people’s children.”
Vance then spent an entire news cycle doubling-down and fake-apologizing for the cat lady comments.
Putting aside his past comments and his habit of following online figures with loathsome beliefs, Vance is making new problems for himself in the present, too. It’s difficult to exactly quantify this, but J.D. Vance does not have any swag at all. Look how bad his joke about soda and racism bombed at a rally in his hometown on Monday.
For some indiscernible reason, the campaign also recorded a video of Vance describing his Diet Mountain Dew stock backstage at a rally in Virginia.
Perhaps Donald Trump Jr. was wrong. Maybe this man is not an effective on-camera surrogate for his father. Likely it will be mere days until Trump himself is mocking Vance during a rally.
With an entirely new election now that Harris is the (presumptive) Democratic nominee, Republicans are already questioning the Trump-Vance ticket. “He was the worst choice of all the options. It was so bad I didn’t even think it was possible,” one House Republican complained to The Hill. “I think if you were to ask many people around this building, nine out of ten on our side would say he’s the wrong pick,” said another. “He’s the only person who can do serious damage.”
This post has been updated.
