A conservative commentator accused Vice President JD Vance of turning on President Donald Trump in plain sight, during a panel discussion about the GOP’s future after last week’s midterm losses.
The comment came during a discussion hosted by CNN's Audie Cornish, after Democratic strategist Kurt Bardella argued that a sitting vice president has “no exit ramp” from the president he serves.
“Whatever he does, you’re going to get the credit or the blame for,” Bardella said.
Conservative commentator Tiana Lowe Doescher disagreed.
“Except Vance is shivving Trump from the front, right?” she said. “Like very publicly, that 600-word essay or whatever you want to call it on Twitter, where he blames the president’s Iran war.”
Doescher didn’t go easy on Vance’s résumé either, arguing he has “really just ridden Donald Trump’s coattails,” pointing to his short Senate tenure and his reversal from Never Trumper to MAGA loyalist. She said Vance went all in on what she called “slopulism.”
“Sloppy populism that panders to the worst instincts, you know, of, you know, we can have it all style economic policy,” she explained.
Cornish then played a clip of Trump responding to Vance’s statement on “60 Minutes.” The president stood by the war and noted that Vance had been involved in the decision.
“He was part of a decision-making process, and my answer is an emphatic yes, because you can’t let Iran have a nuclear weapon,” Trump said. “I think historically this will be a very good decision.”
“He didn’t say JD Vance had nothing to do with that,” Cornish noted.
USA Today's Francesca Chambers said Trump had signaled days earlier, at the ballroom construction site the day after the midterms, that he knew Vance hadn’t supported the war. She said she’d been told Vance gave the White House a heads-up about the statement.
“But they didn’t know what it was going to say,” Doescher countered.
Chambers also pointed out that Donald Trump Jr., a close friend of Vance and one of the people who helped get him on the ticket, had amplified the statement on social media by piling “100 percent” emojis on top of it.
Doescher called the Iran war blame a “willful misreading of the data,” arguing that a plurality of voters said they voted on the economy, with democracy, corruption and foreign policy coming after that.
“JD Vance is not the only person being talked about,” Cornish said.