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Surely, someone must have pointed out to Donald Trump that Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) has serious liabilities as a running mate, right? But Trump chooses not to hear what he does not wish to hear, and so he went forward with it anyhow. Reasons for the former president to regret his choice continue to mount.
To start with, and as we have pointed out several times already, Vance has a long history of saying inflammatory things. And he has done so while being recorded. Did Trump really think that these recordings would not come back from the dead? The one that's running wild on social media right now, in large part because the Harris campaign posted it to her campaign's eX-Twitter feed, is the speech where Vance suggested that the votes of childless people should be watered down, because they don't have as much skin in the game.
Since Harris' campaign posted that tweet, it's gotten more than 4 million views. And the problem for Vance is that the speech was only a few years ago (2021). He might be able to say that the anti-Trump comments from 2015 and 2016 are outdated, and he's changed his mind. But it's rather harder to argue that the Vance of 2021 and the Vance of 2024 are totally different guys. And there are, of course, dozens of clips like this. Vance's extremist tendencies will also get renewed attention on September 24, when the book Dawn's Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America is released. That book, by Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, is a rundown of why Project 2025 is such a great thing. And who wrote the intro to the book? Why, that would be J.D. Vance. Between that, and the fact that the actual Project 2025 was written substantially by a bunch of former Trump staffers, it's going to be rather hard for the Trump/Vance ticket to distance themselves from the whole thing.
Vance is also getting smacked around on the meme front. This one, as you can see, was viewed millions of times before being taken down:
It achieved wide enough currency that both the AP and Snopes did fact-check items making clear that the claim is not true, although the AP later withdrew their item, apparently believing that they were unwillingly helping to create a Google bomb for Vance (in essence, increasing the odds that people searching for Vance would end up with results for "Vance couch" or "Vance-turbation").
This is something of a double problem for Vance. First, lots of people who saw the original tweet aren't going to be aware of the fact checks. Second, these sorts of rumors tend to take off when people are suspicious of the target, and find the alleged behavior to be believable. So, this is probably not the only time this is going to happen to him.
Vance is also being targeted by Democrats playing the role of attack dog. Taking the lead is Gov. Andy Beshear (D-KY), in part because Beshear has credibility on how genuine a hillbilly Vance really is (more on this below), and in part because Beshear really, really wants to be Harris' running mate. Appearing on MSNBC yesterday, the Governor said: "I want the American people to know what a Kentuckian is and what they look like, because let me just tell you that JD Vance ain't from [Appalachia]." Vance fired back by arguing that Beshear is a nepo baby who owes his career to his father (former Kentucky governor Steve Beshear). Before Vance goes down that path again, he might want to take a look at how his running mate's business career got started.
At this point, Vance has become enough of a problem that he might indeed be cashiered from the ticket. In fact, former Trump adviser Anthony Scaramucci thinks that Vance is "doomed":
He is not doing well on the stump for Donald Trump. He's hurting him, the memes on social media are killing him, the net negatives are terrible for the vice president. The vice president on the Trump campaign is supposed to get out of the way, and he has become an issue for Donald Trump. So he could have picked Nikki Haley, or he could have picked somebody, but Trump is such a narcissist he didn't want anybody taking credit for his electoral success. He didn't want somebody on CNN saying, "Yeah, he won that and Nikki Haley helped him," so he picked J.D. Vance and now he's got to live, at least for now, with this millstone on his neck. I mean, he may or may not make it to November 5th.
He also wondered "how many Scaramuccis J.D. is going to last."
If Trump is going to get rid of Vance, he's going to have to do it pretty quickly. First, if he's going to eat that particular batch of crow, he'd want to put as much distance between that and the election as is possible. Second, by the end of August, we'll start hitting state deadlines for ballot information. It will be somewhere between "very hard" and "impossible" to remove Vance once we get to September. As a reminder, the last time a VP was booted from a major-party ticket was in 1972. In that year, Thomas Eagleton was dumped 18 days after the Democratic convention. The 2024 Republican Convention ended 8 days ago. (Z)