JD Vance will say many embarrassing things during his next two-plus years as vice president, but smart Democratic campaign consultants should keep a recent video close at hand for use in 2028. During a March 16 press availability in the Oval Office, Vance insisted that, unlike the decades of “dumb presidents” before him, Donald Trump is a “smart” one.
The vice president was asked why he was supporting Trump’s war with Iran after having crowed in 2023 that he opposed foreign interventions. (Vance backed the president, he said then, because Trump would avoid “starting world-historic catastrophes in the Middle East” and was a man of “great restraint.”) With his trademark smirk, Vance pointed to the president’s great intellect as the reason why Americans should “trust President Trump to get the job done.”
Yes, Vance was celebrating the intelligence of a same man who suggested injecting bleach into human lungs to kill the Covid-19 virus and who bragged that he “aced” a cognitive test with sample questions like “what is this animal?” while pointing to a picture of a horse.
The “dumb/smart” video is cringeworthy now, especially since Vance is clearly using kindergarten vocabulary so that Trump, who is seated behind the Resolute Desk next to him, will understand the flattery. But it will look much worse in the future, once all doubt that this war is a massive failure has been removed and the vice president is asked if he still has faith in Trump’s towering intellect.
This is bad news for Vance, who has built his political brand by trying to appeal to the wannabe alpha-male crowd of the “manosphere,” a loose conglomerate of both secular and Christian right content creators whose bro poses and sexist politics helped propel Trump into the White House.
Plenty of political commentators have noted that, by defending Trump’s war with Iran, Vance looks like a grasping phony, which could hurt his presidential ambitions in 2028. But it’s even worse than that for the vice president. Clips like this underscore that he is weak and, frankly, emasculated — eager to debase himself on camera for crumbs of approval from a president whose political and physical strength both seem to be rapidly waning. This is bad news for Vance, who has built his political brand by trying to appeal to the wannabe alpha-male crowd of the “manosphere,” a loose conglomerate of both secular and Christian right content creators whose bro poses and sexist politics helped propel Trump into the White House in 2024.
Even before he was chosen as Trump’s running mate, Vance was betting his political fortunes on a backlash to feminism that exalts caveman sexism and comical macho posturing. His infamous diatribes about “childless cat ladies” were issued mostly on these male-centric podcasts, where talk about guns, mixed martial arts fighting and putting women back in the kitchen is the order of the day.
Since taking office, Vance has continued to complain about how society allegedly encourages young men to “suppress every masculine urge.” He defined these urges as telling jokes and having a beer with friends — two behaviors that approximately no one has actually denounced — but it’s hard to not notice the larger context of right-wing irritation at feminists for shaming men who, like Trump, are credibly accused of rape and sexual abuse. Despite trying to affect a “just-one-of-the-guys” posture — he grew a beard and tries to photographed with manosphere influencers like Jake Paul — Vance inevitably comes across as a hectoring bore, snidely lecturing reporters like they’re stupid children, even as he is typically saying things that are painfully devoid of reason.
A big part of Vance’s “alpha” act involves regularly bullying his wife Usha in public. I’ve covered this heavily on my show “Standing Room Only,” with clips of him making her stand by him and smile painfully while he mocks her, telling a crowd he wants her to convert to Christianity or suggesting she’s better off now that she had to quit her legal career to be his full-time support system.
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At a recent event in Michigan, Vance said that he asked her to have a fourth baby in 2024, and she replied, “Well, you can become vice president or you can have a fourth baby.” To complete this charming tale of a man slowly breaking his wife’s will until she is merely a vehicle for his ambitions, he bragged, “I got both.”
But picking on his wife may not be enough for the vice president to meet the domination-oriented definition of “masculinity” that wowed so many male Trump voters in 2024 — especially not when he’s being such a sub to Trump over the Iran war, which is already wildly unpopular, even with a lot of the MAGA influencers Vance has been courting. After his performance in the Oval Office, Vance offered even more embarrassing defenses of Trump and the war at his Michigan event. He called soaring gas prices a “temporary blip,” a statement that will likely come back to haunt him.
“Nobody likes war, and I guarantee the president of the United States is not interested in getting us in the kind of long-term quagmires that we’ve seen in years past,” he said in response to another question.
But perhaps the most obsequious comment was, “Once the president makes a decision, it’s up to everybody who serves in his administration to make it as successful as possible.” This statement wasn’t too pathetic on its face, but it came after a question about Joe Kent, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center who resigned in protest of the war on March 17. Whatever the left’s criticisms of Kent — and I have plenty — there can be no doubt who looks braver.
This is especially true because everyone knows that the vice president privately shares Kent’s skepticism of this war. It’s just that Kent was willing to say it out loud and back it up with action. Vance, on the other hand, performs for the president on camera and complains about his decision to the press through back channels. Vance may hope to distance himself from the administration’s inevitable failure in Iran with stories about anonymous “senior Trump officials” telling POLITICO that Vance “just opposes” the war. But it certainly makes him look cowardly that he can’t even muster the fortitude to say it in public, much less to his boss’s face.
As David Graham at the Atlantic noted, Vance’s public display of submission to Trump isn’t even helping him stay in the capricious president’s good graces. Trump’s doctors may still routinely ask him if he can identify barnyard animals on cognitive tests, but he still has the wits enough to know that the vice president and his allies are probably the source behind these “Vance hates the war” stories. As Salon contributing columnist Heather Digby Parton wrote, Secretary of State Marco Rubio “is being seen in elite circles as [Trump’s] heir apparent” in no small part because Rubio is fully on board with the Iran war and is better at feeding Trump the cheap flattery the president subsists on.
Of course, both Vance and Rubio are clomping around in ugly, oversized shoes because Trump demands it of them. Even before the Iran war, Trump made it clear that being in his inner circle meant checking your dignity at the door. For now, that may not fully emasculate all of them in the eyes of the manosphere types, who also have beclowned themselves for a decade now by holding up the makeup-caked reality TV host as their manly leader.
But Trump is an aging, bruise-and-rash-covered lame duck who broke every promise he made about lowering prices and staying out of wars. By the time 2028 comes around, Vance may very well be an embarrassing reminder to the MAGA brohood of their own failures — and they’ll want him to go away.
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