Watch: J.D. Vance Fumbles Repeatedly Trying to Defend Trump Campaign

A one-on-one interview with Meet the Press has done absolutely nothing for J.D. Vance’s likability problem.

NBC’s Kristen Welker sat down with Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick on Sunday, but questions Vance could have used to clear the air with voters were instead used as opportunities to double down on how weird and alienating the fairly unpopular candidate is.

Vance—who has famously likened abortion to murder—insisted that the “childless cat lady” comment he made about Democratic leadership in 2021 was intended to be about wanting to give women more “choices.” Still, he doesn’t regret it.

“You’re calling it a sarcastic comment, and yet some women, and you got the feedback in real time, felt like it was a gut punch to them personally. Do you regret making that comment?” asked Welker.

“Look, I regret, certainly, that a lot of people took it the wrong way, and I certainly regret that the DNC and Kamala Harris lied about it—” Vance started, before Welker interjected to clarify if he regretted saying it.

“Look, Kristen, I’m going to say things from time to time that people disagree with,” Vance said. “I’m a real person. I’m going to make jokes, I’m going to say things sarcastically. And I think it’s important that we focus on the policy.”

“I think it’s most important to actually be the person I actually am,” Vance continued, later commenting that he believed that making the abrasively misogynistic remark was in line with him being a “normal human being.”

“I have a lot of regrets, Kristen, but making a joke three years ago was not in the Top 10 on the list,” Vance added.

In another portion of the interview, Vance seemingly had no response to a question about why Trump is undermining the integrity of the 2024 election before it has even occurred.

“Why is Donald Trump casting doubt on the election before it’s even happened?” Welker asked.

“I don’t think that’s what Donald Trump is doing,” Vance said.

“That’s what he’s doing,” Welker said.

“I think that what he’s saying is that we want to pursue a set of policies in the Republican Party that make it easier for every legal ballot to be cast and counted, but make it harder for illegally cast ballots to be counted,” Vance continued, arguing for reforming election laws by way of the judicial system. “Now, we can disagree about how many of those there are, whether there are a few hundred, a few thousand, maybe more.”

“Do you have faith that the 2024 election will be free and fair?” asked Welker.

“I do, Kristen,” Vance said. “I do think it’s going to be free and fair. And we’re going to do everything that we can to make sure that happens. We’re going to pursue every pathway to make sure, again, legal ballots get counted. But I feel very good about where we are. I think we’re going to win this race, and I think we’re going to win it in a very good election.”

There is no evidence of widespread voter fraud, despite what Vance and Trump continue to insist. Vance has also previously stated, including during the current campaign, that it’s up to the candidates to win the support of voters, as opposed to bringing doubt and suspicion to the process in which ballots are counted.

Donald Trump has accidentally invented yet another new word: “powerfulnnz.”

During an early Sunday morning posting spree on Truth Social, Trump wanted to congratulate border agents while slamming Kamala Harris, but his (short) fingers got tripped up.

“These are great patriots who work their hearts out to have a Strong and Powerfulnnz Border, only to be harassed by Border Czar Kamala Harris, who wants the,” Trump wrote, before giving up mid-sentence.

Though he ultimately deleted the post, the digital footprint remains.

The blunder may remind Americans of the infamous “covfefe” typo in 2017, when Trump typed, “Despite the constant negative press covfefe,” then abruptly stopped.

Senator Lindsay Graham struggled to justify Donald Trump’s outrageous behavior on Sunday, including the former president’s brutal dismissal of his longtime ally.

During an appearance on CNN’s State of the Union, host Jake Tapper confronted Graham with Trump’s dismissive comments about him.

Last week, Graham had told Meet the Press that Trump “the provocateur, the showman, may not win this election.” Tapper told Graham that Trump had responded to his urging to focus on policy, and played a clip of the former president speaking about the South Carolina Republican.

“Look, I like Lindsey. I don’t care what he says, okay?” Trump said during a CBS exclusive interview. “Lindsey wouldn’t have been elected if I didn’t endorse him. So you know, South Carolina—Lindsey’s my friend—but if I didn’t endorse, he would’ve had no chance of getting elected.”

Graham chuckled awkwardly when faced with Trump’s harsh dismissal.

“Well, I talked to him a couple of days ago now, and all I can say is that President Trump, when he was president of our country, we had the most secure border in 40 years, gas was at $1.87, Russia wasn’t invading Ukraine, the Arabs were making peace with the Israelis. He’s got a lot to be proud of,” Graham replied, continuing to heap praise on the Republican nominee.

“Me and him are good,” Graham added, attempting to sidestep Trump’s derisive response. “We’re going to be together. I’m going to Georgia with him. We’re going to try to have a unity event in Georgia to bring this whole party together. I will be by his side in this election. I am proud of what he did as our president. I look forward to him coming back.”

Throughout his interview, however, Graham continued to express significant differences of opinion from the candidate he was desperately backing. At one point, Tapper asked Graham, a staunch anti-abortion Republican, to respond to a post on Truth Social where Trump promised his administration would be “great for women and their reproductive rights.”

“What exactly is Donald Trump going to do to help women’s reproductive rights’” Tapper asked.

Graham couldn’t account for the president’s statement at all. “I don’t know, you need to ask him about that,” Graham replied, insisting that Trump was a “very good pro-life president.”

“He’s gonna leave the abortion issue to the states. He doesn’t believe there is a role for the federal government, my position has always been to be against late-term abortion. It’s a state issue—up to a point,” Graham said. He added that he had a bill that banned abortion after 15 weeks, which is not late-term. That bill was so unpopular, even within his own party, that it never made it to a floor vote.

Trump’s sudden, and baseless, declaration to advocate for women’s health has led to backlash from his anti-abortion supporters, who feel they have been abandoned by the Republican Party platform as it moves further from a federal ban. On Sunday, vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance said that Trump would veto a national abortion ban.

Tapper also questioned Graham about an upcoming gala to support January 6 rioters, which is set to be held at Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey. It’s unclear as of yet whether Trump will actually attend the event.

“Do you think it’s a mistake for him to go, and is it a mistake for this event to be taking place at Bedminster at all?” Tapper asked.

Graham said that those who stormed the U.S. Capitol “should go to jail, they committed a crime.” But he tried to equate Trump’s support for the rioters to Kamala Harris’s efforts to raise bail money for protesters in Minneapolis, Minnesota, following the riots over the death of George Floyd.

“So, when it comes to the parties condoning violence, I would say we both should knock it off in that regard,” Graham said.

When pressed on whether Trump should allow the fundraiser, Graham once again couldn’t explain the actions of the candidate he’d come to praise.

“Well, I’ll let him—there are people being held I think that have had their due process rights violated, quite frankly they haven’t been brought to trial yet, I don’t like that very much,” Graham said. “But I’ll leave it up to him, as to what caused his support.”

Donald Trump appears to be laying the groundwork to, once again, escape debating Vice President Kamala Harris.

In a late-night post to Truth Social, Trump questioned why he would participate in the September 10 debate on ABC, which he agreed to earlier this month while announcing his intention to participate in two other debates, as well.

“I watched ABC FAKE NEWS this morning, both lightweight reporter Jonathan Carl’s(K?) ridiculous and biased interview of Tom Cotton (who was fantastic!), and their so-called Panel of Trump Haters, and I ask, why would I do the Debate against Kamala Harris on that network?” Trump wrote. “Will panelist Donna Brazil give the questions to the Marxist Candidate like she did for Crooked Hillary Clinton? Will Kamala’s  best friend, who heads up ABC, do likewise.” 

“Where is Liddle’ George Slopadopolus hanging out now?” he continued. “Will he be involved. They’ve got a lot of questions to answer!!! Why did Harris turn down Fox, NBC, CBS, and even CNN? Stay tuned!!!”

CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins said she was unsurprised by the development. Speaking on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher on Friday, Collins shared that sources close to Trump had revealed that the former president is “really struggling” with the idea of going up against the former prosecutor.

“I still think it’s an open question, whether or not it happens,” Collins said. “I think Trump is nervous about it. I think Trump—I talk to a lot of sources in his world. I think he has really struggled with it. It’s not just a narrative or a talking point from Democrats. He really has struggled with how to combat her.” 

But actually failing to participate could be visually catastrophic for the supposed strongman candidate.

“I think it’s difficult, if not impossible, for him to pull out because his campaign manager had cards printed that said ‘anywhere, time, any place’ for President Biden,” Collins continued. “And it would look weak. But I don’t think he’s looking forward to it at this point.”

The announcement is the second time in a matter of weeks that Trump has reversed course on debating Harris. Earlier this month, Trump said that he had “terminated” the September 10 ABC News showdown over the fact that the Democratic nominee had changed when he had only agreed to debate “Sleepy Joe Biden.” In its place, Trump offered an alternative debate on Fox News in front of a live crowd, which Harris’s campaign did not sign up to.

But that didn’t go over well with his base. In the following days, Second Amendment activists and white supremacists pulled support from the MAGA nominee, and Truth Social users got the hashtag “#TrumpIsACoward” trending on the Trumpian platform after the news broke. 

As of the time of publication, “#TrumpIsACoward” is trending on X (formerly Twitter).

The election is still almost three months off, but Vice President Kamala Harris bested Donald Trump in at least one race that’s sure to eat away at the former reality TV star: the ratings game.

Harris’s acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention captured the attention of 15 million people Thursday night, approximately 20 percent more than the 12.3 million who tuned into the last night of the Republican National Convention to hear Trump accept his party’s nomination.

Several top swing state markets also favored Harris. More viewers tuned in to the vice president’s speech in Detroit, Atlanta, Phoenix, Charlotte, Raleigh, and Philadelphia, the last of which saw a 50 percentage point increase over people who watched the last night of the RNC, according to the president of insights and analytics for Fox Entertainment, Mike Mulvihill.

“WEST PALM BEACH was the top market for Vice President Harris’s acceptance speech with a 20.2 rating,” Mulvihill wrote in a separate post. “West Palm was also the top market for Donald Trump’s acceptance speech last month (19.9).”

It is possible, though, that the entirety of the Republican National Convention got more viewers than its liberal alternative.

“All week the DNC has had big leads in the overnights and the margins have narrowed in the final nationals,” Mulvihill said. “The 17% gap for last night’s full show is close enough that you can’t rule out the possibility of the RNC having the bigger national audience.”

In a bizarre exit-not-exit speech, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced Friday that he is not terminating his campaign but simply “suspending” it, and expects to remain on the ballot in several states.

The independent candidate was expected to officially announce his withdrawal from the race and endorse Republican nominee Donald Trump during a press conference, but he threw everyone a curveball by opting to remain in the race.

“In a series of long, intense discussions, I was surprised to discover that we are aligned on many issues,” Kennedy said of Trump, recalling a series of calls and meetings that the two had following the attempted assassination on Trump’s life.

The news of the endorsement broke shortly before Kennedy appeared for the delayed presser, revealing itself by way of a Pennsylvania court filing caught by the Associated Press.

“In an honest system, I believe that I would have won the election,” Kennedy said, citing his family’s political dynasty. “I’m sorry to say that while democracy may still be alive at the grassroots, it has become little more than a slogan for our [government.]”

The 70-year-old spent the majority of his exit speech lamenting the current state of the Democratic Party and its decision to nominate Vice President Kamala Harris, all while reiterating falsehoods and talking points touted by Trump via his Truth Social feed.

Kennedy explained he intends to withdraw his name from the ballot of battleground states, but remain on the ballot in other states in an effort to divert votes away from Harris and boost Trump.

“Three great causes drove me to enter this race in the first place, primarily. And these are the principles that persuaded me to leave the Democratic Party and run as an independent, and now to throw my support to President Trump,” Kennedy said, citing free speech, the Ukraine war, and the “war on our children.”

It remains to be seen exactly how Kennedy’s supporters will be distributed between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris. Kennedy had retained less than three percent of the vote as of Friday, according to aggregated polling data from The Hill.

The Kennedy family issued a statement against the independent candidate before the presser ended.

“We want an America filled with hope and bound together by a shared vision of a brighter future, a future defined by individual freedom, economic promise and national pride,” the letter, signed by Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, Courtney Kennedy, Kerry Kennedy, Chris Kennedy, and Rory Kennedy, read. “We believe in Harris and Walz. Our brother Bobby’s decision to endorse Trump today is a betrayal of the values that our father and our family hold most dear. It is a sad ending to a sad story.”

Kennedy’s endorsement of the Republican nominee may not come as a surprise to those who remember that the pair held a controversial phone call in July in which the former president floated the idea that Kennedy—a notorious vaccine skeptic—could lead the Health and Human Services Department should Trump win in November. (That call was, fascinatingly, leaked by Kennedy’s own son, Bobby Kennedy III.)

Kennedy’s pick for vice president, Nicole Shanahan, who also happened to be one of his primary investors, announced shortly after Kennedy’s speech ended that she approved of the decision.

“You sparked a movement that millions of Americans had been longing for,” Shanahan posted on X. “It has been one of my greatest honors to run this race with you. It has been awe-inspiring to witness the fearlessness you showed in the face of censorship, blatant lies about your character, and even threats against your life. Save our children, Bobby.”

Shanahan’s approval is a dramatic shift from her stance just the day before. On Thursday, Shanahan, also an outspoken anti-vaccine conspiracist, took to the Adam Carolla Show to share that the outbound independent presidential candidate was wavering on his endorsement of Trump.

“The hesitation we have right now in joining forces with Trump is that he has not apologized or publicly come out and said, ‘Operation Warp Speed was my fault,’” Shanahan said, referring to the Covid-19 vaccination campaign. “There was a lot that happened under Donald Trump’s watch that should not have happened and cannot happen again.”

“And if we are going to put our bet with him—and we haven’t, we have not confirmed anything—but we need absolute assurance,” she added.

This story has been updated.

During a campaign event with Michigan law enforcement earlier this week, Donald Trump didn’t just refuse to take questions. He may have enabled a crime.

At the event on Tuesday at the Livingston County Sheriff’s Office in the city of Howell, Trump dodged reporters, told lies about rising crime rates, and fearmongered about a “Kamala crime wave” occurring at levels “nobody has ever seen before.” Livingston officers stood behind him, alongside sheriff’s vehicles and a banner reading, “Michigan is Trump Country.”

As the Detroit Metro Times notes, it is against state law to use public resources to support a candidate for office. The Michigan Bureau of Elections is now reviewing two complaints that allege the sheriff’s office violated the law. In a video posted days before the event, Sheriff Michael Murphy offered this preemptive defense: “Let me make a couple of things clear: One, this is not a political event. This is a press conference.”

But Trump only took one question before leaving the event. Trump “can call it a press conference, but he was clearly advocating for his election as president. That was a campaign event, and what the Livingston County Sheriff’s Department did was illegal,” lawyer Mark Brewer, a former Michigan Democratic Party chair, told the Michigan Advance. “They held it in a public building, which was obviously cleaned up for Trump, and then they staged the vehicles behind him. And then you have uniformed officers there, as well. Those are all public resources.”

The Michigan Campaign Finance Act states that such a crime is punishable by up to 93 days in jail.

Donald Trump is trying to brush off the fact that he shared A.I.-generated images of Taylor Swift endorsing his campaign to his Truth Social account earlier this week, now claiming that he doesn’t know “anything about them.”

“I don’t know anything about them, other than somebody else generated them,” Trump told Fox Business correspondent Gary Trimble after his campaign event in Asheboro, North Carolina, on Wednesday. “I didn’t generate them.”

One fabricated image shared by Trump of the notoriously litigious pop star had Swift clad in red, white, and blue, posing like Uncle Sam before an American flag emblazoned with the text: “Taylor wants YOU to vote for Donald Trump.”

“I accept!” Trump captioned the image.

Another Swift-related post shared by the former president depicted a group of women marching in “Swifties for Trump” shirts (the post was labeled satire by its creator).

If Trump truly can’t tell the difference between an A.I. generated image and a genuine photograph, especially one that’s doctored to illustrate a campaign endorsement, then that’s a significant problem. But it’s far from the only A.I.-generated image that Trump has shared in recent weeks. Shortly after he began posting to his Twitter account—the first time he’d done so in earnest since the January 6 riot—the former president shared an A.I.-generated video of himself and X owner Elon Musk dancing.

Still, Trump warned Trimble, “A.I. is always very dangerous.”

“Somebody came out. They said, ‘Oh look at this,’” Trump attempted to explain to the reporter on Wednesday. “These were all made up by other people. A.I. is always very dangerous in that way.”

It’s not the first time this summer that Trump has obsessed over Swift. During a closed-door meeting between Trump and House Republicans in June—his first visit to Capitol Hill since before the January 6 insurrection—Trump insisted on discussing the pop phenom, lamenting that she might endorse President Joe Biden while he was still in the race. Days before the meeting, Variety reported that Trump had spoken at length about Swift in a one-on-one interview, describing her as “unusually beautiful.”

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told Stephen Colbert on Thursday that Minnesota Governor Tim Walz is driving Donald Trump and J.D. Vance “nuts.”

“I think that Trump and Vance, they think they have some kind of like, monopoly over masculinity,” Ocasio-Cortez said on The Late Show.

The Republican nominees have been freaking out ever since Walz first called them “weird” a few weeks ago, and have responded by desperately attacking the Minnesota governor’s son, wife, military history, and governing record.

“Walz has kinda shown up—he’s a football coach, he was the head of the gay-straight alliance as the football coach,” Ocasio-Cortez added. “And he’s like, ‘Actually, this stuff is weird, and why are you acting like that?’ And I think it’s driving them nuts, because he’s showing another way to be an upright man in America.”

The Colbert crowd roared in approval.

Speaking earlier this week in Pennsylvania, and definitely not at all rattled by these attacks, Trump assured his followers that he is the normal one. Referring to Walz, he said, “This whack job said we are weird, that J.D. and I are weird. I think we are extremely normal people—like you!”

But Trump seems especially keen on deflecting the insult from himself, not Vance. According to The New York Times, a GOP donor at an August 2 fundraiser asked about the “weird” label, to which Trump replied: “Not about me. They’re saying that about J.D.”

Amid a year of legal woes that added up to roughly half a billion dollars, Donald Trump has been leeching cash from an eyebrow-raising source: his campaign.

According to a CNN analysis of federal campaign finance data, Trump and associated political groups have funneled more than $28 million in campaign donations into his businesses since he first ran for office in 2015.

Other Republicans are reportedly also using their campaign budgets on Trump’s businesses in order to earn favor with the conservative populist. Republican candidates and conservative investors, including Bernie Moreno, former Georgia Senate candidate Herschel Walker, and Arizona Senate hopeful Kari Lake, have spent more on Trump’s businesses this year than at any point since 2016, reported CNN. Those expenses added up by way of “Mar-a-Lago fundraisers, stays at Trump’s hotels, and flights on the former president’s private jet,” the outlet reported.

Federal campaigns and PACs spent nearly $3.2 million on Trump properties in the first half of 2024 alone, though 80 percent of that came from Trump’s own campaign funds as well as political groups aligned with the Republican presidential nominee, reported CNN.

Karoline Leavitt, a spokesperson for Trump’s campaign, told CNN that “committees are paying the fair market rate for all venues and services” offered by Trump businesses.

But campaign finance experts see the trend as yet another signal that the Republican Party has completely bent the knee to the former reality TV star.

“He’s clearly now in complete control of the Republican Party,” Daniel Weiner, director of the Brennan Center’s Elections and Government Program, told CNN. “Patronizing his businesses has become one of the accepted ways that candidates and public officials express their loyalty to the party’s leader.”