On Tuesday, Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance stopped in Michigan for another grin-and-bear-it rally, full of pained jokes and gross lies.
“I read a story this morning that her advisers are considering just copying all of Donald Trump’s policies,” he said. “They’re more popular. In fact, I’ve heard that for her debate in just a couple of weeks she’s going to put on a navy suit, a long red tie, and adopt the slogan ‘Make America Great Again.’” Hold for applause.
Of course, Trump’s 2017 tax cuts for the wealthy remain unpopular. And the same goes for most of his major policy planks, according to polling from YouGov. For example, only 25% of Americans support Trump’s policy to cut taxes on corporations, while 59% oppose it.
At the rally, Vance also replicated Trump’s penchant for embellishing reality, telling the crowd that “overdose deaths were coming down” during the Trump administration. Which is another lie. In 2019, overdose deaths were at a record high, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. They also rose during 2020. (Those numbers have dropped for the past year or so.)
In the clip above, Vance also suggests that his mother, Bev Vance, got sober during the Trump administration, but according to Vance’s speech at the Republican National Convention in July, she’s been sober since January 2015. It’s great that she’s gotten sober, of course, but it’s disrespectful to the millions of Americans suffering from addiction to say the Trump administration did anything to stymie America’s opioid crisis.
Vance quit lying just enough to make a few more bad, even offensive jokes.
“Kamala Harris said, ‘When we fight, we win.’ This is one of her favorite taglines,” he said. “And I don’t know if you saw it, but then [Harris running mate] Tim Walz stood up and shouted, ‘And even when we don’t fight,’ that’s what, that’s what Tim Walz said.”
Making jokes at the expense of Walz, who is much more popular than Vance, is a tough order.
