The Worst People

Maybe Donald isn’t a good judge of character after all

Imagine this crew walking towards you?

Remember when my uncle told us he only hires the “best people?”

We know he probably wasn’t referring to his former Vice President—the man he almost got hanged simply for doing his job—or his first three chiefs of staff or the dozens of other former employees who are currently working to elect Vice President Kamala Harris.

And then there’s J.D. Vance. It’s only been three weeks, and he’s already proven himself to be a disastrous running mate. He’s an angry and charmless man who can’t even answer a simple question about what makes him happy without getting hostile. Donald may be suffering from the quickest case of buyer’s remorse since John McCain picked Sarah Palin to be his running mate.

It turns out, Vance is as mockable as Donald. Baseless rumors about J.D.’s intimate relations with a couch have seeped into the public consciousness. Memes abound of his alleged interest in dolphin pornography. He has the worst favorable/unfavorable rating of any running mate picked in the modern era—and that field includes Mike Pence, Dan Quayle, Joe Lieberman, and Dick Cheney.

Usually there’s a honeymoon period, but the more America gets to know him, the worse Vance’s numbers get. He’s not just creepy, he’s arrogant. After landing at the same airport as Airforce Two in Wisconsin today, he told reporters as he walked towards Harris’ planes that he “wanted to go say hello to the vice president and ask her why does she refuse to answer questions.” When it turned out she wasn’t there, he walked over anyway because he wanted to “check out my future plane.”

I hope the next time J.D. tries to get within a mile of the vice president’s plane, her Secret Service agents slap him with a restraining order. It’s probably best not to add stalking to your list of weird behaviors.

And it does seem that Vance is following Vice President Harris on her swing state tour. In addition to being in Wisconsin at the same time as she, he was in Philadelphia to speak to supporters in “an intimate setting” (guess what that means?) a few hours before Harris introduced Tim Walz as her running mate.

Donald undoubtedly knows Vance is shadowing their opponents. But he’s going to have a serious problem with the contrast between the massive Harris/Walz crowds and the scores of people who show up to see Vance.

Harris’s selection of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz must feel like salt in the wound. Unlike J.D., Walz has immediately proven himself to be an asset, helping Harris bring the house down at swing state rallies while the campaign raises money hand over fist (almost $40 million in the last 24 hours).

Walz is a veteran, a teacher, and a coach who actually seems to like and care about other people. There are no legitimate lines of attack that will stick. Vance is so rattled by this that he’s begun to lie about Walz’s 24 years of service in the National Guard. He falsely accused Walz of “stolen valor” and has refused to debate him, saying he wants to debate Harris instead. 

There is so much wrong with this, it’s hard to know where to start, but if the Republicans think we’re going to let them get away with another Swiftboat attack on another one of our candidates who served his country honorably, they are sorely mistaken—especially given the fact that the man at the top of their ticket is a five-time draft dodger who lied to get his deferments.

Donald has made Vance’s situation worse by sending him out on the trail by himself while Donald, for unspecified reasons (the corporate media might want to find out what they are), stays holed up at one of his golf clubs. Calling in to Fox and does not count as campaigning. Blasting out social media posts in the middle of the night doesn’t either—especially those in which he begs Joe Biden to get back onto the Democratic ticket. 

Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are good people, happy warriors, who have brought joy back into politics. But their happiness isn’t just contagious; it’s an unexpected and very effective contrast to the darkness they’re running against. 

The reason Vance and Donald can’t outrun the charges of weirdness — and the reason it has gotten so deep under their skin — is because they’re true, and they are slowly starting to realize what a huge liability it is. The problem for them is they don’t understand what they’re doing wrong. They’ve spent too many years in their Fox bubble where it might seem normal to attack “childless cat ladies,” call for menstrual surveillance, and believe that ten-year-old rape victims should be forced to give birth. Out in the real world we know all of this things are out of touch, disturbing, and deeply wrong.

I doubt Donald will replace Vance, not because it would be illegal (the Republican Party and the corrupt illegitimate super-majority on the Supreme Court will let him do whatever he wants). No, he won’t kick Vance to the curb, as much as he might want to, because to do so would be admitting he’d made a mistake.

But Donald is watching every second of those Harris/Walz rallies, and the size of those crowds is making him more desperate than he’s ever been. Vance had better hope he fares better than Mike Pence.