The GOP needs to convince voters that Donald Trump and JD Vance are regular guys, and, manifestly, they are not.
It would be strange for Democrats to attack the Republican presidential ticket for being “weird” if it weren’t true. But those men are getting weirder by the day.
Former president Donald Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance (Ohio), is off to a wobbly start. A Harris 2024 campaign email sent on Friday was headlined, “JD Vance Is a Creep (Who Wants to Ban Abortion Nationwide).” The statement continued, “JD Vance is weird. Voters know it – Vance is the most unpopular VP pick in decades.”
It was bad enough when footage resurfaced of a 2021 interview in which Vance called Democrats “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made.” Things got worse last week when Vance offered a non-apology, blaming “people” for “focusing so much on the sarcasm and not on the substance of what I actually said.”
Uh, okay, but that doesn’t help at all. The substance — which Vance said he stands by — is asserting that adults without children do not deserve an equal say in the nation’s affairs. Another unearthed clip of Vance showed him arguing that parents, when they vote, should be able to cast an extra ballot for each child in their family who is under voting age. He didn’t take that back, either, going only so far as to claim it was a “thought experiment” and not a firm policy position.
The top leadership is all “degenerates” by their own standards. I find this particularly ironic, because one of the biggest points of contention between red and blue is whether to be accepting of weirdness. The red aren’t. But that doesn’t stop them from being just as weird. They are just in denial.