Yep, that’s Vance’s headline attack on the Democratic National Convention.
The least popular vice presidential candidate in modern history, J.D. Vance, and the Fox & Friends hosts spent 14 minutes pretending that the Trump-Vance campaign isn’t in trouble.
The beginning of the interview is a big clue why.
“There were a lot of vibes, lots of energy” at the DNC last night, cohost Ainsley Earhardt began. “How is this working?” the “tough-journalist” wannabe "asked" Vance.
“I don’t think it’s working very well, Ainsley,” Vance said. At least he acknowledged he’s “obviously not the target audience" of the Democratic convention.
Still, I’d have thought Vance and/or the Trump campaign would have been ready to lead with something better than a meaningless conspiracy theory:
VANCE: When you have Barack Obama, the former Democratic president of the United States, sitting there and making his big speech and Kamala Harris is 90 miles away, I think it suggests that their party is not especially unified.
Of course, we know that Barack Obama’s one of the people who really forced Joe Biden out of the race to begin with. So, I think the conflict is actually buried beneath the surface but is there for all to see.
We know this was not the campaign’s planned message or at least not the one Fox News propagandists hoped for because as Vance spoke, a lower-third banner read, “Trump, Vance counter DNC programming with policy.”
First of all, even if Vance is right, who cares? There’s no doubt that Harris has energized the party, trounced Trump in fundraising and is surging in the polls. Even if Vance was too busy fixating on women’s reproductive lives to notice, Fox News surely has noticed. Secondly, there was a good, election-oriented reason for Harris and Walz to campaign in Milwaukee while the national spotlight was on them and while they knew the Obamas would bring down the house in Chicago: the need to win Wisconsin.
Vance continued with the kind of non-policy rhetoric he and his fave felonious sexual predator seem to love best: hate mongering and demonizing those you disagree with:
VANCE: For the American people, I mean, you ask yourself what is the Democratic party about in this country in 2024? It’s clearly about hatred of Donald Trump more than their love for America. They talked about Trump more than they talked about inflation, more than they talked about their foreign policy achievements, more than they talked about the economy. I think that suggests the thing that really unites the Democratic party is not any shared vision for how they want to advance this country, it’s their hatred of one person, a person who, by the way, took a bullet for this country, just a few short weeks ago.
This from the guy whose running mate smeared Harris as a DEI hire and not really Black!
Furthermore, Fox has been pleading with Trump to stick to the issues and stop the personal attacks, something he is obviously incapable of doing. On Sunday, Fox’s own Brit Hume said bluntly that the reason Trump is not doing better in the polls is “because he’s Trump.”
I think we can say that it's also because Vance is there, too.
You can watch the full interview below, from the August 21, 2024 Fox & Friends.
8/21/24 update: Fox is also trying to hype some big Democratic divide. Can you smell the desperation?
