Vance comes into his own as Trump attack dog

Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) is quickly finding his footing as a top messenger for former President Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign.

Vance received high marks for his solo press conference in Detroit and remarks to reporters as he approached Vice President Kamala Harris’s plane at the airport in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. 

“Extremely solid extemporaneous political IQ here,” Republican strategist Josh Holmes, a former adviser to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), wrote on the social media website X. “Vance has barrel of the bat swings going here.”

National Review editor Rich Lowry described Vance as “​​inarguably a good spokesman for the ticket, and he’s shown it the last couple of days.”

“Pivot and attack, rinse and repeat,” Lowry continued (emphasis in the original). “That’s been the basic approach.”

“I wasn’t a fan of J.D. being the pick, but I like what I’ve seen over the past week,” a Republican operative told the Washington Examiner. 

Vice presidential running mates are frequently deployed as attack dogs on the campaign trail, allowing the top of the ticket to remain presidential and above the fray. Republicans have especially had a long history with this, from Spiro Agnew to Sarah Palin. 

Although a former president, Trump has seldom backed down from playing offense in order to appear presidential. Trump didn’t seem to need any help in this area, nor did the mild-mannered Hillbilly Elegy author he tapped as running mate initially seem best equipped to play the attacker role.

When Trump questioned how long Harris had identified as black while speaking to a conference of black journalists, Vance framed it as a broader attack on her authenticity amid a growing list of policy flip-flops.

“Look, I was not bothered at all by what President Trump said. And I didn’t take it as an attack on Kamala Harris’s biracial background at all,” Vance said. “What I took it as was an attack on Kamala Harris being a chameleon.”

Vance repeated this in his press conference on Wednesday. “What I took it as was an attack on Kamala Harris being a chameleon,” he said. “She pretends to be one thing when she’s in front of one audience. She pretends to be something else when she’s in front of another audience.” 

“And I think he was observing the basic foundational reality that Kamala Harris pretends to be something different, depending on which audience she’s speaking to,” he added.

If Trump used more alliteration in his famous nicknames, you could picture “Kamala the Chameleon” making the cut.

“Now, [Harris] has been able to hide this a little bit because, for the past couple of weeks, she only speaks in front of a teleprompter,” Vance continued. “She never gives unscripted remarks, and she’s hidden from the American media and from the American people. But we know she’s a chameleon. We know she’s a person who promised to defund the police and now wants to pretend she’s a tough prosecutor.”

Vance remained on this theme as he marched over to Harris’s airplane when they shared a tarmac in Wisconsin. While he quipped he wanted to take a look at what he hoped would be his airplane next year, he also said, “I also thought you guys may get lonely, because the vice president doesn’t answer questions from reporters.”

Sparring with the press has also been a Republican tradition dating back at least to Agnew. Vance didn’t disappoint there, either. When told he is normally angry and asked what makes him happy, Vance shot back, “Well, I smile at a lot of things, including bogus questions from the media, man.”

Vance has been reminding reporters that Harris did not fall out of a coconut tree but President Joe Biden’s White House. “She said that she would be our border czar, and yet, for 3 1/2 years, we have an open border,” he told reporters. “She said that she would bring some common sense and lower inflation to our economic policies, and yet, she cast the deciding vote that raised interest rates, raised home prices, and raised food prices.”

The freshman Ohio senator’s dogged pursuit of Harris makes another statement, reminding voters that Trump has been president while Biden’s vice president hasn’t been elected to the office — at least not yet.

Vance endured a tough news cycle and discouraging early poll numbers after he was announced last month at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. Democrats and the media pounced, as the saying goes, on his “childless cat ladies” comments. Intraparty rivals second-guessed the pick and asked who vetted Vance.

If Trump had any regrets, he didn’t show them publicly. Instead, he has leaned into using Vance on the trail even more.

Harris and her new running mate, Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN), have responded in kind, making Vance a frequent target of their barbs. ​​”I can’t wait to debate the guy,” Walz said of Vance in his campaign rollout. “That is, if he’s willing to get off the couch and show up.”