JD Vance has been trying out different responses to the wave of scrutiny he’s faced since becoming Donald Trump’s running mate. Now, he’s downplaying his own relevance to the election entirely.
“My attitude is, it doesn’t really matter, as much as this hits my ego,” Vance said in an interview on the “FULL SEND PODCAST” released Friday. “People are going to vote primarily for Donald Trump or for Kamala Harris. That’s the way these things go. I think my job over the next few months is to just drive home the message that Kamala Harris has been a bad vice president, and she’d be a worse president.”
Vance’s honest reflections on the role of the vice presidential nominee — in response to a question about how he’s sizing up the potential contenders for Harris’ running mate — represents one of the campaign’s most direct attempts yet to deflect unfavorable attention away from him. In the weeks since he joined the Trump ticket, he has had to dodge jabs about resurfaced clips of him calling some Democrats “childless cat ladies,” his suggestion that parents with biological children should have more political power and his characterization of pregnancies from rape and incest as “inconvenient.”
Going on offense, Vance sought to reiterate a common but often unspoken understanding in politics that the vice president is more of a symbolic role. But his comments also mirror a far from rousing endorsement from Trump himself earlier this week, during a hostile appearance at a conference of Black journalists in Chicago. There, Trump echoed Vance’s clear desire to redirect attention back to Harris — even as both candidates have yet to settle on a consistent attack strategy.
“Historically, the vice president, in terms of the election, does not have any impact,” Trump said. “I mean, virtually no impact … virtually never has it mattered.”
Trump also didn’t directly answer a question from Fox News anchor Harris Faulkner about whether Vance was ready to serve as president, should the opportunity arise in the future.
“You’re voting for the president, and you can have a vice president who is outstanding in every way,” he added. “And I think JD is, I think that all of them would have been, but you’re not voting that way. You’re voting for the president.”
In the same interview, Vance was still eager to go to bat against his potential opponents for the vice presidency — engaging in a tit-for-tat that prompted one contender for Harris’ pick to quickly fire back.
“There’s a lot of rumors that it’s going to be this guy Tim Walz … He seems really angry,” Vance said of the Minnesota governor.
But it was comparing Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, a rumored front-runner, to former President Barack Obama that immediately caught that governor’s attention.
“I’ve seen a lot of clips of him talk, and he talks like Barack Obama,” Vance said of Shapiro. “It’s like if I tried to do a really bad impression of Barack Obama, that’s what it would sound like.”
But Shapiro called the insult “weird” — citing Obama’s lauded oratory skills — while echoing the same attack line that’s spread throughout the Democratic Party.
“It is clear that Trump really has buyer’s remorse,” Shapiro told reporters at an event in Pennsylvania on Friday.
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