J.D. Vance has thoughts and opinions—and being a millennial, many of those thoughts and opinions are recorded online, where they live in perpetuity.
That wouldn’t be a problem, normally, except the 39-year-old junior senator from Ohio is the Republican nominee for vice president. He is also turning out to be a gift to Democratic opposition researchers from Santa Monica to Brooklyn.
Ever since Donald Trump selected him as his running mate, Vance has faced harsh criticism for painting Democrats as a bunch of “childless cat ladies.” Tellingly, he made the callous comment in 2021. The clip had been available this whole time but it was unearthed and weaponized at the worst possible moment for the Republican Party.
ADVERTISEMENT
“Picking Vance as the VP nominee was driven by pure arrogance,” former Trump staffer and political commentator Sarah Matthews told me. “Now that Trump is up against Harris, there’s probably some serious buyer’s remorse within the campaign. Vance brings nothing to the table.”
Although he’s relatively new to electoral politics, Vance has been in the public eye since the 2016 publication of his memoir Hillbilly Elegy. He started blogging a decade before that. And since the Internet forgets nothing, we now know about the time in 2010, when he was at Yale Law, that he yearned to attend an open bar with the Whiffenpoofs, an a capella group. That is definitely what Trump was looking for in a running mate: an a capella enthusiast.
On both substance and style, Vance is increasingly looking like a debacle. He could be the first vice presidential nominee since Sarah Palin, John McCain’s disastrous running mate in 2008, to actively harm the ticket.
In a 2021 conversation at Pacifica Christian, a private high school, Vance criticized the Sexual Revolution for “making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear,” going so far as to seemingly suggest that women should remain in abusive marriages for the sake of keeping the family intact.
It’s right there online. Has been this whole time. But only now is it making his GOP colleagues squirm. Republicans on Capitol Hill—where the self-important Vance has lost friends (if he ever made them)—are calling him Trump’s “worst choice” possible. There’s even speculation Trump could dump Vance.
The problem is that the Ohio senator once had fairly conventional views, which he ditched in a years-long campaign to win Trump’s favor. That means his record is full of inconsistencies, but also of increasingly extreme rhetoric meant to show the MAGA faithful that he’s one of them, not an Ivy Leaguer who loved the Whiffenpoofs’ rendition of “Little Pony.”
So there he is arguing to Charlie Kirk that people without children should pay higher taxes (“It’s that simple.”) “I certainly would like abortion to be illegal nationally,” he said in 2022. He has also mused about punishing women who travel to have abortions in states where it is legal to have the procedure performed there.
Again, it’s all right there, available freely to a populace that increasingly gets its news online. “In just 3 short years in politics, J.D. Vance has accumulated decades worth of politically damaging videos. Impressive,” Democratic operative Jared Leopold wrote on X.
I have just one question for the Trump campaign: Who vetted this guy?
