Republicans Really Wish Trump Hadn’t Picked J.D. Vance

Some Republicans are starting to seriously regret Donald Trump’s vice presidential nominee, Ohio Senator J.D. Vance.

It’s been only one week since Vance was nominated at the Republican National Convention, and already his own party members are expressing severe doubts about Trump’s pick. The former president’s allies have acknowledged that nominating Vance was the product of Trump’s absolute certainty that he would be able to defeat Joe Biden in November. While Vance wouldn’t do much for swing voters or independents, he would likely shore up support among Trump’s base.

But ever since Biden passed the torch to Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party’s new presumptive nominee, Republicans have begun to sour on Vance.

“The road got a lot harder. He was the only pick that wasn’t the safe pick. And I think everyone has now realized that,” one House Republican told Axios Thursday, under the condition of anonymity.

Another House Republican told Axios that Vance “doesn’t add much.”

“And now with Kamala at the top, the capacity to have expanded the map a little bit ... would have been much more beneficial,” the GOP lawmaker said.

It’s not just Republican lawmakers who are feeling buyer’s remorse. A CNN poll found that Vance was the least liked vice presidential nominee for a nonincumbent following his party’s convention since 1980.

Since being nominated last week, Vance has marred the Trump ticket with his awkward jokes about diet soda, sexist comments about “childless cat ladies,” and humiliating rumors about having sex with a couch. Vance has been so embroiled in gaffes, he hasn’t even really gotten to expound on any of his “new right” ideas, such as his phony brand of conservative economic populism, or creepy pronatalism, or terrifying techo-authoritarianism.

Trump’s campaign, however, released a statement doubling down on the former president’s increasingly unpopular pick.

“President Trump is thrilled with the choice he made with Senator Vance, and they are the perfect team to take back the White House,” said campaign spokesman Steven Cheung, according to Axios.

After Donald Trump’s bizarre attacks against Vice President Kamala Harris in a phone interview on Fox News Thursday morning, her campaign fired back with a blistering response of its own.

The Harris campaign sent out an email minutes later with the subject line “Statement on a 78-year-old criminal’s Fox News appearance,” wondering “is Donald Trump ok?” They called out Trump for “lying and making threats,” praising abortion bans while criticizing mail-in-voting, and being “old and quite weird.”

The email also notes, “If anyone wants an alternative, Kamala Harris is offering one.”

It’s a quick and snarky response that is sure to land well with Democrats and younger voters. Harris already scored points against Trump when she kicked off her campaign Monday, highlighting her history as a prosecutor against Trump’s legally questionable record. These biting criticisms of Trump seem to have set off his meltdown Thursday.

In the Fox News appearance the email referred to, Trump was not happy about Harris’s Monday speech, calling it “disgusting.”

“They say, ‘Sir, be nice. You just got hit with a bullet. Maybe he’s changed. Be nice,’ and I’d love to be nice, but I’m dealing against real garbage when you hear that,” Trump said. He went on to connect Harris’s criticism to the many legal cases against him.

“When you hear that they’ve weaponized the justice system against me, they’ve indicted me four times. They’ve pushed other lawsuits on. To me, it’s never happened in this country,” Trump ranted. “This is like a third-world country, what they’ve done, a banana republic. Every single court case that I have is pushed on by them.”

If this is how Trump will respond to future attacks from the Harris campaign, it probably won’t do anything beyond the MAGA base. Trump’s complaints about the cases against him didn’t land earlier this year, and they probably won’t pick up steam by including Harris.

The Trump campaign has already resorted to making racist attacks against Harris by calling her a “DEI candidate” and claiming she was soft on crime as a prosecutor. Meanwhile, he keeps making things worse for himself. At a rally Wednesday, he confused Harris with his old opponent Nikki Haley. If Harris can keep landing attacks like this, and Trump keeps making bizarre gaffes, the Democrats could go into Election Day with all of the momentum.

FBI Director Christopher Wray said Wednesday that it is not clear whether Donald Trump was struck by a bullet during the assassination attempt against him earlier this month.

Appearing before the House Judiciary Committee, Wray testified about the agency’s investigation into the attempted assassination, expressing uncertainty about the nature of the injury Trump suffered to his ear.

At one point, Republican Representative Kevin Kiley asked, “How close did the assassin’s bullet come to killing President Trump?” Wray responded that he didn’t know the actual distance, but “my understanding is that either [the bullet] or some shrapnel is what grazed his ear.”

Later in the hearing, Wray replied to a question from House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan about where the eight bullets fired by Thomas Crooks went. “With respect to former President Trump, there’s some question about whether or not it’s a bullet or shrapnel that hit his ear,” Wray again said. However, in affirming that the FBI “accounted for” all of the shots, he added, “I don’t know whether that bullet, in addition to causing the grazing, could have also landed somewhere else.”

Over the weekend, Trump told a Michigan crowd, “I took a bullet for democracy.” The same day, Axios reported on a memo, written by Trump’s former White House physician and shared by his campaign, that stated the bullet struck Trump’s ear, coming “less than a quarter of an inch from entering [Trump’s] head” and “produc[ing] a 2 cm wide wound.”

While Wray revealed, among other information, that Crooks researched the killing of JFK and flew a drone over the site prior to his attempt on Trump’s life, his remarks about the basic facts surrounding the former president’s injury show that uncertainty still looms over our understanding of the event.

Wray told the committee, “There’s a whole lot of work underway and still a lot of work to do, and our understanding of what happened and why will continue to evolve.”

J.D. Vance is getting slammed for once calling Democrats, including Vice President Kamala Harris, “childless cat ladies,” and all this newfound attention should probably worry him.

During an interview on Fox News’s now-canceled Tucker Carlson Tonight in July 2021, Vance took aim at Democratic politicians.

“We’re effectively run in this country, via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, 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,” Vance said.

“And it’s just a basic fact. You look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC, the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children. And how does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it?”

To be clear, Vance is not objecting to actual childlessness. What he’s essentially saying is that only people who reproduce have a stake in America. While this statement was from years ago, this idea is still deeply embedded in his current campaign, which is built on pronatalism and his own phony brand of economic populism, which places the biological nuclear family at the center.

The clip’s resurfacing has led to an intense online firestorm that has attracted the attention of one high-profile critic, as well as a mob that Vance should truly fear.

Actress Jennifer Aniston took to Instagram to post the clip of Vance’s “childless cat lady” remark, with her own scathing criticism.

“I truly can’t believe this is coming from a potential VP of The United States,” Aniston, who rarely makes political statements, 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.”

Aniston has been open about her struggles to get pregnant, including by trying IVF, but how she has no regrets that it didn’t pan out for her.

In June, Vance voted against legislation that would codify access to in vitro fertilization, a strange position for someone who purports to think of procreation as the barrier to entry for civic engagement.

Meanwhile, Vance has angered one group that should strike fear into the heart of any man: fans of pop singer and monocultural icon Taylor Swift, known as the Swifties.

Their beloved icon has proudly touted her cat lady status in the past, and so now, the internet is anticipating his imminent destruction at the hands of her devoted fans.

While the deafening far-right noise around Swift has died down a bit since the Super Bowl, she still has the ability to enrage conservatives and amass support around any issue of her choosing. Should she choose to direct her ire against Vance, or voice support for Harris to spite him, one can only imagine the intensity of the backlash that will follow.

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, who is in contention to be Harris’s vice presidential pick, may have summed it up the best: There are some lines you just don’t cross on the internet.

“My God, they went after ‘cat people,’ good luck with that! Turn on the internet and see what cat people do when you go after ’em,” he said Wednesday night.

Now that Senator J.D. Vance is Donald Trump’s running mate, he’s the subject of an internet rumor that he had sex with couch cushions in his younger days.

The rumors were so prevalent that Snopes and the Associated Press both were forced to debunk the tale. As the fact-checkers note, the rumor appears to have originated from an X post on July 15 from user rickrudescalves, who has since protected his account.

The rumor was that Vance told the story in his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, but, as the AP and Snopes found, there is no such story in the book. That didn’t stop the rumor from spreading across the internet, even being picked up by actress and comedian Kathy Griffin.

Curiously, the AP took down its fact-check Thursday morning, spurring internet users to joke about how even the global news outlet can’t confidently rule it was a lie.

While there’s an old expression that “any publicity is good publicity,” Vance probably wants this embarrassing rumor to go away. Unfortunately for him, the subsequent fact-checks have extended its life, and the Trump-Vance campaign may soon have to deal with questions asking about it.

Even if the rumor does eventually go away, there are plenty of other negative stories about Vance that are backed up by facts. The Trump campaign has tried in vain to distance itself from the conservative playbook Project 2025, but Vance happened to write the foreword to a book by the plan’s lead author, Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts. He is using his campaign speeches to praise Diet Mountain Dew, and he has a long record of criticizing Trump that is being unearthed every day. Plus, he has ties to tech moguls with disturbing ideas about reordering society.

After President Biden withdrew from the 2024 election and handed the reins to Vice President Kamala Harris earlier this week, the Trump campaign is reportedly second-guessing the decision to bring on Vance as Trump’s running mate. Embarrassing rumors certainly won’t quell these discussions within the campaign. Then again, there are several embarrassing stories of Trump that have been floating around for years.