Vice President JD Vance is using his apparent abundance of free time to forge a path to eventually taking over from President Donald Trump, according to MSNBC's Jonathan Lemire.
Jimmy Kimmel fired back at Vance – whom he mocked as “Vice President Maybelline” – in his monologue Monday night, showing a clip of him downplaying the administration's role in getting his talk show briefly suspended, and "Morning Joe" host Joe Scarborough wondered about the vice president's actual job duties.
"It's crazy, you've got a vice president who's basically troller-in-chief," Scarborough said. "We hardly ever say somebody is lying, somebody is not telling the truth. So many of his statements just demand it because they are so false. You know, like, his, you know, his claim a couple of weeks ago that everybody knows there's more violence on the left politically, then, it's just – everybody knows that's a lie: 75 percent of violence, political violence over the past 20 years has come, you know, it comes from the right."
"If you're talking about domestic terrorism, and that's like Cato [Institute], the Koch brothers, their studies show that, 'CSIS' shows that," he added. "But there's one statement after another statement that's just detached from reality, and I don't know, did you think somebody told him be troller-in-chief?"
Scarborough noted that Vance seems to pick fights with various social media users on a regular basis, and Lemire said the vice president waded into arguments with individuals who weren't necessarily public figures.
"Sometimes just random people or, like, Substack authors," Lemire said. "It's a Washington joke about the lack of responsibilities [for] the office of the vice presidency. But JD Vance clearly has a lot of time on his hands because his number one job description appears to be to, whether doing interviews or particularly on social media, not only pushing forth, you know, false statements, but just picking fights, and I've been told that he sees that, you know, social media obviously worked part of Donald Trump's rise."
"He sees that could be a similar path for him as he is jockeying with others for the MAGA mantle to be Trump's heir apparent," Lemire added. "But it is striking how much time Vance seems to have to just do exactly this, to tweet. He seems to be on his phone all hours of the day."
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