Donald Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, is catching a lot of heat online for a social post he made in reaction to Vice President Kamala Harris’ CNN interview.
Harris’s first sit-down interview alongside her running mate, Tim Walz, featured several questions that prodded her stances on key issues like clean energy, immigration, and housing affordability.
Harris gave many measured responses and exhibited a warm and collected presence on camera.
In response, the man hoping to take Harris’s current position as vice president in the upcoming election took to social platform X to mock Harris’ interview performance.
Vance posted a notorious clip of 2007 Miss Teen USA contestant Caite Upton that launched the then-17-year-old to internet meme status. Upton, the pageant’s Miss South Carolina that year, fell short in her delivery during the competition’s interview portion after she was asked why a fifth of Americans can’t locate the United States on a world map.
Vance wrote the caption, “I have gotten ahold of the full Kamala Harris CNN interview,” when he posted the video.
His tweet drew tens of thousands of reposts and comments. Many users were less than pleased that Vance stooped to making a misogynistic post to take cheap shots at both Harris and Upton.
“Tell me you hate women without telling me you hate women,” one commenter wrote.
“Using a woman to mock another while making fun of her is on brand for you,” another comment said.
“This is why you will lose, and also go down in history as the least liked VP candidate in history. You’re a creep, misogynist, and women voters are repulsed by you,” another user wrote.
In posting the clip of Upton, Vance appeared to imply that Harris lapsed in her elocution and performance during her CNN interview. While Upton seemed to show some difficulty delivering a clear-cut answer to her question, many viewers assessed that Harris supplied informed, coherent answers during her conversation with CNN’s Dana Bash.
Criticisms did surface against Bash’s line of questioning, partly because some of the questions she posed to Harris revolved around right-wing grievances with the Democratic Party or Trump’s incendiary comments about her racial identity, missing opportunities for Harris to speak more comprehensively about her policy proposals.
“This is modern-day ‘journalism,'” one X user stated. “Every question is a ‘gotcha’ question designed for a viral video or tweet.”
Vance appeared later on CNN, where he chalked up his post to a joke, saying, “Politics has gotten way too lame” and “way too boring,” adding that politicians can have “some fun” while working to improve the lives of American people.
“Sometimes when you’re in the public eye, you make mistakes and again, I think the best way to deal with it is to laugh at ourselves, laugh at this stuff, and try to have some fun in politics,” Vance said to CNN’s John Berman.
“I posted a meme from 20 years ago, and I think the fact that we’re talking about that instead of the fact that American families can’t afford groceries or health care, young families can’t afford to buy a home to raise their families in. Those are the real crises that we should focus on, and there’s nothing that says we can’t tell some jokes along the way.”
