Get ready for even more JD Vance in the spotlight after shaky rollout
By Steve Contorno and Alayna Treene, CNN
(CNN) — JD Vance is making a second pass at introducing himself to America as the Ohio senator attempts to put his uneven rollout as Donald Trump’s running mate in the rearview mirror.
Simply put, the plan to get past this stretch is more Vance, not less.
A far more active calendar for Vance is already in motion as he seeks to turn the page. His days have been filled with visits to battlegrounds states – Nevada on Tuesday, Arizona on Wednesday and Georgia with Trump on Saturday. In between, he’s heading Thursday to the US-Mexico border, a regular campaign pilgrimage for Republicans.
There are plans for him to sit for a series of interviews with conservative and mainstream media outlets, according to people with knowledge of his upcoming schedule. The Trump campaign also hopes to capitalize on the generational contrast Vance brings to the race – he turns 40 on Friday – by having him appear on longer-form podcasts and digital shows that target younger audiences.
For instance, Vance recorded with the Nelk Boys this week for their “Full Send” podcast, a popular prankster and youth culture show that Trump also previously joined. The episode will be released in the coming days, according to a source familiar with the interview.
Vance is also expected to begin holding news conferences with reporters as early as this week, the source said.
And he will be tasked as the campaign’s policy attack dog, a role he embraced Tuesday as he stumped across Nevada trashing Vice President Kamala Harris’ past immigration stances and tying her to the current administration’s recent battles with inflation. The hope, if not the expectation, is that Vance can deliver a more disciplined message focused on immigration, inflation and crime – areas the campaign believes it has the edge on – compared with Trump, who tends to riff or veer off script at rallies and in interviews.
“Kamala Harris’ vision for America is open borders and closed factories,” Vance said in Henderson, Nevada. “It’s bigger government and smaller family bank accounts. It’s widespread war while we’re left praying for peace.”
The playbook for Vance hasn’t necessarily changed since he joined Trump on the ticket more than two weeks ago, but there’s undoubtedly a fresh urgency for the Republican senator to quickly change the conversation around his candidacy. Vance has spent the past two weeks largely on defense from resurfaced clips of him deriding “childless cat ladies” and suggesting that parents with children have more voting power.
Changing the conversation
His past remarks have attracted ire from celebrity icons and Taylor Swift supporters but also from conservative outlets. The Wall Street Journal editorial board eviscerated Vance’s comments as the “sort of smart-aleck crack that gets laughs in certain right-wing male precincts.” Conservative commentator Ben Shapiro wondered out loud to his sizable audience if Trump was having doubts about his pick. Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy, the online face of right-leaning “bro culture,” questioned Vance’s Republican bona fides.
“Sounds like a moron,” Portnoy wrote on social media in response to a video of Vance suggesting people without kids pay higher taxes.
As it is, Vance has spent much of his early time as the GOP vice presidential nomination explaining – a position politicians rarely want to be.
He said in an interview that his remark about “childless cat ladies” was a sarcastic quip but that he stood by the overall message, starting a new round of forehead slaps from Republican figures. Fox News host Trey Gowdy all but pleaded with Vance to try a new tact – “The American people are forgiving, if we ask,” the former South Carolina congressman said at the start of the interview – and Vance instead doubled down.
“If you look at what the left has done, they have radically taken this out of context,” Vance said, even as more video evidence emerged of him espousing similar views.
Liam Donovan, a veteran Republican strategist, suggested that the Trump campaign has missed opportunities to lead with Vance’s compelling background – growing up in poverty to a drug-addicted mother, then finding his way out through the Marines and Yale Law School – and his dynamic young family.
“They’re really ceding the playing field to Democrats, and I think it is a mistake,” Donovan told “CNN Newsroom” this week. “They need to get on an offensive message and reintroduce JD.”
Trump has defended his new running mate, who he said Monday “has got tremendous support.” Amid the fallout, Trump has also been privately encouraging Vance, telling him to move on, according to a source familiar with the matter.
That’s the approach Vance took Saturday night in Minnesota, where he told a St. Cloud crowd, “I served in the United States Marine Corps. I went to Iraq for this country. I built a business for this country, and my running mate took a bullet for this country. So my question to Kamala Harris is, what the hell have you done to question our loyalty to the United States of America?”
His delivery of the line, and its reception on social media, tickled Trump advisers, who viewed it as evidence of Vance improving on the road, according to three people close to the former president, who told CNN to expect Vance to continue deploying that line in future speeches.
Not the entry they hoped for
Privately, Trump’s campaign acknowledges this isn’t the entrance it envisioned for Vance when the former president tapped the freshman senator as an heir to his political movement. Vance was picked in part because he had proved an effective defender of Trump on cable television and it was hoped that he could articulate the ticket’s vision for the country, perhaps even better than the former president. Instead, the resurfaced clips have so far generated distractions and have forced Trump himself to defend Vance.
This also isn’t the political landscape the campaign expected Vance would step into – a race rocked by an assassination attempt on a former president and the unprecedented exit by an incumbent president.
Trump’s advisers contend that the early concerns are overblown, and they expect Vance to settle into the job in the coming weeks as he engages with more voters and reporters. They also believe anyone Trump had selected would have received similar treatment, a sentiment shared by one of those also-rans, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio.
“Everything they are attacking (Vance) on is exactly what the leftist would have said about whoever Trump picked,” Rubio wrote on social media.
Much of the hand-wringing, too, is coming from corners of the GOP that were already skeptical of Vance’s ascension into his new role. The Wall Street Journal editorial board campaigned for North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, with its owner, conservative media mogul Rupert Murdoch, lobbying for him behind the scenes. Gowdy was an unapologetic backer of his fellow South Carolinian and close friend Sen. Tim Scott. And Shapiro didn’t want Trump for the nomination in the first place; he favored Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
And there are other benchmarks that suggest Vance has succeeded in delivering new energy to the GOP ticket. His 2016 memoir “Hillbilly Elegy” is No.1 on The New York Times bestseller list for nonfiction paperbacks, and the movie based on the book cracked Netflix’s 10 most-watched list. Attendance at his events has exceeded capacity, and the fundraisers he has headlined have met, and in some instances exceeded, expectations.
At a closed-door fundraiser in Oklahoma City last week, Trump’s finance team was hoping the former president’s new running mate would raise $1 million. Vance raised $2 million, sources with direct knowledge of the figures said. He raised another $1 million with donors in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
But there are also potential landmines ahead. Vance wrote the foreword to an upcoming book from Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation, the organization that launched Project 2025. While Trump has attempted to distance himself from the conservative policy playbook, Vance praised Roberts’ work in promotional material, writing, “We are now all realizing that it’s time to circle the wagons and load the muskets. In the fights that lie ahead, these ideas are an essential weapon.”
Vance spokesman William Martin has said that the foreword had “nothing to do with Project 2025” and that Vance “has previously said that he has no involvement with it and has plenty of disagreements with what they’re calling for.” The book will be released September 24.
Nor does Trump’s team have a full grasp of what Vance, a millennial who entered adulthood in an age of email and text messages, might have put in writing as a younger man. The campaign was well aware of Vance’s past criticisms of Trump and the deeply anti-abortion views he vocally defended. They did not anticipate, though, that a former friend would turn over to the New York Times a trove of text messages in which Vance discusses attending San Francisco Pride and expresses disdain for the police and the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, a conservative icon.
Still, people close to both Trump and Vance argue that America has yet to learn how effective the Ohio senator can be when in the spotlight. While Trump in part selected Vance for their chemistry and close personal relationship, he also was impressed by the senator’s performance in TV interviews and his defense of the MAGA agenda.
“We will see more of that in the weeks to come,” said one Trump adviser.
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