J.D. Vance Roasted for Trying to Defend Trump’s Economic Nonsense

J.D. Vance crashed and burned during an interview on CNBC Thursday where he couldn’t back up Donald Trump’s plans for tariffs on foreign goods, or his own conservative economic populist ideas.

CNBC’s Becky Quick gave Vance the opportunity to refute a misconception about Trump’s economic policies, and Vance quickly spouted off some noneconomics—only to get brutally fact-checked.

“Well, I think one of the things I think they say is for example about Donald Trump’s economic policies is that somehow they’re going to jack up inflation,” Vance said. “Which is rich coming from Kamala Harris whose economic policies have directly led to inflation.”

“But tariffs are inflationary,” Quick replied.

Economists across the board have said Trump’s plan to impose 10–20 percent tariffs on all U.S. imports, and a 60 percent on imports from China, will raise prices for consumers. During Tuesday’s presidential debate, Harris dubbed Trump’s tariffs effectively a “sales tax” that could cost households up to $4,000 per year. Trump seemingly hadn’t understood what she meant and cried that he had no “sales tax.”

Vance tried to save his answer, “Well, not always—”

“They’re either inflationary, or people aren’t buying the products anymore,” Quick said simply.

Vance explained that tariffs would increase prices in the short term, but over the course of multiple years, the prices would go back down as U.S. manufacturers were induced to make investments in a particular industry.

CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin cut in to point out that Trump’s proposed tariffs did not target any industry in particular and would likely raise prices across the board, leaving U.S. manufacturing scrambling to pick up the slack in every sector.

“There are certain industries that unfortunately we don’t have. Now wouldn’t it be great if our country were to invest in some of these industries that we’re missing on the manufacturing side? But the amount of time it may very well take to ‘induce’ every, every industry to invest here to manufacture, that’s the complication with the plan,” Sorkin said.

Sorkin asked whether Trump planned to use his broad tariffs as a “negotiating cudgel” with China for other things, or if Americans could expect them to go into effect.

“I do think that it’s a negotiation,” Vance acquiesced, but then went right back to claiming that tariffs would not increase prices in the long term. He also claimed that because Trump had imposed tariffs narrowly during his first presidential term, they could also be imposed broadly without negative effects.

Vance later turned to his favorite subject, immigration, and seemed particularly excited (maybe a little too excited) to get in a point about his favorite city to complain about: Springfield, Ohio.

“If the path to prosperity was flooding your nation with low-wage immigrants, then Springfield, Ohio, would be the most prosperous country—most prosperous city in the world; America would be the most prosperous country in the world,” Vance said.

Here, Vance completely ignores the fact that the United States … is one of, if not the most prosperous country in the world. The U.S. has the highest global gross domestic product, at $25.43 trillion. More to the point, there is plenty of evidence that immigrants drive economic growth by filling more jobs and spending more money—this is true in Springfield. It’s also worth noting that here, Vance is speaking about immigrants generally, not undocumented workers.

It appears that Vance’s anti-immigrant politics and doom and gloom perspective about the country he hopes to run have caused him to elide some plain economic facts—and this became increasingly clear as Vance’s interview went on.

When asked what the first regulatory actions of the Trump administration would be, Vance was quick to answer: “Drill, baby, drill!”

Vance launched into a lengthy explanation of the importance of increasing natural gas drilling, and dismissed the claim that the country was already in a “renaissance” of American energy production as “preposterous.”

“It’s been a total disaster under the Biden-Harris administration,” Vance said. “And again, you just look at the energy costs. You look at how much Americans are paying for energy compared to three years ago. If it was so successful, then why are Americans payin’ 40 percent higher? When we’re sitting in Pennsylvania—we’re sitting on the Saudi Arabia of natural gas!”

“We’re producing more crude oil than any country. Ever,” Quick said, sounding slightly exhausted.

“We’re producing a lot less crude oil than we could be,” Vance replied, explaining that the U.S. is producing far fewer barrels under Harris than it would be under Trump.

When Stephen Miller claims that Venezuela is safer than the United States, he doesn’t want to be questioned about his sources.

While lingering in the spin room after the presidential debate Tuesday, the senior Trump adviser took questions from the press. Speaking about “criminal migrants that have been flooded [sic] in the country,” Miller claimed Venezuelan crime rates are down because all the criminals are coming to the United States.

“The crime rate in Venezuela is down, I believe, over 60 percent,” said Miller, echoing a point parroted by Trump himself. “Let’s put it this way, if you’re a dictator of a poor country with a high crime rate, wouldn’t you send your criminals to our open border?”

“Are you trusting the official figures from the Venezuelan dictatorship?” asked NTN24 reporter  José María Del Pino. “Those are Maduro numbers.”

Miller repeatedly refused to answer the question—by the end yelling loudly about how the criminals are coming here.

Venezuelan security officials have reported a 25 percent drop in the country’s violent crime and homicide rate, but the absence of official reports makes it hard to verify the data. Equally important, there’s no indication that any such drop is because of an “open border” or because  Maduro “let his criminals out of their jails” and into U.S. cities.

Miller is best known for his cruel immigration policies (which include eliminating DACA, enacting the Muslim ban, and implementing family separation) and his bad temper, which eventually got him demoted. Clearly, both of these impulses were on full display during his latest altercation with the press.

By the end, a shouting Miller tries to badger the reporter with questions, rather than the other way around. “Are Venezuelan gangs in this country, yes or no? Yes or no?” he repeats over and over again.

“Sir, you said that in Venezuela the crime rate is lower than the USA; what are your numbers? That is the question,” said an annoyed Del Pino.

As Del Pino notes, the Venezuelan homicide rate is still four times higher than that of the U.S. At the same time, violent crime and homicides have also dropped in the U.S., a point you won’t see Miller or Trump bringing up.

While Donald Trump’s team is publicly pushing a postdebate victory lap, many in his camp were privately disappointed in the Republican candidate’s performance on Tuesday.

CNN’s Kaitlan Collins reported Wednesday night that several Trump insiders were “stunned” by his poor performance and by just how easily he fell for all of Kamala Harris’s attempts to provoke him.

“I’m told that as soon as Donald Trump exited that debate stage, he immediately began quizzing those waiting in his viewing room about how the last 90 minutes had gone,” said Collins. “While several people praised him to his face, telling him they did a great job, that’s not what a lot of them are saying privately today.

“Instead, those around Trump have described what happened as a draw at best and a loss at worst,” Collins said. “Several of them told CNN they were stunned that the former president failed to do a better job executing on the talking points that he had been preparing with his team for weeks against Vice President Harris, her record, her policy reversals.”

Apparently, all that practice with members of his team, such as former Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard, had ultimately amounted to very little when it came time to debate.

“Trump had actually done more debate prep ahead of his first meeting with Harris than he did for his debate with President Biden earlier this summer. Yet they didn’t believe that he made some of the central arguments against her,” Collins explained. She said that Trump had failed to utilize one of his main criticisms against her: that Harris hadn’t enacted many of her campaign promises during her time in office.

“He didn’t go there until his closing argument, which surprised a lot of people in his inner circle,” Collins said. “Instead, they believe that Trump took the bait every single time Harris offered it up.”

“While multiple Trump allies described what happened last night as a missed opportunity for the former president, they have since started downplaying the debate’s significance overall,” Collins said.

Emerging details behind the first presidential debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and Donald Trump suggest that by the second commercial break, Harris was totally in control—and Trump knew he was blowing it.

As soon as the stagehands announced that the duo were clear for the four-minute commercial break, Trump lunged off the stage and away from the former prosecutor, letting a heavy sigh escape his pursed lips, according to CBS News’s Sara Cook.

While he was gone, Harris reportedly spent half of the break writing nonstop on her sheet of paper, only pausing to fix her hair.

“She then reviewed what she wrote for the next minute, making a few tweaks, before putting the pen down and looking out around the room with her hands folded in front of her. She took a sip of water from a glass placed under the lectern,” reported Cook.

Trump reemerged behind the podium with 30 seconds to air. The candidates did not look at each other, but stared straight ahead until the program resumed.

In the aftermath of the debate, Trump has baselessly attempted to claim that every postdebate poll has indicated he won the face-off. A CNN flash poll after the debate indicated that 63 percent of Americans felt that Harris outperformed Trump.

Meanwhile, conservatives have spent the better part of the day lamenting Trump’s performance, with South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham decrying the MAGA leader’s performance as a “disaster.”

Donald Trump sought to visit the 9/11 memorial in New York City Wednesday to commemorate the twenty-third anniversary of the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

But apparently he hasn’t been to this event much in years past (if at all), because one of the attendees was picked up by C-SPAN’s microphones calling out the former president and convicted felon.

“Where were you for 20 years? I’ve been here. Where were you?” one angry person asked Trump.

Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, considering how thin-skinned Trump and his supporters can be, the person was not captured on video. Trump is not particularly well liked in his native city, and he isn’t particularly happy with New York after its residents gave him his only criminal conviction in May. Bizarrely, during his visit to the Big Apple on Wednesday, he brought along the 9/11-denying, proudly Islamophobic, and self-described “pro-white nationalist” Laura Loomer.

The ceremony Wednesday was also attended by his running mate, J.D. Vance, President Joe Biden, and Vice President Kamala Harris, but none of them appear to have been targeted by any hecklers. Trump doesn’t have the best history of honoring slain Americans, whether it’s his visit to Arlington National Cemetery last month to make a campaign video or his refusal, in Paris in 2018, to visit the graves of American soldiers killed in World War I, calling them “suckers and losers.”

At least on Wednesday, Trump doesn’t appear to have said anything insulting or weird about the people killed in 2001, even if he seems to have only gone to the 9/11 commemoration because it’s an election year.