Analysis: JD Vance just tried to reassure America. He made everything so much worse. Tasked with making Iran, the president and a slush fund for Trump allies sound good, the VP dug his heels in — and proved exactly why he remains so unpopular to Americans across the political spectrum, writes Holly Baxter.
The Moment It Unravelled
The exact moment when it became clear that JD Vance was going to fumble this press conference was about 10 seconds in, when he called the Iran war “the Iran situation.” The moment when it became clear that it was going to become deeply weird was when he claimed that the United States doesn’t have a national healthcare system because there are American troops in Europe. And the moment when it became truly eye-opening was when he suggested taxpayers should be fine paying for a $1.8 billion (sorry, a patriotically pegged $1.776 billion, to be precise) slush fund for Trump allies because there aren’t taxes on overtime or tips.
An Uncomfortable Start
It had already started off uncomfortably. Tasked with answering the questions of White House correspondents in the place of Karoline Leavitt (currently on maternity leave), Vance came sauntering into an already tense political moment carrying the political equivalent of a can of gasoline and a copy of Hillbilly Elegy. He had a tough job: defending that already-infamous slush fund; defending a war that was going to last six weeks and is now dragging on, and on, and on; defending a president whose approval rating is underwater.
The thing is that JD can be briefly charming — he made a fairly well-received joke about outsourcing the vice presidency role after the birth of his fourth child this summer early in the briefing — but he can’t sustain it. He falls back on bombastic egotism, sometimes to disastrous effect.
Iran: A Personal Crusade
First of all: Iran. “As a father of three young kids,” he had to stand against them getting a nuclear weapon! Also, if Iran did have a nuclear weapon, everyone else would want one, and then what? Underlining how hard he’s personally worked on the Iran situation, Vance detailed to the room how it had taken him “22 hours on a plane there and 24 hours back” to travel to Islamabad as part of the negotiating team. The bravery is astounding. And yet, there’s more! He was sad to hear about the San Diego mosque bombing, not least because it happened five minutes’ drive away from a restaurant that he and his wife, Usha, often like to visit when they’re back in California. I don’t know about you, but that really made it real for me.
Iran, well, he knows as someone from a generation that was deployed to lots of Middle Eastern conflicts that a forever war is bad, so “this is not going to be one of those things that lasts forever.” And if you think about it, really, the war is basically over, because the “active period of conflict was five, five-and-a-half weeks.” Yes, the president literally wrote this morning on social media that he was considering bombing Iran today. But JD Vance doesn’t want a forever war, so why are you worried?
The Slush Fund Defence
On the slush fund, it was the same straw man fallacy over and over again: “We do have, John, in this country, innocent until proven guilty!” Vance said to a question that in no way suggested we didn’t. “We don’t automatically say that everybody accused of a crime was guilty,” he said to another, before going into an aside about how wrong it is to prosecute people simply because they have different political viewpoints to oneself.
Needless to say, he then immediately answered a question from the far-right Daily Caller about Ilhan Omar by saying that “it certainly seems like something fishy is there” in terms of her marriage and “it’s something the Department of Justice is looking at right now.”
Then, when pushed too hard by CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on the economy, he fully retreated back into his “Reddit bro with a protein shake” persona: “See, Kaitlan, what you did was you misrepresented the question that was asked and then you misrepresented the answer that I gave,” he said, smirking. It wasn’t big and it wasn’t clever.
Cross-Ideological Embarrassment
Vance creates a kind of cross-ideological secondhand embarrassment. Democrats find him sinister. Traditional conservatives find him offputting. Swing voters find him slimy. This performance underlined exactly why. Answers were thin on the ground, fallacies became obvious and people were patronized. Because however much he does try to lean into the salt-of-the-earth Appalachia thing, Vance always seems to eventually out himself as an elite-educated, smooth-talking former VC.
How much additional damage can JD Vance do to a situation at a press conference before the mandated applause begins? If you have a negative answer to that question, I have $1.8 billion that says you can be priced into silence.
