JD Vance personifies the joylessness of MAGA
His insult comedy tour is not going well.
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JD Vance is the least popular vice presidential candidate in modern history, and unlike Tim Walz, the more voters get to know him, the less they like him. There’s little mystery behind Vance’s plummeting approval rating: He’s aggressively unlikeable.
Vance reinforced this point during his disastrous interview last week with CNN’s John Berman. When Berman asked him about Donald Trump’s habit of posting unhinged QAnon conspiracies and grossly misogynistic memes about Kamala Harris and Hillary Clinton, Vance defended this deplorable behavior as just good-natured fun: “[Trump’s] a political candidate who isn’t stodgy, who likes to have some fun, and likes to tell some jokes.” (Watch below.)
Vance’s shameless response — and note that Berman clearly wasn’t buying it — sums up a major problem with the Trump/Vance ticket: Their smears and personal attacks aren’t funny, and Trump and Vance themselves don’t seem like they’re having much fun.
If the Harris campaign has come to represent “joy,” Trump’s third presidential campaign consistently projects anger and resentment that wallows in past grievances. Vance in particular personifies the sullen face of a joyless MAGA movement.
Laughing at everyone but laughing with no one
It’s telling that Vance’s notion of a freewheeling, lighthearted campaign involves disparaging political opponents with baseless slander and sexist screeds.
For example, Vance took a typically cheap shot at Harris prior to her interview with CNN’s Dana Bash. He posted a 2007 clip of Miss South Carolina Teen USA Caitlin Upton bombing an answer to a question about why Americans couldn’t find their own country on a map. He wrote: “BREAKING: I have gotten ahold of the full Kamala Harris CNN interview.”
Vance’s “joke” was lousy politics that distracted from any actual gaffes Harris might’ve made. (You’ll note that the Harris social media team consistently hangs Vance with his own awful words.) When Berman later reminded Vance that Upton is a real person, who was so humiliated by the 2007 incident that she contemplated suicide, Vance expressed zero remorse and refused to apologize.
“Look, I’ve said a lot of things on camera; I’ve said a lot of stupid things on camera,” he said. “Sometimes when you’re in the public eye, you make mistakes. And again, I think the best way to deal with it is to laugh at ourselves, laugh at this stuff and try to have some fun in politics.” (Watch below.)
Vance wasn’t laughing at himself, though. His “joke” was at the expense of another person. He was punching down.
It’s an telling contrast to the collective MAGA freakout when Tim Walz joked in a video about his limited spice palate and affection for “white guy tacos.” Ben Shapiro, Matt Walsh, Megyn Kelly and other right-wingers accused Walz of “self-loathing” anti-white bigotry. These are people who don’t appreciate or even comprehend self-deprecating humor, because for them, humor is solely another form of exerting dominance over people who are more vulnerable.
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By any reasonable measure, the Harris/Walz ticket is the one having actual fun on the campaign trail. “Fun,” however, is not a word that easily applies to Vance’s awkward encounter a couple weeks ago with the staff at Holt's Sweet Shop in Valdosta, Georgia.
Vance asked perfunctory, close-ended questions, and not a single joke or laugh was shared. Simply put, the footage is brutal. (Watch below if you can bear the cringe.)
Vance’s botched attempt to order doughnuts drew immediate comparisons to Walz’s more relaxed exchange with the staff at a Runza restaurant in Nebraska. Walz obviously had the superior advance team: Runza staff knew who he was and was actually pleased to see him. Walz was characteristically affable and seemed genuinely interested in what the staff had to say.
“Sorry for holding this up for you,” Walz said, acknowledging that these visits aren’t convenient for the staff. “We really came just to go to Runza but then we had a little rally on the side.”
See, that was a joke, but it wasn’t mean-spirited or at someone else’s expense. (Watch below.)
Vance, on the other hand, struggles to crack a joke that doesn’t sound petulant and bitter.
For instance, while in Valdosta, he “joked” about running the “fake news media” out of town, and he reportedly told the staff at a deli in Kenosha, Wisconsin, “You have any food here you really don’t like? We’ll take some and feed it to the journalists on the plane.” Vance is incapable of reading a crowd: What competent politician would even jokingly ask a deli for their “worst” food?
This isn’t a new problem for Vance, either. When he was running for Senate in 2022, he tried out some sexist dad humor at a campaign stop in Ohio. First, he tried calling the vice president “Cacklela” instead of “Kamala.” No one laughed, but undaunted, he delivered a classless joke about how Bill Clinton was watching Harris on TV and thought, “She’s so condescending. She’s mean-spirited and kind of nasty. Maybe I should leave my wife and marry her instead.” This elicited a single chuckle amidst the awkward silence. (Watch below — video via @receiptmaven on twitter.)
This is why Walz is such an effective foil to Vance. He’s far more comfortable in his own skin, while Vance comes across like someone who practices every creepy line in the mirror. Vance has praised Trump for his tendency to “go off script,” but his own offensive remarks are never as extemporaneous. You can imagine Trump impulsively sharing misogynistic missives and absurd conspiracy theories about the size of Harris’s rallies, but Vance probably carefully considered the Miss Teen USA slam and concluded that it was comedy gold. That’s even more pathetic.
Vance’s attempts at levity are usually just shows of aggression and efforts to dominate his political opponents. Last month, he apparently thought it was a riot to approach the vice president’s plane when both he and Harris landed at the same airport in Wisconsin. He wasn’t self-effacing or charming. He was just a creep performing a Stupid Human Trick.
“I figured that I would come by and get a good look at the plane because hopefully it’s going to be my plane in a few months,” he told reporters, demonstrating zero humility. “I also thought you guys may get lonely, because the VP doesn’t answer questions.”
Of course, Vance doesn’t cheerfully engage with reporters. He was recently asked what makes him smile, and he practically snarled, “I smile at a lot of things — including bogus questions from the media, man. Look, if you watch a full speech that I give, I'm having a good time out here and I'm enjoying this. Sometimes you've got to take the good with the bad, and right now, I am angry about what Kamala Harris has done to this country.”
It doesn’t take Bill Clinton’s political instincts to recognize “What makes you smile?” as an easy layup question. Yet Vance explicitly refused an opportunity to show voters his pleasant side — assuming it exists — and instead reminded everyone that he’s seething with barely concealed rage, just like his equally mopey running mate.
Trump’s not having fun either
Donald Trump was, to say the least, an unconventional candidate in 2016.
Trump mocked his political opponents with silly, demeaning nicknames and brought a WWE-style showmanship to the GOP primary and eventually the general election. He was crass and vulgar, but he presented himself as the nation’s savior who didn’t have time for politically correct niceties. Mike Huckabee actually compared him to the grizzled sea captain in Jaws.
Even many Democrats enjoyed the guilty pleasure of watching Trump mercilessly mock his Republican primary opponents, especially the odious Ted Cruz. Trump’s 2016 campaign was like Andy Kaufman’s star turn as a wrestling “heel,” but unfortunately for America, it wasn’t an act.
Now, Trump feels stale, a declining attraction who’s often listless during campaign events where he rambles nonsensically about bacon, wind, and fictional cannibal Hannibal Lecter. He plays the greatest hits to diminishing returns and it’s clear he’s not enjoying himself the same way he did in 2016.
Rage and betrayal are the consistent themes of Trump’s platform: He still falsely insists that the 2020 election was stolen from him and whines that Democratic leaders orchestrated a coup that denied him his preferred opponent, Joe Biden. He’s already moved on to the next big lie as he feels the election slipping away.
Trump, however, has always been mostly incapable of making a joke at his own expense. His ego is too fragile, which might explain why he picked Vance as his replacement running mate. Trump is still bruised from Mike Pence’s refusal to aid and abet his attempted coup on January 6, and Vance bears all the signs of a bad rebound pick. In his DNC speech, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg called out a key difference between Vance and Trump’s once and never again VP: “At least Mike Pence was polite.”
Pence boasted a superficial veneer of respectability that proved helpful to winning over Trump-skeptical GOP voters in 2016, especially white women, who Trump narrowly carried over Hillary Clinton. But Vance doesn’t just lack Pence’s scruples or fidelity to the Constitution — he’s also openly hostile to women in general. Old clips regularly resurface of him deriding “childless cat ladies” who he claims “have no real value system” and are “miserable.” Worse, he openly antagonizes women in real time and seems unable to stop, as he did when he needlessly insulted Caitlin Upton. This includes women who might otherwise align themselves with the GOP. Former Fox News host Gretchen Carlson posted on X in response to Vance’s tweet mocking Upton, “How awful to hit Kamala Harris by dragging a private citizen who as a teen on live TV struggled with a response.”
It would seem obvious that Vance’s “childless cat lady” comment was politically toxic, but he continues to minimize its significant impact.
“The media wants to get offended about a sarcastic remark I made before I even ran for the United States Senate,” he said last month. But that’s untrue: He officially launched his Senate campaign in July 2021, and he was a guest on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show just a few weeks later when he said, “It’s just a basic fact – you look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC — the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children. And how does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it?”
Upton herself was a MAGA supporter who has shared Trump’s social media rants and posted anti-lockdown messages. She’s now called out Vance as a callow bully. She posted on social media before apparently shutting down her account, “it’s a shame that 17 years later this is still being brought up. There’s not too much else to say about it at this point. Regardless of political beliefs, one thing I do know is that social media and online bullying needs to stop.”
Vance is a bad insult comic posing as vice presidential nominee. So far, he’s had success playing to a specific audience of one: According to the New York Times, Trump finds Vance’s “combative style” endearing, but American voters find him far less appealing. FiveThirtyEight shows his net favorable rating at a dismal 33.9 percent and his unfavorable rating at 44.4 percent.
Pence was never wildly popular but his unfavorable rating was just 33 percent at this point in 2016, and during his tenure as vice president, his approval never sunk to Vance’s current lows. Of course, Pence usually avoided walking into rakes like Vance. He was content to remain Trump’s reliable straight man. Vance is desperately trying to be Trump, but such an effort is pointlessly redundant. The traditional role of VP as the campaign’s “attack dog” only works if the top of the ticket isn’t regularly foaming at the mouth.
In a normal campaign, the public reaction to Vance would demand a major course correction. But that would require at least admitting you’ve made a mistake, which is heresy in MAGA circles. It seems like Vance is doomed to more demoralizing “please clap” moments at his sparsely attended campaign events. These days he’s no longer delivering jokes. He’s become the punchline.
That’s it for today
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Vance…. Man is a joke. Made all the millions and STILL CANT BUY personality or a friend.
JD keeps being presented as some kind of very smart guy and yet all he comes across as is a jackass with a very mean spirit. I just wonder if his wife isn't somewhere in there wondering who the hell this awful creature is she's married to that looks for all the world like a man who hates women. And that thing about being valueless unless you have children, what the eff is all that about? No one would be surprised if that mind of his doesn't harbor just nothing but skeletons of thought.