While enthusiasm for Kamala Harris soared, Donald Trump’s pick for vice president was making zero sense before a small crowd in Byron Center, Michigan.
In one portion of J.D. Vance’s speech Wednesday, he seemed to forget what the average American spends on an economy vehicle, claiming that thanks to Harris’s spending policies, the “average new car costs nearly $50,000 a year”—a figure that would hardly translate to anything other than luxury vehicles.
Vance also flubbed a spur-of-the-moment interaction with a supporter, who shouted out that the potential administration should “fire Granholm,” referring to Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm. But Vance seemingly forgot who that was, instead responding that they would “fire the Agriculture Secretary.”
“She’s not doing a very good job,” Vance said, forgetting the gender of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack.
The Ohio senator also tried and failed to brush off comments that Trump made during a one-on-one interview with Elon Musk on Monday, in which the Republican nominee praised Musk for firing striking workers. The comment earned the ire of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, whose president described the behavior as “economic terrorism.”
“Well look, I like Teamsters’ president, I think he’s a good guy,” Vance said of Sean O’Brien. “But I think he’s wrong about this.”
“Donald Trump was not talking about firing Michigan autoworkers,” he continued. “He was talking about firing the employees of Twitter who use their power to censor American citizens. Those people ought to be fired.”
Vance, who famously authored The New York Times-bestselling memoir Hillbilly Elegy, has seen a significant decrease in the association of positive labels by voters since he was announced to the Republican ticket. Descriptive options such as “young,” “smart,” and “businessman” have all gone down among survey participants, according to a poll by centrist Democratic pollster Blueprint.
Most participants were aware of Vance’s strange and off-putting remarks, including an instance in which Vance claimed that childless adults should not hold positions of power as they don’t have a “direct stake” in the future of the country, deriding Democratic Party leaders as “childless cat ladies.” Approximately 50 percent of respondents said they were aware of Vance’s comments, while 55 percent said they were bothered by it.
Potential voters were also disturbed by a 2021 interview in which Vance defended a Texas abortion law’s lack of exceptions for instances of rape and incest by claiming that the resulting pregnancies were simply “inconvenient.” Roughly 62 percent of survey participants said they were “bothered” by that description, while 50 percent noted that it “bothers me a lot.”
Source Agencies
