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J.D. Vance is . . . kind of a weird guy

Published on 85 Comments on J.D. Vance is . . . kind of a weird guy

J.D. Vance has been running for vice president less than two weeks and has already racked up an impressive list of recently uncovered greatest hits:

  • Suggested that parents should get more votes than people without children.
  • Said Kamala Harris is part of the community of "childless cat ladies" who want to make the country as miserable as they are. He later explained himself by saying he didn't actually have anything against cats.
  • Went on at length about the prospect of George Soros filling 747s full of (mainly) Black women who want to fly out of Ohio to get abortions. Said he was sympathetic to arguments this should be banned.
  • Became the target of a meme that he had fucked a couch in his youth. It is unclear how or why this started.
  • Wrote the foreword for a book by the head of the Heritage Foundation's ultra-right-wing Project 2025, which the Trump campaign is desperately trying to distance itself from.
  • Praised a book written by a right-wing conspiracy theorist that calls leftist protesters "unhumans" who want to kill anyone who has more than they do.

J.D. Vance is a very strange guy. I'm not sure how well this is going to play in the ol' heartland.

85 thoughts on “J.D. Vance is . . . kind of a weird guy”

  1. Art Eclectic

    It'll play just fine with the MAGA base, but will have the center people furtively eyeing the door and mentally locating exits.

    1. LactatingAlgore

      & trump is also a weird guy.

      just, when you're rich, it's mere eccentricity, not the kind of strangeness you cross the street to avoid.

      trump is captain beefheart, j.d. is wesley willis. (no offense to wesley.)

      ... rock over london
      rock on chicago
      trump-vance -- track america's periods again...

  3. D_Ohrk_E1

    It only took one week for JD to go from official VP nominee of the GOP to a liability to Trump. This is where things get interesting: Does Trump attempt to ditch JD with the ostensible argument that the Democrats did it?

    As I said before, Republicans don't get nuance.

    1. Josef

      Whatever the reason ends up being you can be sure it's going to be entertaining in a train wreck sort of way. I'm grinning imagining the look of betrayal on the face of J.D. Vance. If only for that reason I hope Trump does atleast try to replace him.

    2. coldhotel

      I don’t see Trump replacing Vance. Trump does not admit to making mistakes, he’ll double down on Vance, call for extending the vote to the unborn.

      1. Josef

        He'll say it wasn't his first choice or some other lame excuse. Similiar to how he distanced himself from his choices in his first and hopefully last administration.

        1. Marlowe

          Sometime in August, Unser Drumpfenführer will tell us that he never even met JD Vance, though he might have shaken his hand in a receiving line at Mar-a-Lago one time. The MAGA faithful will nod and applaud; the media will note that Drumpf is merely being Drumpf so its barely news. (I'm obviously exaggerating a little bit, but, amazing enough, not by much.)

      2. D_Ohrk_E1

        He replaced most of his cabinet. Some, twice. He can do it without admitting making an error: My aides told me JD was MAGA but it turned out he wasn't, or, IDK what happened to him but he's changed and he's not true MAGA anymore.

        1. Vog46

          More importantly is that Trump saw what happened when JOE B stepped aside. It set off a fire storm of support for Kamala. Trump will "allow" JD Vance to withdraw his consideration for VP
          The question is who will replace Vance?
          I suspect the eventual nominee will be DJT Jr.

          ALL donald wants is a return to a time where HE was the news, NOT Kamala nor her VP choice(s)
          And Donald Trump Jr could easily change his address to New York (if that ever came up)

          The ONLY thing missing is a named Hurricane like.......Donald this year

          1. D_Ohrk_E1

            I'll enjoy the schadenfreude, every last drop of it.

            No on Junior, though. Junior likes the spotlight just as much and says stupid things all the time. If he's going to pick family he'll either choose Ivanka or Jared.

            1. Vog46

              Junior knows his place which Dad likes.
              Junior dresses nicely, got a female companion that wears too much makeup, and wears revealing clothes but obeys the old man
              I'll go with Junior.
              Jarvanka comes with its own problems. Ivanka over shadows Jared and sometimes Dad. The Saudi deal would take away from Dads campaign. No, I think Jared relishes the doors that "Dads" presidency opened for him but he sure didn't like the publicity that came with those open doors
              Junior is the perfect lapdog

              1. LactatingAlgore

                american juche.

                (well, not the first time. the somozas in honduras beat the trumps to that.

                hell, they beat the kims to it.)

      3. pipecock

        I mean he is already running with a different VP and fired Scaramucci amongst many others. You can say a lot about the guy, but not that he won’t get rid of an underling.

  4. Justin

    The couch thing is awesome. More of this please. Democrats are squeamish about this sort of thing, but it’s a war. And in a war, you don’t cry about lies or even failed assassination attempts. You cheer them on.

    2. pipecock

      Yeah I’m still trying to understand how the Dems just suddenly got competent in this area. It’s been frustrating to watch them be unable to clown on the most clownable ppl in all of politics for the last forty years.

      1. LactatingAlgore

        the gop has always had yung pranksters on the comeup willing to do crazy things to smear dems. just look at 1960s/70s roger stone, 1980s ralph reed, 1990s david brock, & post-9/11 andy breitbart & james o'keeffe.

        contrariwise, leftcoded pranksters are the usual gang of idiots like tom forcade, abbie hoffmann, that whole yippie thing, & on to animal liberation front/earth liberation front, earthfirst, answer, where the protagonists are actually as happy to shit on democrats as stone or o'keeffe & leave gop alone.

        it's been asymmetrical polarization for the longest.

  6. aldoushickman

    He's also not that great, electorally speaking. In 2022, when he won his senate seat, he beat his Dem opponent by 6%; while that sounds impressive, the Republican governor in the same election beat his Dem opponent by a whopping 25%. Accordingly, many, many people who wanted a Republican governor in Ohio crossed parties to vote against Vance.

    (in fact: Gov. DeWine received 2.58 million votes, while Vance got only 2.19, meaning that nearly 400k DeWine voters--or about 15%--voted against Vance)

    Trump selected a VP who significantly underperformed in his own state. Whether he couch-consumated or no, Vance is a bad choice to help Trump with swing voters in swing states.

  8. KJK

    Except for couch fucking, the description of JDV is completely consistent and normal for today's MAGA GOP. He is what all good MAGA's strive to be.

    Instead of fucking couches, the MAGA GOP deity cheated on all three wives, is a rapist, self declared sexual predator, paid off women he had sex with to buy their silence, and purposely walked through the Miss USA pageant's dressing room while they were undressed.

    FYI, apparently, JDV wrote about couch fucking in his book, pages 179-81. So I guess its true, but who fucking cares.

    1. KJK

      I guess I got caught in the fake news couch fucking event. Goes to show what a 10 second Google search about something you really don't care about can do.

  9. bad Jim

    Vance misunderstood the line "Voulez-vous coucher avec moi"?

    The basic joke goes back to LBJ, who famously wanted to spread a rumor that his opponent was a pig fucker, not because it was true, but just to make him deny it.

    Someone put it out, on Twitter perhaps, that the story involving a couch and a rubber glove was to be found on a specified page in "Hillbilly Elegy". AP ran a story debunking it ... and then took it down, but not until it had been widely shared.

  11. kahner

    People keep saying how he's weird, and of course he is, but all of this seems like pretty standard beliefs and behavior for a republican. This is their brand.

  13. zic

    Just so long as the marks keep purchasing TruthSocial shares, all's well.

    I'm sure that the RNC has invested most of their kitty in shares, instead of GOP candidates in close races.

    So it looks to be a blue wave election, with the red-meat donations siphoned off to some off-shore account on a warm tropical island with a golf course and lots of babes in bathing suits.

      1. golack

        There were a bunch of new shares issued recently that diluted outstanding shares and caused a drop in prices (April), then the company allowed (some?) investors to exercise their warrants, bringing more shares onto the market and causing prices to fall.

        But valuation and P/E don't seem to be supported by the fundamentals. .

    2. Altoid

      Seems likely to me that the RNC's stash is multivalent, a good bit in the pockets of trump's lawyers and some in the tills at trump properties, as well as conservatively invested in that sure-fire market rocket.

  15. Cycledoc

    Just another indication as to how low the American political scene has fallen. I somehow can’t imagine this very ignorant person being second in line for the presidency. And it reflects terribly on Yale and even more so on his brilliant “Yale” graduate wife. Is love blind? Maybe.

  16. illilillili

    > calls leftist protesters "unhumans" who want to kill anyone who has more than they do.

    Why would we want to kill the goose that lays the golden egg? We just want to tax them. And not "anyone who has more". Only those who have obscenely more (and who probably got it by ripping off more deserving people).

  18. raoul

    Trump used to have better political instincts, why he trusted his sons on this is befuddling. Vance absolutely did not bring anything to the ticket and may be an anchor. I have to say his abortion comment is a thing of beauty, racist, antisemitic and misogynistic in one breath. The late James Watt would be proud (we have “every kind of mixture… black,… woman, … Jews and a cripple” describing people like cement.)

    2. Altoid

      I'm not so convinced Junior and Eric swayed him that much, honestly. How much has he listened to them before?

      Now *Pence* was a political pick-- ambassador to evangelicals, etc. Vance, well, there I think we're looking at a combination of most convincing suck-up of the three top possibilities (him, Burgum, Rubio), most in tune with trump's pure blood-and-soil mood of the moment, and most connected to ginormous piles of available cash (ie Thiel's) as key factors. He was convinced he'd win in a walk against Biden and wouldn't even have to fall back on all the vote-rigging and rat-fucking his people are working on. So Vance wasn't a *political* pick in the usual sense.

      Oh, and he's the only one of the three with a punchy one-syllable last name, as opposed to a weak-sounding two-syllable bleat. That might have been the whole ballgame right there.

    3. Marlowe

      I would never be befuddled by anything that Unser Drumpfenführer did or said unless it was an sincere act of kindness or mercy with absolutely zero possible benefit to himself. Or maybe if he ever used his little thumbs to type a sentence (just one!) on his vanity social media site that had no lies, no random capitalization, proper spelling, punctuation, and grammar, and parsed so well that even a Vulcan would declare it logical.

    4. Jasper_in_Boston

      Trump used to have better political instincts, why he trusted his sons on this is befuddling.

      His political instincts are/were overrated. He basically had one good election—2016, and in that one luck (Comey, badly divided Democratic Party, mini-recession in the Upper Midwest, the fact that Dems were trying for a 3rd consecutive term) undoubtedly played a role. The next three elections—2018, 2020, 2022—were more or less shitshows for the Trump-dominated GOP.

      He's not a very good politician. What he is is a very good white working class whisperer, and he happened to arrive on the political scene when that characteristic enabled him to dominate the Republican Party. But outside 2016, he really hasn't accomplished much in terms of political accomplishments. He's not fit to carry Nancy Pelosi's stilettos.

    5. ColBatGuano

      "racist, antisemitic and misogynistic in one breath"

      Yeah, he really hit all the talking points with that one.

    1. cld

      So, it wasn't the couch, it was the cushions.

      The guy Snopes found who claims he did it,

      It was a simple edit of an e-book copy of JD Vance's book, "Hillbilly Elegy." I edited the raw file, which was easy, since it was a pirated copy. Then I imagined the great expanse of Mr. Vance's sweat-slickened back curving over the loveseat he made his wife buy for them, the hussy with four legs and every kind of hole, I imagined these things as possible futures, in a meditative fugue, much like a real life Dr. Strange. I pulled the most likely reality out of this haze and then wrote it into the file. Then I loaded it up in my e-reader and took screenshots. Then I sent it on the internet to hopefully complete the work of my dark master, Lucifer, the liberator and bringer of forbidden light.

      Sure, but then I thought, --what if it really was in the galleys and Vance thought it might come out and decided to get ahead of the story by creating his own debunkable fake? He is exactly that diabolical.

  20. kenalovell

    Also weird is that he changed his birth name Bowman to Hamel. Then he changed Hamel to Vance after he left the military. And he insists on JD (no punctuation) instead of his perfectly good American names James David.

    Actually "screwed up in the head" might be more clinically precise than "weird".

    2. ResumeMan

      Honestly, of all the extremely bizarre and loathsome shit coming out about Vance, that one isn't really that weird. I mean it's "weird" as in very unusual but actually understandable.

      I don't have the details at hand, but basically all of those other names are associated with family members who treated him very badly and he wants no association with. The one that comes to mind is that Vance is the name of the grandparents who basically raised him, so he chose to go by that.

      So it's certainly odd, but there's a reason for it, and of all the (many, many) things to mock him for, that is one I think we should leave aside.

      1. pipecock

        What’s the old saying?

        “If you run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. If you run into assholes all day, you're the asshole.“

        I don’t think I need to expound upon the relevance here.

      2. LactatingAlgore

        regardless the reason, if any democrat politician had gone thru four or five names, they'd be branded as so patently inauthentic they didn't deserve to be elected to the sanitation commission in frozen bridge gap, nd, let alone senator or vice president.

        hell, i sm old enough to remember william jefferson blythe, sr's, other illegitimate children, whom william jefferson clinton [sic] never knew to exist, being held against ol' bill.

  21. Dana Decker

    Nowadays 747s haul cargo, not passengers.

    At least he didn't say "Every day, George Soros sends a DC-3 to Columbus to load up, disproportionately black women, to get them to go have abortions in California".

    With all the damaging information about Vance pouring in, it's clear that Trump's decision to pick him was a cat-astrophe.

    Re the couch stuff. It wasn't a couch. It was a loveseat -obviously.

  22. Altoid

    "Weird" is right about Vance, in spades, and beyond him I love the way the Harris campaign has started using "weird" about apparently everyone in trump's universe now. It's so true, and so obvious about virtually all of them once the label is spoken that it crystallizes their vibe to normies. I hope they keep this up-- I think it's a brilliant comms tack.

  23. cld

    I've got it!

    That look in J.D. Vance's beady blue eyes,

    it's like the exercise wheel in his cage broke and they can't afford to fix it so they're trying to make up for it by putting Diet Mountain Dew in his water bottle but he's not falling for it.

  24. cmayo

    From the white male Christian nationalist perspective, most of this stuff actually isn't weird.

    So, y'know, a significant chunk of the Republican voter base.

  25. cld

    America's tiniest huge dick promises vote for me and you'll never have to vote again,

    https://www.rawstory.com/donald-trump-2668822314/

    . . .
    After questioning why Catholic and Jewish people would vote Democrat, the president remarked Friday at his rally in West Palm Beach, Florida, that supporters have to “get out and vote.”

    “You won’t have to do it anymore. Four years, it will be fixed, it will be fine. You won’t have to vote anymore. In four years, you won’t have to vote again.”
    . . . .

  26. akapneogy

    " He later explained himself by saying he didn't actually have anything against cats."

    So, only against ladies?

  28. D_Ohrk_E1

    Trump said the quiet part out loud again.

    The former president urged attendees at the faith-themed event to vote — “Vote early. Vote absentee. Vote on Election Day. I don’t care how, but you have to get out and vote,” he said — and promised that in four years, “we’ll have it fixed so good you’re not going to have to vote.” -- WaPo

      1. iamr4man

        That’s what I heard too yet the closed captions said “I’m a Christian”. Also is anyone else talking about it. Should be big news I would think.

    2. Batchman

      That's pretty shocking, on the surface. The most charitable interpretation I can come up with is that he meant that Christian evangelists won't have to vote (en bloc) anymore after 2024 because both major parties will have aligned themselves with the extreme Christian ideology (look at Oklahoma).

      1. iamr4man

        I have to say that I’m really tired of. People giving Trump’s wildest, most disgusting statements a “charitable interpretation”.

        1. LactatingAlgore

          i am old enough to remember obama saying "57 states" & "marine corpse" was evidence of his unsuitability for the presidency.

  29. Vog46

    EXACTY why he wants Junior as his VP
    Even if Dad dies in office the name Trump continues on.
    It's a Trump desired monarchy.

    1. LactatingAlgore

      was it in relation to capitol police not joining the january 6th irregulars in massacring congress?

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