JD Vance’s address to the country from the James Brady Briefing Room at the White House was scorched by former GOP campaign adviser Rick Wilson on Thursday morning.
On MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” the co-hosts shared a clip of the vice president not only assigning blame for the government shutdown on Democrats, but also repeating a GOP talking point that Democrats are holding the country hostage because they want to hand Affordable Care Act benefits to undocumented immigrants.
According to Vance, “The Chuck Schumer-AOC wing of the Democratic party shut down the government because they said to us, we will open the government only if you give billions of dollars of funding to healthcare for illegal aliens. That’s a ridiculous proposition.”
On Wednesday, just as Vance made that claim, MSNBC host Chris Jansing had the audio cut and told viewers, “ So that is not true,” and then fact-checked him before coverage resumed.
Thursday morning, Wilson, long a critic of the Donald Trump administration, joined the pile-on with a literary reference.
“I think what you saw yesterday with JD Vance was his sort of his tryout for the 2028 Hunger Games: ‘Can I be as big a liar as Donald Trump?’” he began. “And he really was displaying that that line was pumped out of a focus group by [GOP strategist] Tony Fabrizio and Trump's polling people. Because they recognize they're not trying to appeal to the middle of America or to the majority of America. They're trying to produce content for the Fox News conveyor belt.”
“And so they're going to lie about these things,” he added before pointing out, “But I want to start out with a top-line that we have just this morning out of the Washington Post poll, where 47 percent of the people say that the Republicans are responsible for the shutdown and 30 percent say, the Democrats.”
“And why is that? Because Donald Trump chose this shutdown. The Republican Party chose this shutdown,” he added.
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