Weirdo J.D. Vance Desperately Tries to Claim Tim Walz Is “Weird”

J.D. Vance is begging people to stop calling him and Donald Trump weird.

During a campaign stop in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, on Wednesday, Vance was asked to respond to the whole “weird thing,” which was popularized by Minnesota Governor Tim Walz before he was tapped to be Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate. 

The Republican vice presidential nominee attempted to dispel rumors of his weirdness. 

“I think that what makes Donald Trump and I good candidates and a good team is that we’re normal guys who wanna make this country great again, and we want Americans to be able to live the American dream,” he said.

Vance quickly pivoted into slinging some dirt of his own. He called Walz “pretty weird” for not kissing his wife onstage during his rally in Atlanta, which drew a crowd of more than 12,000 people. At Vance’s rally across town, the Ohio senator attracted a group of just over 200 people, according to local news outlet WHYY.  

Throughout Vance’s appearance Wednesday at Wollard International, an airplane part manufacturer, Vance made his best case for just how normal the Republican ticket is. But for Vance, even softball questions elicited strangely hostile, awkward answers. 

At one point, Vance was asked why people in Wisconsin would want to get a beer with him. 

“I guess, I guess they’d wanna have a beer with me because I actually do like to drink beer,” he said, signaling his apparent normalcy. “I probably like to drink beer a little bit too much, but that’s OK, I’m sure the media won’t give me too much crap over that.”

Vance proceeded to gush about his running mate, saying he’d never met someone “who likes normal people more than Trump.”

This week, Vance has been traveling solo, stopping in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, never far from the Harris-Walz campaign. On Friday, he will be rejoined in Montana by former President Donald Trump, who hasn’t campaigned all week. 

Donald Trump has spent weeks trying to disavow Project 2025 since it became clear just how deeply unpopular the christo-nationalist agenda is among American voters. He even went as far as to claim that he knew “nothing about Project 2025” after the leader of the group organizing it, Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, called for a “bloodless” revolution. But new evidence shows that Trump did know about the plan—and Roberts—as early as April 2022, when the two were photographed on a private flight together, smiling.

“I personally have talked to President Trump about Project 2025,” Roberts told The Washington Post that month, “because my role in the project has been to make sure that all of the candidates who have responded to our offer for a briefing on Project 2025 get one from me.”

Trump and Roberts took that flight, which the Heritage Foundation had chartered, from Trump’s home in Palm Beach, Florida, to the annual Heritage Foundation conference on the state coast. Trump was the conference’s keynote speaker.

“They’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do,” Trump said in his speech.

Project 2025 reflects Trump’s core political philosophy, and was designed to be a transition playbook to expedite the first 180 days of a potential second Trump presidency. But the 920-page Christian-nationalist manifesto boasts what would otherwise be considered outrageous policy positions, including dismantling staples of the executive branch such as the Department of Education.

It also proposes revisiting federal approval of the abortion pill, a national ban on pornography, placing the Justice Department under the control of the president, slashing federal funds for climate change research in an effort to sideline mitigation efforts, and repealing policies that help LGBTQ+ people and single mothers, on the basis that these laws threaten “Americans’ fundamental liberties.”

Trump’s campaign has grown increasingly frustrated by reporting on the affiliation between the campaign and Project 2025’s agenda, despite their apparent linkage and the program’s intention of enacting the former president’s wish list.

The two share political philosophies and key allies, including former Trump advisers Stephen Miller and John McEntee. In fact, at least 140 Trump staffers currently work for Project 2025. And as much as Trump wants to distance himself from the apparatus, Project 2025 has been thoroughly involved in staffing a future Trump presidency: Roberts has claimed the project has already “trained and vetted” more than 10,000 people to replace executive branch employees should the presumptive GOP presidential candidate win in November. But they may have more on the way—in November, Trump allies claimed they were looking to install as many as 54,000 pre-vetted Trump loyalists to the executive branch via a “Schedule F” executive order.

“Never before has the entire movement … banded together to construct a comprehensive plan to deconstruct the out-of-touch and weaponized administrative state,” Project 2025’s former director, Paul Dans, told Axios at the time.

Another architect of Project 2025, Russel Vought—whose simmering extremism has been fueled by year-long partnerships with renowned Christian nationalists—“is likely” to be appointed to a high-ranking position in a second Trump administration, the Associated Press reported Monday.

Regardless, senior Trump advisers have warned news outlets against reporting on the connections, repeatedly insisting that Project 2025 has no affiliation or involvement with the Trump campaign, and have instead pointed to Agenda47 as Trump’s official platform. They do not offer an explanation as to why Agenda47 is almost identical to Project 2025.

It turns out that Donald Trump had something nice to say about Minnesota Governor Tim Walz during the protests over George Floyd’s death in 2020.

At the time, ABC News reported Wednesday, Trump praised the now-Democratic vice presidential nominee, telling a group of state governors that Walz “dominated” and saying he was an example for other governors to follow.

“I know Governor Walz is on the phone, and we spoke, and I fully agree with the way he handled it the last couple of days,” Trump said on the June 1, 2020, phone call, a recording of which was obtained by ABC.

“I was very happy with the last couple of days, Tim,” Trump added. “You called up big numbers, and the big numbers knocked them out so fast it was like bowling pins.”

Trump also claimed on the call that it was his suggestion that Walz call in the National Guard to help manage the protests, which the Harris campaign categorically denied. The Trump campaign said Wednesday that Trump only praised Walz for listening to him.

“Governor Walz allowed Minneapolis to burn for days, despite President Trump’s offer to deploy soldiers and cries for help from the liberal Mayor of Minneapolis,” Trump press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement to ABC News.

“In this daily briefing phone call with Governors on June 1, days after the riots began, President Trump acknowledged Governor Walz for FINALLY taking action to deploy the National Guard to end the violence in the city,” Leavitt added.

The audio puts a serious damper on the Trump campaign’s claim that Walz was supposedly soft on crime and mishandled the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests.

Since Harris announced Walz as her running mate, both Trump and J.D. Vance have accused Democrats of antisemitism, Sarah Huckabee Sanders called Walz far left and was trolled for her efforts, and Vance has taken hollow shots at Walz’s two decades of military service. While it’s too early to tell if any of those attacks will stick, right now it seems like Trump, Vance, and the rest of the GOP are struggling for a rhetorical win, and Democrats hope that will translate to an electoral win for Harris and Walz.

J.D. Vance was not seen as the popular choice when Donald Trump selected him as his number two—and the Ohio senator has proven even less popular since joining the ticket.

Several polls have indicated that Vance has overwhelmingly underperformed among American voters, making him the least popular nonincumbent veep candidate since 1980. Vance’s popularity has sunk by 8.8 percentage points since his vice presidential candidacy was announced at the Republican National Convention, according to a polling average aggregated by FiveThirtyEight.

One poll conducted by Public Policy Polling on July 31 found that 47 percent of polled Americans found Vance to be unfavorable, while just 30 percent considered him favorable. An ABC News-Ipsos poll conducted between July 20 and July 27 found that Vance’s favorability had dropped by nine points, and an AP-NORC poll conducted between July 15 and July 29 saw Vance’s favorably drop by eight points.

That’s in stark contrast to other recent vice presidential nominees, who all managed to keep their heads above water in the weeks following their nominations.

Voting blocs that have turned away en masse from Vance include women, independents, and Black voters. His favorability with those groups has tanked by double digits, according to The Washington Post. Vance’s reputation has also collapsed with college-educated voters, with whom his image has declined by 28 percent, according to an August Marist poll.

But confusingly, Trump has continued to send Vance out to campaign events all week, while the Republican presidential nominee has remained largely out of the public eye. Given Vance’s low appeal, it’s unclear how this strategy helps the campaign.

Utah has become the first state to institute a statewide book ban, prohibiting 13 books by authors including Margaret Atwood, Judy Blume, and Rupi Kaur in public school classrooms and libraries. 

The move comes after the state passed a bill on July 1 that allowed for books with “pornographic or indecent” material to be banned. Utah has a Republican governor and GOP supermajorities in both its state House and Senate. 

Six of the 13 banned books were written by fantasy romance author Sarah J. Mass. Twelve of the 13 have women authors. School districts as well as charter schools must now “legally” dispose of these books, which “may not be sold or distributed.”

The nonprofit free expression organization PEN America called the ban “a dark day for the freedom to read in Utah.”

The state’s ban “will impose a dystopian censorship regime across public schools and, in many cases, will directly contravene local preferences,” the organization’s Freedom to Read program director, Kasey Meehan, told The Guardian. “Allowing just a handful of districts to make decisions for the whole state is anti-democratic.”

Banning books is a theme across a lot of  dystopian fiction, for instance in Fahrenheit 451 and Nineteen Eighty-Four, titles that ironically could be banned next under Utah’s new law. In real life, book bans commonly occur in repressive and authoritarian societies. That fits into a pattern with Utah Republicans, who have also proposed monitoring which public restrooms people use. Utah’s extremism isn’t unique among red states, though: In Oklahoma, the state is requiring that the Bible be taught in schools.

According to The Salt Lake Tribune, the full list of banned books in Utah is:

• Blankets by Craig Thompson
• A Court of Frost and Starlight by Sarah J. Maas
• A Court of Mist and Fury by Sarah J. Maas
• A Court of Silver Flames by Sarah J. Maas
• A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas
• A Court of Wings and Ruin by Sarah J. Maas
• Empire of Storms by Sarah J. Maas
• Fallout by Ellen Hopkins
• Forever by Judy Blume
• Milk and Honey by Rupi Kaur
• Oryx & Crake by Margaret Atwood
• Tilt by Ellen Hopkins
• What Girls Are Made Of by Elana K. Arno