JD Vance Acknowledges His Rocky Start as Trump VP in Interview With NBC News
(AP Photo/Paul Vernon)
Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance acknowledged he’s had a less than stellar rollout, but insisted Donald Trump is not disappointed in his running mate pick.
“I knew that when I came out of the gate there was going to be a couple of days of positive media coverage and then immediately they would go and attack me over everything that I had ever said in my life,” Vance told NBC News reporter Henry J. Gomez while on the campaign trail this week.
Since being announced as Trump’s running mate, a number of old clips of Vance have bubbled back to the surface of social media. He’s earned backlash for numerous comments criticizing Americans without kids. He specifically named Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in 2022 as “childless” and part of the “anti-kid” Democratic Party. The callout confused many as Harris is a stepmother and Buttigieg became a father shortly after Vance’s criticism.
Speaking with Gomez, Vance once again defended his comments and claimed he’s mainly criticizing the promotion of not having children.
“What I was criticizing and continue to criticize is a particular neurosis in American leadership that I think leads people to say crazy things, like you shouldn’t have children because climate change is a threat to the future. Climate change may very well be a problem, but it is not a problem that should motivate people to not have families. And I think that attitude is quite damaging. It’s quite destructive,” he said.
On Democratic critics repeatedly referring to him as “weird,” Vance called such attacks a “point of entry” for being on a national ticket.
“The price of entry of being on the national ticket and giving me an opportunity to govern is you have to … take the shots, and so I sort of expected it,” he said. “I think that, frankly, the people who’ve made a lot of money and acquired a lot of power screwing the country up are not going to go easily.”
