After years spent successfully defining their Democratic opponents in the popular consciousness, Donald Trump and his Republican Party are used to winning the political messaging wars. But it took less than a week for newly minted vice presidential candidate JD Vance to unravel the GOP’s messaging dominance.
Trump’s new yes-man drew groans from political insiders and the public alike almost from the moment of his selection. Vance somehow managed to merge everything voters found unlikeable about today’s far-right political elite into one candidate. From his grating libertarian techno-utopianism to his terminally online jokes and a Ron DeSantis-esque awkwardness, Vance has become Trump’s unexpected gift to Kamala Harris and the resurgent Democrats.
Elevating Vance to the national ticket has done more than just showcase the Ohio senator’s excessively cringey personality. It’s reminding millions of voters that the MAGA movement is a clown car packed with off-putting weirdos. Political first impressions are often defining, especially on the national stage. Vance has managed to define himself in the worst possible way.
It isn’t just that Vance is both historically unpopular as both a vice presidential nominee and a U.S. senator, though those factors make him an easy partisan punching bag. He also has an uncommon knack for alienating the very voter groups Trump needs to win what is now a statistically tied race. That’s true even among his Republican colleagues, who presumably should be rallying around the new MAGA ticket.
“The road got a lot harder,” one House Republican whispered to Axios last week. “[Vance] was the only pick that wasn’t the safe pick. And I think everyone has now realized that.”
That’s in part because of off-the-cuff comments that apparently went unvetted by Trump’s political machine. Most notably, Vance dismissed millions of childless women across America as “childless cat ladies” before later apologizing — to cats. “I’ve got nothing against cats,” Vance told right-wing broadcaster Megyn Kelly in a remark that probably sounded a lot funnier in his head.
If Vance’s weird comment was a one-off gaffe, he might have been able to laugh it off. But his disdain for childless women goes far deeper, including his argument in 2021 that childless Americans should pay a higher tax rate than people with children, before adding that parents should have more votes than the childless.
It’s hard to see what Trump gains from a vice presidential nominee who seems intent on alienating women in a race that is already defined by Republicans’ polarizing war against abortion rights. Republicans don’t seem to know either. GOP lawmakers and strategists are already griping to Politico that Vance makes an already-challenging race even harder by limiting Trump’s ability to appeal to the independent voters he needs to build a winning coalition.
So much for a post-convention victory lap.
But it would be wrong to pin all of the MAGA movement’s social weirdness on Vance alone. Rushing to his friend’s defense, Donald Trump Jr. launched into an X tirade against Democrats’ embrace of Kamala Harris by describing one $3.5 million fundraising event as “Cucks for Kamala.” That might generate some laughs on 4chan, where calling people “cucks” has been a running gag for a decade now, but it leaves most normal Americans scratching their heads in confusion. These guys are supposed to be the grown-ups in the room?
It’s well established that the MAGA movement draws inspiration — and staff — from right-wing cesspools like 4chan, where Trump-as-Emperor memes flood every corner of the site. It’s less clear how it helps an already insular MAGA movement to get its memes and marching orders from a site famous for its nearly all-male, very-online population of white supremacists and mass shooters. Trump Jr. may get a giggle out of seeing the 4chan kids retweeting his content, but most voters aren’t eager to be associated with the Internet’s weirdo fringe.
In a sense, the MAGA movement is falling victim to the same Internet addiction that doomed the progressive left. Twitter isn’t real life, as the famous political adage warns. That clearly hasn’t sunk in on the MAGA right, where Trump and Vance now spend as much time hawking 4chan-approved crypto schemes as they do trying to broaden the Republican Party’s appeal beyond its core group of true believers.
Plenty of voters still see Trump as an aspirational figure, a made-for-TV version of a billionaire business tycoon. In Vance, they see the kid who always ate alone at lunch. If his attempts to flip the script are any indication, that’s an image he’ll be stuck with well past November.
Max Burns is a veteran Democratic strategist and founder of Third Degree Strategies.
