Trump Probably Regrets Picking JD Vance Solely For His Stunning Good Looks, Effortless Charm
When you’ve lost Rachel Green ...
It’s rarely good when a politician’s best news cycle is confirmation that he didn’t have “sectional relations” with a couch. Such is the richly-deserved fate of one JD Vance, whose moral rot is the stuff of a Rod Serling monologue: “This is a cheap man, a nickel-and-dime man, with a cheapness that goes past the suit and the shirt; a cheapness of mind, a cheapness of taste, a tawdry little shine on the seat of his conscience, and a dark-room squint at a world whose sunlight has never gotten through to him.”
Almost two weeks have passed since Donald Trump elevated Vance to the national stage as his next disposable running mate, and the general population’s response has been a collective “eww.” CNN conducted a survey after Vance’s debut at the Republican National Convention, and Vance has an approval rating of minus 6 points, which is low. (The average rating for a running mate after their party’s convention was plus 19 points.) He’s the first vice presidential nominee to start the general election with a negative rating since 1980.
You could waste time and money on focus groups to determine why Vance isn’t fetching, but the simplest explanation is that he’s a big jerk. That’s a bigger problem than having a bland personality, like Mike Pence, who was still a far-right radical but otherwise kept quiet and let Trump command the headlines.
JD Vance is no Sarah Palin
Liberals online have compared Vance to John McCain’s 2008 running mate, Sarah Palin. However, Palin was briefly popular: She left the RNC with plus-26 net favorability, and her favorable ratings remained high even as voters questioned her qualifications. Palin was the McCain ticket’s young, dynamic foil to Barack Obama.
Yes, she was a moron, but she was a talented public speaker before her brain completely dissolved. Her folksy act drew applause from Republican voters rather than “please clap” awkward silence.
The Plain Dealer Editor Chris Quinn suggested that Trump picked Vance for his youthful good looks, as a contrast to President Joe Biden. It’s true that Vance is young, but he’s no thirst trap, even in a convent. He just comes across as callow and unfit to lead. That’s before the perfectly normal Democratic vice presidential nominee pummels him in a debate.
JD Vance is no Dan Quayle
MAGA is an overtly anti-woman movement, with specific hostility toward unmarried, college-educated women who aren’t baby-making machines. After the 2022 midterms, Jesse Watters at Fox News argued that single women needed to hurry up and get married so they’ll start voting Republican. House Rep. Matt Gaetz, during a Newsmax interview, dismissed suburban women voters as “Karens” that Republicans could lose and make up the difference with non-college educated men of color named “Julio” and “Jamal.”
JD Vance, a fraud and blatant opportunist, adopted the misogynistic MAGA rhetoric after the 2020 election. He didn’t seem to realize that Watters has an average audience of less than 3 million viewers, and Gaetz represents a Florida congressional district with a population of 789,347 and a Republican lean of plus 19 points. Vance’s MAGA makeover made him a good fit for right-wing media, but he can’t rely on incels alone in a national campaign.
Three years ago, Vance was a guest on Tucker Carlson’s old Fox News show, where he declared that “we are effectively run in this country … by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too. And it’s just a basic fact: If you look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez], the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children.”
Even if you accept his bigoted premise, which only bigots would, it’s flat-out wrong that “childless cat ladies” control the Democratic Party. (Vance’s Republican colleagues Susan Collins, Lindsey Graham, and Tim Scott are also childless.) Most of the big names and up-and-comers — Hakeem Jeffries, Gretchen Whitmer, Josh Shapiro, Andy Beshear — are married with children. The vice president isn’t childless, either. She’s stepmother of two adult children with her husband Doug Emhoff. They call her “Momala,” which is adorable. Their biological mother, Kerstin Emhoff, has spoken movingly about the great co-parenting relationship she has with Harris: “For over 10 years, since Cole and Ella were teenagers, Kamala has been a co-parent with Doug and I. She is loving, nurturing, fiercely protective, and always present. I love our blended family and am grateful to have her in it.” If Harris has secured the notoriously difficult “spouse’s ex” endorsement, there’s really no stopping her.
David Weigel at Semafor provided some context to Vance’s remarks, which weren’t all that exculpatory. Vance claims that he wasn’t talking about people who “even though they would like to have kids, are unable to have them.” That doesn’t hold up to the slightest scrutiny, considering Vance can’t know if the supposed “cat ladies” are childless voluntarily, not that it’s any of his business.
Including Buttigieg among the “childless cat ladies” was an obvious homophobic dig. Buttigieg and his husband, Chasten, have two adopted children, and Buttigieg revealed this week that Vance made his crass comment after a “heartbreaking setback” in that process. “He couldn’t have known that,” Buttigieg said. “Maybe that’s why you shouldn’t be talking about other people’s children.” (Watch Buttigieg’s full response below.)
Vance told Weigel that his “childless Left” bit was inspired by a friend’s observation that Washington D.C. had apparently become a haven for adults without kids.
“I was like — oh, that’s really odd, right?” Vance recalled. “The city that’s governing for the rest of the country is also the place that, in some ways, is the least like the rest of the country, where most people do want to have children, and most people do start families.”
It’s more likely that D.C. attracts young professionals, who then move to nearby Virginia and Maryland when they do start families. Also, the literal District of Columbia doesn’t govern the rest of the country. It doesn’t even have congressional representation! The politicians doing the actual governing are from all 50 states.
In July 2021, Vance told an audience at the right-wing Intercollegiate Studies Institute: “Why have we let the Democrat party become controlled by people who don’t have children? Why is this just a normal fact of American life, that the leaders of our country should be people who don’t have a personal and direct stake in it via their own offspring, via their own children and grandchildren?”
He also offered a modest proposal where “real” parents would get more votes somehow than the childless cat ladies: “Let’s give votes to all children in this country, but let’s give control over those votes to the parents of those children. When you go to the polls in this country as a parent, you should have more power … than people who don’t have kids.” This is grossly unconstitutional, anti-democratic, and bears the stench of the Three-fifths Compromise.
Vance’s repulsive rhetoric has rightly received more attention now that he’s Trump’s running mate. He isn’t just “owning the libs” in some Dave Chappelle/Ricky Gervais-style Netflix special. He’s alienating voters Republicans will need in November. According to 2020 exit polls, 67 percent of the electorate were childless heathens.
Joe Biden carried childless women by 11 points, but Vance could help Trump tank even further among that demo.
Of course, noted election loser Blake Masters agreed with Vance’s position: “Political leaders should have children. Certainly they should at least be married. If you aren’t running or can’t run a household of your own, how can you relate to a constituency of families, or govern wisely with respect to future generations? Skin in the game matters.”
I don’t advise taking political advice from someone whose reproductive process probably involves laying eggs underneath their sleeping host’s skin. Republicans should worry about the normal women who still vote and have their own bank accounts. Jennifer Aniston, who isn’t overtly political on social media, shared the Tucker Carlson Vance clip with her 44.9 million Instagram followers.
“I truly can’t believe this is coming from a potential VP of The United States,” she wrote. “All I can say is ... Mr. Vance, I pray that your daughter is fortunate enough to bear children of her own one day. I hope she will not need to turn to IVF as a second option. Because you are trying to take that away from her, too.”
That’s not great earned media. During the summer of 1992, Vice President Dan Quayle attacked Murphy Brown — a fictional character — for “mocking the importance of fathers, by bearing a child alone, and calling it just another ‘lifestyle choice.’” A White House spokesperson originally claimed the CBS series, which wasn’t a documentary, had glorified “the life of an unwed mother.” It soon occurred to the spokesperson that Murphy had chosen to keep her baby, like that great American Madonna, so he backtracked and praised the show’s “pro-life values.” It was a huge mess. A few months earlier, Quayle had publicly misspelled the word “potato,” and yet he somehow found a way to humiliate himself even more. This wasn’t why the Bush/Quayle ticket went down in flames that year, but it didn’t help.
JD Vance makes Dan Quayle look good, and that’s not a compliment for either man.
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It’s starting to sound like PAB is having buyer’s remorse about JD Vance and now wants to “You’re Fired!” him. Didn’t the RWNJs just threaten to file suit against someone, whoever?, to force the Dems to keep Biden on the ticket because too late, he’s your nominee, no take-backs allowed! Except without the formality of the convention process, Joe wasn’t actually the nominee, whereas JDV already was the convention-certified VP nominee, so they’re stuck with him, although you know Donnie will somehow slither out of it anyway if he wants to?
Sorry, I’m a mite bit confused today. It’s probably from the whiplash traumas and panic of the last couple of weeks that have seemingly screeched to a sudden halt, and now we’re blanketed in so much schadenfreude we don’t know what to do with it. I’ll take it, though!
'Let’s give votes to all children in this country, but let’s give control over those votes to the parents of those children.'
Which is another conservative thing: absolute control of your family. You are not allowed to be your own person with thoughts, ideas and desires, you are property of your husband/father and will do everything they command, to the point of them making choices for you.
In this example, it's just stupid vote-stacking wish fulfillment, but it is the basis for estrangement and a lot of pain when children discover they have different ideas about what they want and end up having to sever ties with parents who refuse to acknowledge that they have created a person, not property.