Fox News’s Attempt to Prove J.D. Vance Isn’t “Weird” Fails Miserably (2024)

Yet another video of Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance has resurfaced, and unfortunately for him, he explicitly said in it that racism helped elect Donald Trump president.

Mother Jones reports that in February 2017, Vance gave a talk at the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics as part of a series called “America in the Trump Era” after his book, Hillbilly Elegy, became a bestseller.

Discussing the 2016 presidential election, journalist Alex Kotlowitz asked Vance, “Where do you think race played into all this? Because I think the sort of myth is that all these Trump supporters are vehement racists and anti-immigrant. And so where do you think it played?”

Vance gave an answer that seems surprising today.

“Race definitely played a role in the 2016 election. I think race will always play a role in our country, It’s just sort of a constant fact of American life. And definitely some people who voted for Trump were racists, and they voted for him for racist reasons,” Vance responded.

Vance couched his answer by saying he didn’t think racism was the main motivator for Trump voters, but jobs were. But he did say that the 2016 election was “hyper-racialized,” and he blamed conservative extremists.

“The people that I blame for that are actually typically well-educated coastal elitists, people like Richard Spencer and the alt-right,” Vance said. “It’s telling that the alt-right is driven by primarily very well-educated, relatively smart, relatively stable people. It’s not driven by people in the Rust Belt who go on 4chan and talk about Michelle Obama in these really nasty ways.”

“Like Steve Bannon?” Kotlowitz asked.

“Right,” Vance replied, taking a shot at the Republican strategist who is now serving a prison sentence for contempt of Congress.

In an answer quite different from his present-day half-hearted defense of his Indian American wife, Usha, Vance addressed racism against his marriage head-on back then.

“There were all these alt-right people, and I’m in an interracial marriage, and I got a lot of stuff directed at me and my wife on online message boards and Twitter and so forth. So I definitely buy this was a racialized discourse unlike any that we’ve had in a really long time,” Vance said.

Senator J.D. Vance knows that Vice President Kamala Harris is a big threat. While he may not be willing to say it publicly, he’s certainly admitting it to donors.

In a new recording released Monday by The Washington Post, Vance spoke candidly at a fundraiser in Golden Valley, Minnesota, on Saturday, where the Ohio senator’s line to donors was far different from the about-face that he and former President Donald Trump had been presenting publicly.

“All of us were hit with a little bit of a political sucker punch,” said Vance. “The bad news is that Kamala Harris does not have the same baggage as Joe Biden because whatever we might have to say, Kamala is a lot younger. And Kamala Harris is obviously not struggling in the same ways that Joe Biden did.”

While Vance’s admission was not particularly surprising given Harris’s slate of high-profile Democratic endorsem*nts and how successful her initial fundraising efforts have been, it was a tune that the public hasn’t heard Vance sing.

As CNN’s Kaitlan Collins pointed out Monday night, this line was extremely different from what Trump was saying concurrently, over on Fox News.

“I think she’s a worse candidate than him,” Trump said in an interview with Laura Ingraham. She’s far more radical left. She is younger, but I mean she’s 60 years old. A lotta people—I didn’t know she was 60 years old, I thought she was a little younger.”

In general, the “Kamala’s worse than Biden” line seems to be the main strategy for the Trump campaign, but it certainly isn’t the reality they’re facing.

In the leaked audio, Vance admitted that the Trump campaign had the “unique opportunity” to shape public perception of a candidate that voters are far less familiar with, trying out different lines of attack to see what has the most impact.

“Love ’em or hate ’em, everybody has an opinion about Donald Trump and Joe Biden after the past eight years,” Vance said to the room of donors. “But Kamala Harris, people don’t really know.”

But shortly after President Joe Biden dropped out, Vance acted like nothing had changed.

“I don’t think the political calculus changes at all,” Vance told reporters on July 22. “We were running against Joe Biden’s open border, Kamala Harris’s open border. Kamala Harris supported the Green New Scam. Kamala Harris, frankly, covered Joe Biden even though it was obvious he was mentally incompetent for a very long time.”

Donald Trump did little, if anything, in a Fox News interview Monday night to explain what he meant when he told a group of supporters on Friday, “You won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians.”

Laura Ingraham asked Trump what he meant, and Trump gave a meandering answer that didn’t answer the question, talking instead about how much Christians support him and how Jewish people who don’t support him “should have their head examined.”

When he finally came back to the question at hand, he said “Christians are not known as a big voting group. They don’t vote, and I’m explaining that to ’em. You never vote. This time, vote. I’ll straighten out the country; you won’t have to vote anymore. I won’t need your vote.”

Ingraham interjected to try to help the convicted felon and Republican presidential nominee, saying, “You meant you don’t have to vote for you, because you’ll have four years in office.”

Trump still didn’t answer the question, talking about how gun owners don’t vote. When Ingraham pressed the matter again, Trump again came back to how Christians don’t vote and that they ought to this time, and then once again repeated his promise that people won’t have to vote in the future if he’s elected.

“Don’t worry about the future. You have to vote on November 5. After that, you don’t have to worry about voting anymore, I don’t care, because the country will be fixed, and we won’t even need your vote anymore because frankly, we will have such love if you don’t want to vote anymore, that’s OK,” Trump said in one of his trademark run-on sentences.

It doesn’t make sense as to why Trump keeps repeating this statement. Is he hinting at some sort of authoritarian takeover where voting doesn’t matter? And why is he claiming that Christians don’t vote when devout, fundamentalist Christians have been involved in politics for most of America’s history?

Also, last week Trump told his followers, “We don’t need the votes, I have so many votes,” sending a weird message just before the election. While Democrats won’t mind, this might be another sign of Trump’s continued cognitive decline.