JD Vance Praises Trump’s Longstanding Relationship With World’s Most Famous Palestinian: ‘Chuck Schumer!’

Vice President JD Vance spoke at Thursday’s fawning Cabinet meeting, where each of President Donald Trump’s top officials went around the table and took turns praising the president. Vance also used his time to crack a joke about Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) before tearing into the leading Democrat over the shutdown.

“Congratulations on yesterday. It was a big day to Marco, to Susie, to the entire team, but in particular, viewing it from this perspective, where for months the fake news media attacked you, attacked the entire team, attacked your approach,” Vance began, addressing Trump.

He added:

The definition of insanity is to do the same thing again and again expecting a different result. The reason we’re here is because the president actually charted a different course with a different team. He vested a lot of authority in Steve Witkoff in particular, and that’s why we’re here. It’s because you did something different, and I think it’s important to recognize that.

I also think the president—you know, Marco mentioned the president’s personal touch being a big part of this. The one thing I would say is, obviously, the president of the United States, a New York real estate billionaire, one of the most famous New Yorkers in the world, has a lot of interaction with a lot of people who are very pro-Israel. I think that was an important set of experiences and life experiences that he brought to the table.

“He also, of course, knew one of the most famous Palestinians in the world, Chuck Schumer!” Vance said to laughter, repeating a common attack Trump uses on Sen. Schumer. Vance continued:

And I think without that background of knowledge, it would have been impossible to get us to this point.

Second thing I want to say, just on Chuck Schumer: the president mentioned this, that Chuck Schumer said this has been very good for us this morning about the shutdown. One of the things that we talked about before all the media came in, and that all of us are going to work on for the rest of the day—we’ve been working on for days—is how to make the shutdown as painless as possible on the American people.

So while Chuck Schumer brags about this being good, and I think the president is right, it’s not good for him politically as much as he might think that it is, it’s causing real consequences for the American people. There’s a low-income food program, the WIC program—my mom actually used it when I was a baby. That program is about to be underfunded, and it’s about to get cut off because Chuck Schumer won’t open the government. We have troops—the Secretary of War mentioned how well we’re doing on recruitment. We’re trying to figure out how to pay our troops because Chuck Schumer is shutting down the U.S. government. There are veterans’ benefits that are going to suffer. There are Americans that are going to suffer because Chuck Schumer refuses to do his job.

So while we’re all celebrating this incredible success that we’ve had on the world stage, the country could be doing so much better if Chuck Schumer did his job and opened the government. Every single Republican except for Rand Paul has voted to open the government. A few moderate Democrats, to their credit, have voted with us to open the government. We just need five more Democrats to come to their senses and let the people’s government serve the American people. I hope that they’ll do that. Thank you.

Watch the clip above via Fox News.