J.D. Vance Crashes and Burns Trying to Defend His Kamala Conspiracy

Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance claimed Wednesday that he had never suggested Kamala Harris hadn’t tapped Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro as her running mate due to his faith.

During a press conference at a campaign stop in Michigan, a reporter from NBC News asked Vance to clear up some confusion surrounding his assertion that Shapiro had been skipped over for antisemitic reasons.

“You have repeatedly suggested that the only reason Kamala Harris didn’t pick Josh Shapiro to be her running mate was because of his Jewish faith,” the reporter asked. “Do you have any evidence to support that assertion, that a person who is married to a Jewish man is somehow antisemitic, or bowing to antisemites?”

Vance responded with hostility, refusing to answer the question.

“Well, I reject the premise of the question. I did not say that was the only reason that Kamala Harris didn’t choose Josh Shapiro,” Vance replied. “So you should, you know, take a little less DNC talking points when you ask your questions, and ask a real question.”

But just two days earlier, Vance had said precisely the opposite.

“I think that they will have not picked Shapiro, frankly, out of antisemitism in their own caucus and in their own party,” Vance told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt on Monday, hours before Harris’s campaign had even announced her pick of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz.

Vance would continue to trot out this argument over the next 48 hours. On Tuesday, Vance responded to the news of Walz’s pick by claiming that Harris had “listened to the Hamas wing of her party.”

At a rally in Philadelphia later that day, Vance immediately piggybacked off that sentiment and the statements of other Republicans who had begun claiming that Harris hadn’t picked Shapiro because he’s Jewish.

“I genuinely feel bad that for days, maybe even weeks, the guy actually had to run away from his Jewish heritage because of what the Democrats are saying about him. I think that’s scandalous and disgraceful,” Vance said. “Whatever disagreements on policy you have about somebody, the fact that that race, the vice presidential race on the Democratic side, became so focused on his ethnicity, I think is absolutely disgraceful.”

Vance’s weak attempt to walk back his statements on Wednesday fell flat, as it came just hours after Trump proudly repeated the exact same argument the Ohio senator claimed he’d never made.

On Wednesday morning, Trump suggested that Harris had not chosen Shapiro “because of the fact that he’s Jewish, and they think they’re going to offend somebody else.” In the same breath, Trump suggested that Jewish voters not supporting him ought to have their heads examined.

One of the leaders of the conservative manifesto Project 2025, Kevin Roberts, is delaying a book he wrote until after the 2024 election.

“There’s a time for writing, reading, and book tours—and a time to put down the books and go fight like hell to take back our country,” Roberts told RealClearPolitics. “That’s why I’ve chosen to move my book’s publication and promotion to after the election.”

The book, Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America, includes an introduction by Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance and was due to be published in September. The book will now come out on November 12, one week after Election Day.

Vance’s foreword to the book lauds Roberts for criticizing corporations and breaking with the Republican establishment, as well as his strong emphasis on family. Most notably, Vance endorses Roberts’s call for revolution:

As Kevin Roberts writes, “It’s fine to take a laissez-faire approach when you are in the safety of the sunshine. But when the twilight descends and you hear the wolves, you’ve got to circle the wagons and load the muskets.”

We are now all realizing that it’s time to circle the wagons and load the muskets. In the fights that lay [sic] ahead, these ideas are an essential weapon.

It’s highly likely that Roberts is delaying his book due to the negative publicity that Project 2025 has brought to Republicans and the Trump campaign. It contains plans to dismantle abortion rights, LGBTQ+ rights, labor rights, and numerous other protections. Trump has tried and failed to distance himself from the project, belying his own past support for the manifesto and Vance’s extensive ties to it.

Trump’s frustration with being tied to Project 2025 has led to one of its leaders stepping down from his role, bad blood between Trump’s campaign staff and the project’s operatives, conflict within MAGA world over the former president’s disavowals, and now a delayed book. But the Heritage Foundation’s massive effort means the project won’t go away, no matter how much Trump wants, and if he’s elected, Project 2025’s architects will put its dangerous ideas into practice.

Republican Vice Presidential nominee J.D. Vance appeared at a Kamala Harris rally in Phila—oh, it wasn’t a Harris rally? Then why on earth did he bring a massive sign that said “KAMALA”?

Donald Trump’s gaffe-prone running mate appeared at his own rally in Philadelphia Tuesday, where he stood in front of a sign that said, “KAMALA CHAOS”—only it didn’t quite read that way.

Vance had invited several people onstage with him to speak about the ways they’d been negatively affected by the Biden administration’s policies, specifically immigration. However, the small crowd that lurked behind Vance covered the word “CHAOS” on the low-hung banner. Vance appeared to stand in front of a giant sign that just read, “KAMALA.”

Across town, Harris and her newly announced running mate Minnesota Governor Tim Walz held a rally of their own. The campaign reported that 12,000 people had been in attendance, between the arena and the overflow section. Meanwhile, Vance’s rally drew a crowd of “more than 200 supporters” to a venue with a 1,300-person capacity, according to WHYY.

The ironic image quickly circulated online. The International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, or IATSE, posted the image on X (formerly Twitter) Tuesday.

The account captioned the photograph, “Here’s why you should hire union stagehands and stage designers: (They did not).”

IATSE confirmed Wednesday to The New Republic that Vance’s rally was nonunion. As their post went viral, the union took the opportunity to further criticize Trump.

“In 2004, Trump crossed our picket line as workers on ‘The Apprentice’ spoke up to get paid fairly,” IATSE wrote in another post. “He is dangerously anti-worker and anti-union.”

This should sting extra hard for Vance, who was brought in to appeal to white, working-class voters specifically. Earlier Tuesday, several prominent unions and union leaders had expressed their support for Walz, including the AFL-CIO, the American Federation of Teachers, and the United Automobile Workers.

Clearly, union support has tangible benefits. Harris’s rally, which was devoid of similar rigging errors, sported a large sign thanking “local union labor” for setting up the event.

Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s attempts to paint Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as a progressive bogeyman could morph into instant wins for Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign.

In an interview with Fox News on Tuesday night, McCarthy described Walz as an ardent leftist, claiming that the governor’s politics were akin to those of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders.

“This is the most extreme,” McCarthy said. “I served with Tim. We came into Congress together. He’s known for being the Bernie Sanders of Congress.”

Putting aside the fact that Sanders is literally “the Bernie Sanders of Congress,” that comparison could work wonders for Harris’s fresh campaign, which has energized voters across the political spectrum but has yet to show evidence of capturing the progressives.

Harris chose Walz as her running mate on Tuesday, but the selection is still too recent to indicate whether he has moved the needle on her campaign. Still, his addition has piqued the interest of young voters, who have warmly described the 60-year-old as having “peak Midwestern dad vibes.”

It’s been less than three weeks since she announced her bid for the White House, but Harris’s candidacy has already galvanized the electorate. She’s won the support of Black voters, white college-educated women, and independent women voters, all of whom have shown more than 20-point gains in their levels of support since Harris announced her candidacy.

Republicans have suggested that Walz’s involvement could help to rejigger how they approach chipping away at Harris’s momentum, which so far has amounted to elementary-level ad hominem attacks on Harris’s race and identity that have only angered conservative voters.

“This provides the much-needed reset,” Trump ally Vivek Ramaswamy told NBC News on Tuesday.

“If this race does come down to policy, I think it should be a hands-down victory—not just for Trump but for candidates all the way down the ballot,” he continued—adding that the possibility is on the table only “if Republicans keep our eye on the ball.”

Unfortunately for Ramaswamy, Trump doesn’t seem all that interested in only discussing policy.

Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance regularly texts infamous far-right troll Charles C. Johnson, a conspiracy theorist and Holocaust denier.

The Washington Post reports that Vance received a text message through the encrypted messaging app Signal from Johnson shortly after being elected to the Senate in 2022, and corresponded with the blogger for 20 months, until just weeks before Donald Trump chose Vance as his running mate.

The texting relationship between Vance and Johnson does not reflect well on the Ohio senator. Vance asked Johnson’s opinion on everything from UFOs to aid to Ukraine to the Republican Party’s relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Vance even appeared to accept advice from Johnson, including a suggestion that the senator should work to restrict foreign ownership of housing.

Johnson has promoted doubts about the Holocaust, created and promoted fake news stories about various politicians, and associated with neo-Nazis and white nationalists. But in their correspondence, Vance didn’t appear to be worried about that, instead expressing concern that Johnson was collecting information about him.

“If you are who you say you are then don’t you have my phone tapped?” Vance wrote to Johnson last fall, possibly alluding to the fact that Johnson has served as a federal informant in the past.

Ever since Vance was named as Trump’s running mate, many of his unfavorable speeches and stances have come to light, from his views on people without children to his association with the conservative manifesto Project 2025. His polling numbers are underwater, and Republicans think Trump shouldn’t have picked him. These latest revelations aren’t likely to help Vance or the Trump ticket, especially since Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz already has a groundswell of support.

Donald Trump got in on the conservative meltdown over Kamala Harris’s decision to pick Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate over Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, claiming that she did so because Shapiro is Jewish.

Trump, who shamelessly cavorted with a neo-Nazi, called in to Fox & Friends Wednesday morning, where he claimed Harris’s decision was “very insulting to Jewish people.”

Trump was asked to respond to a Siena College poll that found Trump leading by 1 percent among likely New York Jewish voters, as well as a remark Tuesday from political strategist Van Jones, who claimed that antisemitism had been “marbled into” the Democratic Party through progressive support for Palestine against Israel’s catastrophic military campaign. Jones had questioned how much of Harris’s decision involved “caving in to some of these darker parts in the party.”

Trump responded by claiming that he was “very close” to winning New York, which was why he was surprised Harris had not opted for Shapiro. (It’s worth noting that the last time a Republican presidential candidate won New York state was 1984.)

“I think that any person who votes for a Democrat—or in this case, these people—but who votes for a Democrat should have their head examined,” Trump said, an old attack he’s used repeatedly over the last six months against any Jewish person who has refused to support his presidential bid.

“They are so bad, if you look, they are so bad to Jewish people. What they’ve done, and the way they talk, and their policy and everything else,” Trump said.

Trump claimed that Harris had not chosen Shapiro “because of the fact that he’s Jewish, and they think they’re going to offend somebody else.” He didn’t deign to say whom.

“And you wouldn’t feel very comfortable if you were in Israel right now with this team. This is the worst team ever assembled for a Jewish person or for Israel, either one. The worst team ever assembled. This is a team that will not be there,” he said.

Trump has continued to trot out the same tired lines about how Jewish people should vote in the presidential upcoming election. Trump has previously suggested that any Jewish person who did not vote for him “does not love Israel” and “should be spoken to.” He claimed in March that “any Jewish person that votes for Democrats hates their religion.”

Trump and his fellow Republicans have been desperate to blame antisemitism for Harris’s apparent snub of Shapiro. But when Trump dined with Nick Fuentes, a noted antisemite, conservatives were eerily silent.

Donald Trump’s jabs at Vice President Kamala Harris aren’t doing him any favors.

The Republican nominee’s campaign appears to be flailing as it struggles to find a compelling line of attack against Harris. Trump spent much of the weekend dragging the former prosecutor as a “low IQ individual” while questioning her racial identity—a strategy that prompted some of his supporters online to plead that he challenge her policy rather than her person.

But the new week has shown no such growth in Trump’s game plan. Speaking on Fox News on Wednesday, Trump baselessly claimed that Harris refuses to do interviews because she can’t answer questions. (Harris has not done a sitdown interview with a network since her whirlwind campaign was announced. The last time she appeared on air was June 24 on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, when she was still defending President Joe Biden’s candidacy.)

But the bulk of Trump’s arsenal continued to be elementary-grade ad hominem attacks against the vice president.

“I heard she’s sort of a nasty person,” the convicted felon told Fox.

And the social media arm of Trump’s campaign didn’t seem to have better ammo, either. On Tuesday, the X account Trump’s War Room apparently thought it was cringe that the vice president said “Good evening” at a Philadelphia rally.

In other posts, Trump’s War Room called Harris and her newly minted number two pick,  Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, “crazy,” and complained that Harris’s crowd chanted “Lock him up”—a twist on a campaign slogan that Trump invented himself in 2016 as a weapon against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Meanwhile, even Trump’s most ardent supporters appear furious with him. Gun rights activist and charged Kenosha, Wisconsin, shooter Kyle Rittenhouse publicly withdrew his support from Trump last week, announcing in a video statement that he felt Trump wasn’t a true champion of the Second Amendment and intended to write in former Representative Ron Paul. (Though less than 12 hours after making the post, Rittenhouse was approached by Trump’s team and subsequently changed his tune.) 

Users on Trump’s social media platform, Truth Social, got the hashtag “#TrumpIsACoward” trending after the Republican nominee backed out of a prearranged September 10 debate with Harris on ABC News.

And a Morning Consult poll published Monday revealed that voters across the country are turning on Trump. After spending months dismissing Biden as a tired old man, voters are suddenly far more likely to view the 78-year-old Republican nominee as too elderly for the job.

Missouri Representative Cori Bush became the second “Squad” member to get knocked out by the efforts of pro-Israel lobbyists Tuesday night, losing her primary race to St. Louis County prosecuting attorney Wesley Bell.

The race was tight, but Bell held a small but steady margin over Bush as the votes were counted.

The blow-up race became yet another temperature gauge on Democratic divisions over hot-button political issues, including the Israel-Palestine conflict. The fundraising arm of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC—the United Democracy Project PAC—spent more than $7 million on Bell’s campaign to undermine the pro-Palestine Bush’s influence in D.C.

The hotly contested issue made Bush’s race one of the priciest House primaries of all time—though not quite as expensive as New York Representative Jamaal Bowman’s primary, which he lost to Westchester County Executive George Latimer in June over similar issues. More than $23 million was spent on advertising alone in that race.

Bush has argued that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza and was one of the first representatives to call for a cease-fire, just weeks after Hamas’s October 7 attack.

Even in the waning days of the race, Bush staunchly defended her position on Israel’s war, which has so far killed more than 39,000 Palestinians. In an interview with The New York Times published Monday, Bush refused to call Hamas a terrorist organization.

“We were called terrorists during Ferguson,” Bush told the publication, referring to the anti-racism protests in Ferguson, Missouri, where she made her name as an activist. “I’m not trying to compare us, but that taught me to be careful about labeling if I don’t know.”

Her campaign later walked back the comment.

Meanwhile, her opponent had aggressively campaigned alongside Jewish advocacy groups in the St. Louis area. That could have helped him cinch the district’s 2.8 percent Jewish population—a demographic that Jewish Democratic Council of America chief of staff Sam Crystal told ABC News could “make the difference” in a close race.

“That he is not just expressing support for the issues that Jewish voters are prioritizing but taking the time to actually reach out to Jewish voters in the district and to create relationships with the Jewish leaders has been a big impact on why he’s gained so much support in the district,” Crystal told the outlet on Monday.

Ultimately, there were few policy differences between Bush and Bell. Instead, the election boiled down to foreign policy stances and political rhetoric, according to The Washington Post: a choice between a candidate who would vote alongside the Democratic establishment or one who would continue to challenge it.

Donald Trump’s campaign really does not want to talk about the presidential debate he backed out of, originally scheduled for September 10.

On Tuesday morning, Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, was interviewed on Newsmax, telling hosts Shaun Kraisman and Emma Rechenberg that Trump “will never back down from the hostile fake news media. He’s not afraid.”

“But why won’t former President Trump debate on ABC News, the one he committed to with Biden? Harris said she’d show up to that one. Do you have an answer for that? Does he have an answer for that?” Kraisman asked.

Leavitt initially hesitated.

“Yes, we do. Well, first of all, that debate was committed between President Trump and Joe Biden. The race has changed,” Leavitt said. The Kamala Harris campaign pounced, posting the interview on X (formerly Twitter).

Later on Tuesday, Trump campaign adviser Danielle Alvarez claimed on Fox News that the former president and convicted felon was ready to debate, noting that he “accepted” a debate that would be hosted by Fox.

“Kamala Harris is running scared, and I don’t blame her because President Trump delivered a knockout punch to Joe Biden in that first CNN debate. They formed a coup and forced him out. President Trump is absolutely prepared to debate,” Alvarez told Fox’s Bret Baier. “He takes tough interviews all the time, and it’s in stark contrast to Kamala Harris, who has not taken an interview in the 17 days since she ascended.”

“Well, he obviously stepped back from the ABC debate offer on September 10,” Baier pointed out. “But you’re saying that there’s a belief that Kamala Harris will accept a debate?”

“She absolutely should accept a debate,” Alvarez replied. “She needs to explain to the American people the failures that are occurring, especially in the last 24 hours.”

It’s funny to say that Harris is scared, when Trump refuses to take part in a debate with ABC News moderators who won’t be on his side, unlike at Fox News. Trump has made multiple excuses—from made-up polls to former President Barack Obama—for backing out of the previously agreed-upon debates. In reality, the truth is that he’s probably the one who is running scared.

So much for the law-and-order party: FBI agents recently executed a search warrant for Representative Andy Ogles, a Tennessee Republican, last week over his fraudulent campaign finance reports.

Nashville TV station NewsChannel5 broke the news Tuesday, reporting that sources said the warrant might have been limited to Ogles’s electronic devices. Ogles’s attorney didn’t deny that a warrant was issued, but declined to comment, as did the FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Tennessee.

Only last week, Ogles won his primary race for the Tennessee 5th congressional district, meaning that he could be under FBI investigation during the general election in November. The Department of Justice generally doesn’t make overt actions in investigations of political candidates 60 days before an election.

In May, Ogles filed amended campaign financial reports, admitting that when he first ran in 2022, he hadn’t loaned his campaign $320,000 as he had previously reported. He also filed more amendments retracting claims made in his financial reports of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions and expenditures.

At the time, Ogles was compared to disgraced ex-Congressman George Santos, who is facing criminal charges for inflating campaign fundraising numbers after also reporting loaning his campaign a lot of his own money.

NewsChannel5 reported last year that Ogles didn’t have the resources or assets to make such a loan to his campaign, raising the question of where the congressman got the money from, and if he made some illicit or extravagant purchases like Santos. Like Santos, Ogles was found to have lied about his background, making up details about his education. He also raised $25,000 on GoFundMe to build a garden in memory of his stillborn child, but the garden was never built.

It appears that the law might soon be catching up to Ogles, who has a history of sponsoring futile, symbolic bills. He has proposed sending protesting students to Gaza, tried to lift the gag order in Trump’s hush-money trial, and has tried to require the White House to inform Congress any time President Biden takes a drug “that could alter his alertness, judgment or mood.” It looks like he’ll finally have to spend his time doing something more serious: fighting possible federal charges.