J.D. Vance and Donald Trump are attacking Andy Beshear over comments the Kentucky governor made on MSNBC Tuesday morning.
“I mean, think about what some people have had to go through because of these laws,” Beshear told Mika Brzezinski on Morning Joe regarding Republican states’ laws against abortion.
“J.D. Vance calls pregnancy resulting from rape ‘inconvenient.’ Inconvenience is traffic. Make him go through this,” Beshear added.
The Trump-Vance campaign seized on the words and took them out of context, claiming that Beshear actually called for Vance’s family members to be raped. Vance’s spokesperson William Martin called for Kamala Harris to “immediately repudiate” Beshear’s comments.
The Republican vice presidential nominee chimed in himself, calling Beshear a “disgusting person.”
What the hell is this?
— JD Vance (@JDVance) August 20, 2024
Why is @AndyBeshearKY wishing that a member of my family would get raped?!?
What a disgusting person. https://t.co/11Kp1h92MN
It’s pretty clear that the Trump campaign is deliberately misinterpreting Beshear’s words, looking to make an issue when in reality, Beshear was accusing Vance of downplaying pregnancies resulting from rape. Recent polls have shown that while the Harris-Walz campaign is surging, Trump and Vance are going in the opposite direction.
Vance could be attacking Beshear as a way to distract from his own views on abortion. Last week, he said that “normal” women don’t care about their reproductive rights, and, long before that, he said some weirder things about procreation and women who don’t have children. In any case, Vance and Trump have struggled to land any effective attack or criticism against Harris or her running mate, Tim Walz, so expect to see them try to manufacture more controversies as the election draws nearer.
