Trump Blundered Badly When He Picked The Weird Guy As A Running Mate— Watch Him Blame The Democrats

Has Vance Really Changed His Mind About Trump?

The hands down most crucial way to look at a VP candidate is to see a potential president. Since Harry Truman (FDR’s vice president), 5 former vice president’s have become president— LBJ, Nixon, Ford, George H.W. Bush and Biden. On top of that, in the same period, 11 former vice presidential nominees were nominated by their party to be president— Truman, Nixon, LBJ, Humphrey, Mondale, Ford, Dole, H.W. Bush, Gore, Biden, Kamala. That’s a big deal. And that’s part of why the other crucial factor to consider is the decision-making that goes into the choice. I’m worried about which of the awful establishment candidates being floated by the Democrats, Kamala will select. Trump already managed to pick the worst of the potential running mates that the Republicans had been floating. 

At this point, even Trump seems to understand that listening to his two moron sons who were demanding Vance, was a big mistake. When swing voters look at Vance and imagine “a president”— even subconsciously— they pull back, aghast. An arrogant, one year-and-change, unaccomplished senator, no one— outside of MAGA die-hards— wants to see Vance as president. And, remember, Trump is very old, in bad shape, sick and from a family where the men get Alzheimers, symptoms of which are already manifesting themselves daily. 

Even the Wall Street Journal editors— in sync with Rupert Murdoch who thinks Vance is a loser— wrote that Vance’s reactionary proposal that families without children should pay higher taxes is “bad policy [and] bad politics” and would amount to using the tax code “as a political and cultural weapon against people who don’t share his values.” And that’s likely why Trump is being forced to spend time defending the least liked running mate anyone has chosen since… McCain blundered into Sarah Palin?

Politico reported that rightist Ben Shapiro bluntly questioned whether Trump should have picked Vance, saying on his show: ‘If you had a time machine, if you go back two weeks, would [Trump] have picked JD Vance again? I doubt it.’… Since Harris began her presidential campaign, Democrats have begun to go on offense against Vance, and polls suggest these attacks are beginning to take a hit. Vance averages a net favorability rating of negative 5 percent across all polls, lower than any vice presidential nominee in history, CNN analyst Harry Enten said this week— a lower figure than former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, perhaps the most infamous GOP running mate pick.” And that was before the story— whether true or not; we’ll never know for sure— broke about him having spent years humping a couch.

Contenders for the Democratic veepstakes have gone on the offensive against Vance, too. Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear slammed the Hillbilly Elegy author as a “phony,” saying “he ain’t from here” and accusing him of writing his memoir to “profit off our people.” Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz said “people like JD Vance know nothing about small town America,” adding: “none of my hillbilly cousins went to Yale.” And Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said he’d met a lot of people like Vance at Harvard “who would say whatever they needed to to get ahead.”

By Friday, the word “weird” had already been definitively inserted into the 2024 campaign, courtesy of Eli Stokols and Elena Schneider. “As this simple and quintessentially Midwestern description of Trump and Vance catches on,” they wrote, “it marks a notable rhetorical shift— away from Biden’s apocalyptic, high-minded messaging toward a more gut-level vernacular that may better capture how many voters react to far-right rhetoric of the kind Vance in particular trades in. ‘It perfectly describes the uneasiness people feel. It’s how people who don’t live and breathe politics every day react to hearing the Republican vice presidential candidate denigrate people without children,’ said Tim Hogan, a Democratic strategist who worked on the 2020 presidential campaign of another Minnesotan, Sen. Amy Klobuchar. ‘It’s simple. It’s how you might talk to your neighbor about the crazy political climate we’re living in.’… [O]n Friday, the Harris campaign used the term in multiple press releases. One focused on Vance’s anti-abortion stance, which called him ‘creepy’ in the subject line, began with a simple declaration: ‘JD Vance is weird.’ That followed another release highlighting negative coverage of Trump’s running mate in which Harris campaign spokesperson Serafina Chitika asserted that Vance had ‘spent all week making headlines for his out-of-touch, weird ideas.’… Describing Trump and Vance as ‘weird’ also serves as something of a catch-all, given the former president’s penchant for vicious personal attacks, incendiary language and off-topic riffs about Hannibal Lecter, shower head pressure and the comparative dangers of electric boats and sharks. It allows Democrats to characterize Vance’s own controversial statements about ‘childless cat ladies’— and to even nod at other, stranger memes shooting around the internet— without going into the details or even referencing them directly.’”

“Using new words gets people’s attention. [It’s] so easy to tune out the political language,” said Democratic strategist Martha McKenna. The “weird” label, she added, fits not just the candidates but the broader MAGA movement. “It’s the first word that came to mind when I saw the white bandages on the ears of delegates at the RNC: ‘That’s weird.’”

Tagging MAGA as “weird” started for [Tim] Walz during a series of keynote speeches at state party dinners in Kansas, Indiana, Nebraska and North Dakota, where the description drew big laughs and knowing nods from Midwesterners, according to one of the governor’s aides. He first used the term with the press in an interview with Politico eight months ago as he took over as chair of the Democratic Governors Association.

But it was his appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe on Tuesday, which was watched with heightened interest given Harris’ reported interest in him as a potential running mate, where the line really caught his party’s attention.

“These guys are just weird,” the former school teacher said, drawing audible chuckles from an off-air Joe Scarborough. “They’re running for, like, ‘He-Man Women Hater’s Club’ or something. That’s what they’re doing. That’s not what people are interested in.”

Hours later during another MSNBC appearance, Walz said it again. “These are weird people on the other side,” he said. “They want to take books away. They want to be in your exam room. That’s what it comes down to. Don’t go sugarcoating this— these are weird ideas.”

"Bizarre" works too:

Jonathan Weisman’s and Shane Goldmacher’s NY Times headline over the weekend, JD Vance Stumbles in His Debut as Democrats Go on Offense, probably caught Trump’s attention, especially when they noted that Vance’s “struggles have dented the sense of invulnerability that only a week ago seemed to be the overriding image of the Trump campaign… threatened to undermine the Trump campaign’s outreach to women, voters of color and the very blue-collar voters to whom Vance, a first-term Ohio senator, was supposed to appeal... Publicly, the Trump campaign is standing behind its vice-presidential nominee… But those ‘past comments’ appear to be resonating beyond the internet, especially with women, a demographic that has long been wary of Trump and whose support the former president had been courting. Democrats had already been going after Trump for the civil judgment in New York that found him liable for sexually assaulting the writer E. Jean Carroll, and then defaming her.”

Over the weekend, The Times also reported on a series of nearly 100 written communications between Vance and a former Yale Law School classmate “showing how Vance pivoted from a strong opponent of Trump to his running mate. Here are some of the excerpts highlighted by The Times:

And his summation of Trump and his character in 2016 was pretty definitive (and, incidentally, shared by Vance's wife):

Trump can do it, but he has just until next month if he decides he actually wants to replace Vance on the ticket.