Vice President J.D. Vance fired back at White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles after she called him a "conspiracy theorist" in an interview with Vanity Fair.
While speaking in Pennsylvania on Tuesday, a reporter from The Washington Post asked Vance about Wiles's remarks.
"Unfortunately, I have to ask a bit of an off-topic question from affordability," the reporter said. "And that is the interviews that White House Chief of Staff, Susie Wiles, gave to Vanity Fair, in which she's quoted as referring to you as, excuse me, and again, not my words, sir, but a conspiracy theorist of a decade, and described your transformation from someone who once opposed President Trump to now his vice president as an act of political expediency."
"Sometimes I am a conspiracy theorist, but I only believe in the conspiracy theories that are true," Vance replied. "For example, I believed in the crazy conspiracy theory back in 2020 that it was stupid to mask three-year-olds at the height of the COVID pandemic, that we should actually let them develop some language skills."
"And I believed in the conspiracy theory that Joe Biden was trying to throw his political opponents in jail rather than win an argument against his political opponents," he continued. "So, at least on some of these conspiracy theories, it turns out that a conspiracy theory is just something that was true six months before the media admitted it."
Vance went on to downplay Wiles as a mere "staffer" to the president.
"I've never seen Susie Wiles say something to the president and then go and counteract him or subvert his will behind the scenes," he explained. "And that's what you wanted from a staffer. Because as much as I love Susie, the American people didn't elect any staffer. They elected the President of the United States."
As Vance was speaking, a person in the audience shouted that Democrats were "traitors."
"They are!" the vice president agreed. "And the last thing I'll say is if any of us have learned a lesson from that Vanity Fair article, I hope that the lesson is we should be giving fewer interviews to mainstream media outlets."