JD Vance’s latest appearance took an unexpected turn when his potty mouth stole the spotlight.
The vice president made a crude comment on stage that quickly grabbed the crowd’s attention. He then tried to clean up his wording after realizing how it landed. Instead,
Vance made things worse, prompting comparisons to his boss, Donald Trump, over his desperate attempt to be funny.
Footage from Vance’s Monday trip to North Carolina shows him working to help Republicans hold a crucial Senate seat.
By lunchtime, almost nobody was talking about the seat. Instead, they pointed to a disgusting comment he made in a packed room, and why he managed to repeat it.
Vance headlined a campaign rally at the Koury Convention Center in Greensboro. The event centered on Michael Whatley, the former RNC chair running for the seat Sen. Thom Tillis is leaving.
Whatley faces former Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper in a closely watched race, and Vance’s visit came just days after Trump himself rallied for Whatley in Gastonia.
Two visits from the top of the ticket in less than a week tell you how nervous the White House is about keeping North Carolina red.
So Vance stood in front of a “Defend Our Future” sign, a wall of red hats packed in behind him, and ran through the usual script about what Republicans are up against. The state, he argued, needed a senator who would take the fight to Democrats.
Then he reached for a punchline nobody in the building saw coming.
“Because we need somebody who will fight back against the fart left,” Vance told the crowd.
He could have let it slide. Instead, he stopped to walk everyone through it in case they didn’t catch it the first time.
“Now, you may not have even heard that, but I actually, I usually don’t mispeak. But I just called them the fart left, not the far left,” VP said. “I promise that was an accident so the fake news will accuse me of bad language.”
In other words, the second-highest-ranking official in the country paused a Senate rally to make sure no one missed the fart joke.
Vance insisted he doesn’t usually misspeak as he rolled out the line.
The clip spread fast on social media, and the response he received was less than enthusiastic.
Several people zeroed in on the fact that Vance had to explain his own joke, asking questions like, “OMG … seriously?” and “is he in first grade?”
“Yeah… jokes that need explanations aren’t funny,” a Threads user replied. Another noted, “Nobody noticed his pathetic joke so he had to repeat it by pretending it was a mistake.”
Vance may have been the one on stage, but the replies had their own surprise guest. Commenters quickly pulled Trump into the conversation, sharing photos of the president while taking aim at Vance’s performance.
One commenter wrote, “He wants so badly to have any charisma or oratorial ability. Genuinely a sad pathetic little man.”
Two others joked, “Five year old potty humor, that’s true leadership,” noting that his delivery “Reeks of desperation.”
This isn’t the first time Vance’s mouth has gotten ahead of his message. In July, he apologized for cursing in front of children at a Milwaukee event, then blamed the slip on his grandmother.
Not to mention, in March he told a room of union members that the person running the spotlights must be a Democrat because he couldn’t see the crowd, a line that landed about as well as Monday’s.
And just days ago at the GOP’s midterm convention in Dallas, critics said he strutted across the stage like a Trump mini-me while pitching himself as the president’s natural successor.
That’s the part that stings for Republicans. Vance is supposed to be the more polished, more disciplined version of Trump, the one who can carry the movement once the president is gone. Instead, he keeps borrowing the worst of his boss’s habits and none of the crowd work.
For Whatley, the timing could hardly be worse. The Nov. 3 election is barely six weeks away, and the biggest headline out of his marquee rally has nothing to do with him, the economy or anything he plans to do in Washington.
It has to do with a joke the vice president thought was funny enough to tell twice.
It has been a rough stretch on the stump for Trump’s would-be heir, who was left fumbling for a comeback after a heckler blindsided him in Kansas just last week. This time, though, nobody interrupted him. He did this one to himself.
