JD Vance Brags About Getting Nothing Done While He Was a Senator

Vice President JD Vance spoke for roughly 35 minutes at a MAGA rally in Fairbanks, Alaska, Monday evening. Within that time, he managed to admit that he really didn’t do very much while representing his home state of Ohio.

The confession came on the back of an insult toward Alaska’s Democratic Senate candidate, Mary Peltola, who served as one of the state’s representatives from 2022 to 2025.

“Her sole job was to support Alaskans in the House of Representatives. Yet she couldn’t be bothered to show up for one in five votes,” Vance said.

“I was a senator for all of two years. It’s not that hard of a job,” he continued. “You show up. You fight for your people. At a bare minimum, just show up and cast your vote.”

During another portion of the campaign stop, Vance shared an exchange he had with former senator and current State Secretary Marco Rubio in which he effectively chalked up his current role to the efficacy of conservative news pundits.

“Marco said, there are two kinds of guys in the United States Senate,” the vice president recalled. “There are the guys who want to go on TV and earn a lot of credibility for themselves, and there are guys who get things done.”

“I said, ‘Marco, first of all, don’t criticize the people who show up on TV,’” Vance said. “That made me vice president of the United States.”

The trip, which constituted Vance’s first visit to Alaska, was in support of Senator Dan Sullivan and Representative Nick Begich, both of whom were endorsed by Donald Trump.

Both Vance and Trump are expected to stay on the campaign trail for the next few weeks as the executive branch leaders attempt to prop up their struggling party members ahead of midterms. Trump, for his part, is expected to attend rallies for more than 94 percent of the time between now and November 3.

That will effectively place Trump at the center of an election cycle in which Republican candidates have increasingly tried to peel away from his influence.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll published in August suggested that the president’s influence is waning: Just 13 percent of Americans strongly approve of the president—compared to a 2025 YouGov poll that found 23 percent of people felt the same way a year prior.

Top issues weighing down Trump’s popularity include the seemingly endless Iran war, the rising cost of living, an economy and supply chain thrown out of whack by the president’s reckless tariffs, the cost of health care, and the encroachment of artificial intelligence and the industry’s data centers into American communities—a hot topic that Trump has unequivocally backed.

Kansas Senator Roger Marshall used unapproved images of children in his recent attack ad against Democratic opponent Adam Hamilton.

The Tall Oaks Camp and Conference Center publicly called on Marshall to stop using the campaign ad, which featured an image of its campers while accusing Hamilton of being related to a sexual abuse scandal at the Church of the Resurrection, which he founded. This has nothing to do with Tall Oaks.

“Our concern is straightforward,” Tall Oaks’ Board of Directors President Lea Ann Combs told the Kansas Reflector. “This advertisement creates a misleading association between Tall Oaks, the young people pictured and events that did not happen here. Protecting the dignity of these young people and accurately representing our organization should be a shared priority.”

Marshall’s chief of staff said the campaign believed the Tall Oaks picture was a stock image, and acknowledged it was not taken at Hamilton’s church. That wasn’t enough for the Hamilton campaign.

“Marshall lies and uses children as political pawns to distract from the fact he had pregnant mothers arrested and jailed over small medical debts, and voted to protect the predators named in the Epstein files,” said Hamilton’s campaign, striking back. “Roger Marshall is desperate to hide from his record of protecting predators, and preying on low-income families in Kansas.”

This all comes as the race for Senate in Kansas is the closest it’s been in almost 100 years, with Trump’s dismal approval rating in the state making Marshall’s chances at reelection all the more precarious.

President Donald Trump flipped out over an ugly photograph of his golf club.

The New York Times published a story Sunday about the ethical red flags surrounding Trump’s decision to hold an international summit at Trump National Doral, his private golf club in Miami, Florida. Never one to concern himself with his own ethics, Trump was more concerned about the photograph they used.

Trump accused the publication of using a “DOCTORED” picture of the building’s facade. “These people are STONE COLD LOSERS—Totally dishonest. That’s why they’re going TO HELL, and their subscription numbers are way down!” he wrote on Truth Social Monday night.

The president compared the Times photograph, taken by Scott McIntyre, showing a yellowed facade with noticeably dark and dirty spots, to a promotional photograph from the Trump Organization website, in which the facade looks white and pristine.

Earlier that day, Trump claimed the publication had used a “picture where the facade has been blackened and denigrated by them in order to make it look shoddy, filthy, and just plain BAD.”

“They want World Leaders to see this, knowing it is not the ‘TRUMP’ way,” he added.

Clearly, Trump’s way is to ignore any of the actual issues facing Americans to harp on his own petty bullshit—and that was actually his second temper tantrum of the day. The president had only just finished raging at a report that there were empty seats at his recent rally in Ohio. (Spoiler alert: there were.)

Dr. Oz thinks butter costs a dollar.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services administrator and TV doctor revealed just how out of touch he was with the average American on Fox News Monday night.

“You have no idea what things are gonna cost. I brought you some things [for] example,” he told Fox’s Laura Ingraham, holding a pack of butter. “Stick of butter, bag of peanuts. Butter in America, it’s about a buck [for] a stick like this.”

Ingraham checked him immediately.

“Where are you shopping? It’s not a buck, it’s like $4,” she said.

“I just bought this, so it’s close to that,” Oz stumbled. “Maybe it’s going bad!”

Butter is about $4 according to the Department of Labor, but someone as wealthy as Oz likely would never remember that.

“I want to challenge Dr. Oz. I will fly out on my own dime to D.C. and we can go to every grocery store he chooses, but at least 20 and we’ll stop when he finds butter for $1 lb,” former American Heart Association Chairman Craig Beam commented. “I’ll arrange a video crew to film it all.”

It’s ridiculous that Oz confidently brought a whole pack of butter on air just to be wildly incorrect about how much the average American—whom the Trump administration claims to care about—is paying for it. This isn’t the first time Oz has exposed his lack of connection to the average consumer. In 2022, during a failed Senate run in Pennsylvania, he was widely lambasted for posting an embarrassing video of him shopping at “Wegner’s” (not a real store) complaining about how much crudités cost. It’s clear he’s just as clueless now as he was then. It’s that kind of ignorance, that kind of apathy, that defines the Trump administration. It’s painfully obvious that they just don’t care.

At a rally in Nebraska Tuesday night, President Trump told his supporters exactly what he thinks about the well-being of the American people.

Trump first said that the prices of goods and services, which have gone up thanks to his ill-advised Iran war and tariff policies, were “just a little bit high. It’s a small price to pay for keeping the world safe—keeping our country safe.

“They can take out a city. Let them take, let them take out Los Angeles. Let them take out San Diego. This is a very small price to pay,” Trump said. “And it’s going to be over with very soon. It’s essentially almost over with.”

Conservative activists have argued that Trump didn’t really mean that losing the two cities is a “small price to pay,” but that he was referring to high gas prices. In that generous interpretation, Trump was arguing that his war, which has killed scores of civilians in the Middle East and an estimated 23 U.S. soldiers, is preventing Iran from waging large-scale attacks on American cities. But Iran’s targets during the war have been U.S. installations in the Middle East, and it wasn’t targeting American cities before the war, either.

California leaders, however, have taken his words at face value.

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass blasted Trump’s words as “irresponsible,” saying the remarks “could potentially compromise” the city’s safety.

“The role of a president is to protect the country, not to actively threaten it and encourage attacks on American lives,” Bass said in a statement. The mayor of San Diego, Todd Gloria, concurred, saying his city was “not collateral damage.”

“We are not expendable. And we are never a ‘small price to pay,’” Gloria wrote in a post on X. “Keep our city out of your reckless war talk.”

California’s Democratic nominee for governor, Xavier Becerra, also criticized the president’s speech.

“Thirteen million Californians call LA and San Diego counties home,” Becerra said. “Their lives are not a ‘small price to pay’ or a punchline for Donald Trump.”

Meanwhile, gas prices continue to go up thanks to Iran’s control of the Strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf and its allies in Yemen, the Houthi militia, controlling the Bab el-Mandeb Strait in the Red Sea. As of Tuesday morning, the average price of gas nationwide is $4.37 per gallon, while diesel fuel is a whopping $6.32 per gallon.

Trump’s claims that the war is almost over belie the fact that talks aren’t going anywhere right now. The president rejected Iran’s peace proposal on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly last month, and mediators haven’t made much headway. Meanwhile, the conflict has escalated in recent days as the Houthis have attacked Saudi Arabia’s airports, with the Saudis bombing Yemeni targets in response. The midterms are less than one month away, and Trump has nothing to show for his war.