A CNN panel Thursday night wasn’t buying theories floated by Sen. J.D. Vance that he and Donald Trump had the support of “the normal gay guy” before adding that “a lot of upper-middle-class kids” have become “trans” to get into elite universities.
The eyebrow-raising comments came Thursday on the “Joe Rogan Experience” podcast as both presidential campaigns spend the final days before Nov. 5 making their closing arguments.
“I think that, frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if me and Trump won just the normal gay guy vote,” the Republican vice presidential nominee said. “They just want to be left the hell alone and now you have all this crazy stuff on top of it.”
He also added that the pathway for “a lot of upper-middle-class kids” has become a lot harder and suggested “the one way that those people can participate in the DEI bureaucracy in this country is to be trans.”
The clip was played Thursday on CNN’s “AC360” with host Anderson Cooper during a panel discussion that included former Obama White House official Van Jones, veteran Democratic strategist David Axelrod and former Fox News host Gretchen Carlson – to roaring laughter and bewilderment.
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“The idea that people are having surgery in order to get into these colleges – I mean I know parents will go really far to get the kid into a good school – and J.D. Vance, by the way, knows something about, yeah using something to get your way in,” Cooper said, seeming perplexed by Vance’s interview remarks.
Cooper then wondered aloud to his panel “where the line is between a normal gay person and a not-normal gay person. I'm assuming I can guess what it is, like you know, anything related to drag, I guess you know that drag wearing as much makeup as Donald Trump wears, that would be considered not normal – it's fine for Donald Trump – but on a gay guy that wouldn't be considered normal.”
Carlson added that having been a parent who recently went through the college entrance process with her two children, she has “never thought about having them be trans to have an upper edge.”
“To say that people are actually going to go through this process to get him to school is crazy,” she told Cooper.
Cooper concluded by saying he knows “a lot of normal gay guys and I haven’t heard a lot of them breaking this way.”
Watch the clip below or at this link.