Reprinted from Politico.
Written by Alex Isenstadt, Meridith McGraw, and Natalie Allison.
PHOTO CREDIT: Alex Brandon/AP
If anyone knows how to survive bad headlines, it’s former President Donald Trump. Now, after a week of bad press, his vice presidential pick, JD Vance, is trying to do the same.
Despite bipartisan criticism over recently unearthed comments, the Trump campaign is planning to deploy Vance as a major fundraiser and chief policy attack dog against Kamala Harris, the vice president and presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.
Vance, a former venture capitalist with connections to the tech industry, has already held a number of fundraisers, including one in Silicon Valley on Monday night. After a rally in Nevada on Tuesday, he will return to California for another donor event Wednesday.
Trump has signaled — privately and publicly — that he is standing by the 39-year-old Vance, whom he views as the future of the MAGA movement.
In an interview with Laura Ingraham on Fox News on Monday night, Trump said that Vance’s resurfaced controversial comments about abortion and childless women were because he “loves family” and were misconstrued by Democrats and the media.
“I think a lot of people like family, and sometimes it doesn’t work out. And you know, you don’t meet the right person,” Trump said. “You’re just as good, in many cases, a lot better than a person that’s in a family situation.”The flurry of campaign activity comes after the Ohio senator faced heavy criticism during his debut week on the trail from both parties. A TV clip from 2021 of Vance ripping “childless cat ladies” drew rebukes from Democrats, as did past remarks he made about supporting a “federal response” to end abortion. The Wall Street Journal editorial board also admonished Vance over the comments, writing that the Ohio senator’s remarks wouldn’t “play well with the millions of female voters, many of them Republican, who will decide the presidential race. One of them was actress Jennifer Aniston, who has struggled with fertility and blasted Vance’s position on reproductive rights on Instagram.
The dust-up did little to change Trump’s view of his running mate according to Republicans who have communicated with the former president. South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham said he spoke with Trump about Vance over the weekend and maintained that the former president and Vance have “good chemistry.”
“At the end of the day, the vice president’s job is to, you know, help the ticket and also to govern. And I think President Trump feels very comfortable with JD being a guy that can help him implement his agenda,” said Graham, who was among those lobbying for Trump to pick Florida Sen. Marco Rubio over Vance.
“If people think the country’s going in the wrong direction, it’d be Trump-Vance. If it becomes a personality contest, who knows, it may change,” Graham said. But the bad headlines on social media, Graham added, are “all inside baseball stuff.”
“‘News cycle,’ I think, is the right way to phrase it,” said Henry Barbour, the Republican National Committeeman from Mississippi, regarding the recent consternation about Vance and questions about whether Trump is regretting the decision.
He said he believed the running mate picks for both Trump and Harris are “going to be a minimal factor” in the election.
“My sense is there may be a group of Washington insiders and perhaps the media that loves the story,” Barbour continued. “I think it’s meaningless to the folks who are going to be voting in November.”
Kellyanne Conway, a former senior adviser to Trump who like Graham privately advocated for Trump to pick someone other than Vance, said anyone he selected “would have been roundly criticized and pilloried. Who knows better than Trump about the uniform obsession that forms over comments from decades ago or minutes from now?”
Vance is expected to lean heavily into policy-focused critiques of Harris when he heads out to campaign events despite the Trump campaign initially having difficulty defining her as their main opponent after President Joe Biden bowed out of the race. The senator previewed the approach over the weekend during a roughly 20-minute speech in St. Cloud, Minnesota, when he yoked Harris to the agenda of the Biden administration.
“Everybody knows that Kamala Harris owns every failure of the ultra-liberal policies of the last four years,” said Vance, who went on to blame the vice president for an influx of illegal immigration.
Vance’s feed on X, meanwhile, reads like a bulletin board for attacks on the vice president’s record on immigration — an issue the Trump campaign plans to make a centerpiece of its anti-Harris effort, and one that the Ohio senator has long been focused on. During his 2022 Senate race, Vance aired a TV commercial in which he attacked Biden’s immigration policies, which he said had resulted in a flood of illegal drugs coming into the country.
Vance is expected to become a regular face on the TV circuit in delivering the message, even on less Trump-friendly outlets. The senator impressed Trump by defending him on mainstream outlets during the run-up to his selection as running mate, something that helped distinguish him during the process. He will also try to appeal to younger voters by appearing on podcasts popular with Gen Z and millennial voters. He is expected this week to record an interview with the Nelk Boys, a trio of comedians and pranksters whose show, Full Send, is popular among young men.
The campaign also sees Vance as a key fundraising asset. During the vice presidential search, Vance tapped his Silicon Valley connections to organize a big-dollar fundraiser hosted by investor David Sacks. Vance has been aggressively calling donors and last week held around a half-dozen fundraising events, including an event in Oklahoma City that was co-hosted by oil billionaire Harold Hamm. The event raised around $2 million, according to a person familiar with the total.
John Fredericks, a conservative radio host and Trump loyalist, said Trump’s picking Vance was also about continuing his MAGA brand of politics once he exits the political stage. Fredericks said that Vance was “the only populist in Congress, as far as I am concerned, who can carry on this legacy.”
“A couple of comments on some obscure podcast maybe were ill-advised. Who cares?” Fredericks said. “We haven’t even started to delve into the policies of Kamala Harris, and whoever her vice presidential pick is.”
“Who’s he going to turn off? People that were not going to vote for them anyway,” Fredericks said. “His objective is to motivate rural voters to go out and vote early and vote on game day.”