JD Vance found time in his busy schedule to promote his book on daytime television today — and what a promotion it was.
In case you’re out of the loop and/or you’ve been concentrating on other, lesser news items like the Iran deal or the G7, allow me to enlighten you. Communion is the book nobody asked for, but by God, we’re all going to get. It’s about Vance’s conversion to Catholicism, presumably written in order to make the vice president seem more palatable for a 2028 presidential run.
His appearance on The View, a show whose audience — and panel — are predominantly middle-aged women, makes sense. It’s well-known both that MAGA Republicans are hemorrhaging female voters and that Vance as a person has a major woman problem. This is surely supposed to be the de-ickifying of a vice president who has steadfastly been giving women the ick since 2021.
If I were his campaign manager, however, my head would be in my hands right now. The panel opened with a question on the economy. Why are prices still high, he was asked, when Vance and Trump ran together on a platform of lower prices for all?
“We were elected on a number of mandates,” Vance clarified, in a bizarre twist on ‘well, actually’ that didn’t exactly make him look good. One was to lower immigration. Another was to lower prices, and as for that, “there’s a lot of work to do.” Which, I mean… of course.
He then hurtled through a clearly pre-prepped answer at 100 mph, bringing in immigration (again), capital investment, factories being built, and how, “I grew up in one of those towns that was forgotten.”
Joy Behar, visibly unimpressed, asked why Trump had called affordability a “hoax” and why he was spending millions of dollars on ballrooms, an arch and a White House cage match “when everybody knows Americans are struggling?”
Vance tried to deflect onto the Biden administration, and said, again, “There’s a lot more work to do,” again with no further specifics.
Trump “said he loves the inflation,” Behar retorted. Vance jumped in to nonsensically claim that “what he said was he loves that inflation is gonna come down.” The response from the panel was incredulous: “That’s not what he said,” was yelled over, “Are you his interpreter or are you his vice president?” At that, Vance laughed. But he offered no actual reply.
Vance is not built for these kinds of interactions. It’s true that he can put on a charming front, in some situations: he’s also an excellent debater, for instance, who wiped the floor with Tim Walz during the last vice-presidential debate, despite Walz polling as vastly more likeable. Sometimes, Vance proves exactly how he managed to climb the ranks from nobody to vice president in about five minutes. But today was not one of those times.
The problem is that Vance’s knee-jerk reaction to being challenged by a woman is to patronize or dismiss, and an all-female panel in front of an all-female studio audience wasn’t going to allow that. He’s also terrible at being, or even seeming, off-the-cuff and candid. When he said that Trump’s economic policies were going to “pay serious dividends” and Behar immediately asked, “When?” his smile began to wear thin as he hit back: “Well, Joy, what happens is that construction jobs build the factories and people go back to work.” It was condescending and weak all at once.
Later, when Whoopi Goldberg asked him about the whitewashing of American museums and college courses, Vance disingenuously asked, “What exactly are you talking about, Whoopi?” to groans from the audience. When Goldberg underlined, again, what she meant abut the removal of exhibits on slavery and Black achievements, with backup from the other panelists, he ended up at: “Black history is not erased.” Oh, OK then!
It was the same story when it came to the Epstein files, where the entire panel was careful to praise Vance’s public statements about the need for transparency. Given the chance to put some daylight between his response and Trump’s, he instead claimed, “I don’t know what documents you’re talking about.”
Pressed on specifics, he said: “There are things that are false and things that are true.” The segment was especially tense, with Vance at one point saying, “I have to defend my boss — I know you guys don’t always appreciate that,” and then ending up at: “Let’s talk about the book! I’m here to sell books, please!” Presumably, that part was supposed to be funny — but no one was laughing.
The audience reactions were telling throughout, not least because this was an audience of women who cheered and clapped warmly for Vance at the beginning but began to turn against him halfway through. How much bad behavior are you willing to excuse as a Christian, he was asked? The audience applauded. Why are people being dragged out of their houses by ICE agents, he was asked? The audience cheered. Why should we accept children being held in detention centers and why won’t you go and visit one of those centers yourself, he was asked? The audience clapped and whooped even louder.
Vance loves to deploy a logical fallacy and then move on, but The View is a bit too long of a show for that to work. By the third time he’d blamed a Trump policy on the Biden administration, the panel was rolling its eyes. “Let’s talk about this administration,” he was told, but he ignored it.
Trump’s clearly false claims about Central American countries emptying their prisons and asylums into the US? There were “caravans” in 2022 and 2023 that were “funded by governments,” Vance said. The ICE agenda not feeling very Christian? The bible “says you can have borders”. And if you care about kids in detention, then what about Mexican cartels sex trafficking young girls?! “You say I’m anti-minority,” he began, at one point, in response to Whoopi Goldberg, to which she immediately and flatly stated: “I never said that.”
And then it all came back to another, constant, tired refrain: the media, the media, the media. The media is the reason why people don’t like Trump. The media is the reason he once called his boss the American Hitler. The media is biased and even the photographs they publish are biased, because law enforcement “is not always going to be pretty when you take a picture of it,” even though secretly it’s righteous and good.
The final part of the show was dedicated to Vance’s infamous “childless cat ladies” comment, made in 2021 when he was running for the Senate. Women who are “miserable at their own lives” and “want to make the rest of the country miserable, too” are dragging the country down, he said back then. It’s a comment that’s followed him around for years, and that he has refused to disown, electing instead to mock people who are offended by it. But in the book he’s currently promoting as he stares down the barrel of the 2028 election, he’s suddenly decided he didn’t mean it after all, at least not in that way.
It’s “one of the dumbest things I ever said,” he writes in Communion, although he wasn’t quite so humble about it on The View. Instead, he bypassed the immediate question and pivoted to saying that “this country has become increasingly anti-family” and that he regrets making the comment because of the reaction to it, which overshadowed what he was apparently trying to say. He wasn’t insulting women when he insulted women, ladies! He was standing up for the American family! Did you not get that?!
Elsewhere in the book, Vance makes the same unserious claims made again and again by anti-abortion hardliners: that he doesn’t actually want to control women; he just wants to make it easier for them to keep their babies, which surely every woman really wants to do. He’ll achieve that, apparently, by re-normalizing the very normal idea of a family, and nebulously making things easier for moms and dads. I’ve never seen JD Vance out campaigning for maternity leave, or for universal childcare, or for free college, but maybe if you say, “I love marriage,” three times backwards into a mirror then all those little logistical issues will be magically transformed. Only one way to find out!
Oh, he also claims that Charlie Kirk’s death made him decide to have a fourth child with his wife, Usha. Make of that what you will.
What Vance underlined this morning, however, was how thin his arguments really are and how little he cares about the people affected by the policies he co-signs.
He brings up problems with an “anti-family” country while seated in the White House, in prime position to change that. He dishonestly misquotes Donald Trump to make him sound more normal. He refuses to back even his own previous position — which was a good position — on the Epstein files, because his boss didn’t wholeheartedly agree. He is too brittle and too angry to be able to pull off a good-natured back-and-forth with a group of women who are sympathetic enough to him that they’re promoting his book and handing him a printed onesie for his new baby, simply because they asked him a couple of difficult questions.
Every criticism against him is actually proof that he’s a victim; every female concern is a silly woman who doesn’t know what she’s talking about. He is, quite clearly, spending way too much time inside an echo chamber.
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