Sen. JD Vance has been dragging down the Republican presidential ticket since Donald Trump tapped him as his running mate, and it’s getting so bad for team GOP that some Republicans are speculating that Trump may dump Vance. However, it isn’t that easy: Vance would have to choose to leave the ticket.
That scenario would be lose-lose for Trump and Vance. The former would have to admit he made a colossal mistake, and the latter would end up on the damaged-goods table, with a dim political future after he’d been labeled too weird for this Republican Party.
But that hasn’t stopped congressional Republicans—who need a strong top of ticket to keep the House and take the Senate—from talking about the mistake Trump made.
“Some Republicans express buyer's remorse over Vance VP pick,” Axios reported last week. An anonymous House Republican told the outlet that the “road got a lot harder. He was the only pick that wasn't the safe pick. And I think everyone has now realized that."
"On the whole, the feeling is: doesn't add much," another House Republican said. "And now with Kamala at the top, the capacity to have expanded the map a little bit ... would have been much more beneficial."
This week, Senate Republicans complained to The Hill, which is kind of a big deal because Senate Republicans tend to remain united as a conference.
“I would assume [Trump is] not real happy,” one Republican senator said about the nonstop negative reporting on Vance. “I don’t think Trump likes any discomfort. He can create discomfort himself, but he doesn’t like external discomfort coming in, and JD’s struggling. I would assume he’s not real happy,” they added.
One Republican senator even criticized Trump for not listening to them about his pick.
“It’s pretty generally thought that it was his son and Tucker Carlson who talked him into” picking Vance, the senator said, adding that they were sure it wasn’t coming from his campaign advisers. “Because they’ve done so well up until this point in being able to widen” Trump’s appeal. “Unforced errors,” they added.
Trump’s BFF in the Senate, South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham, tried to talk Trump out of picking Vance, appealing to him in front of passengers on Trump’s plane, The Washington Post reported Sunday. Graham also tried to get other people on the plane to convince Trump to go with Florida Sen. Marco Rubio instead.
“Among Trump allies, there has been ‘constant discussion about whether the president made a bad choice,’ according to one longtime adviser,” the Post reported. “Text message chains have blown up with [Vance’s] ‘awkward public appearances,’ the person said.”
Is Trump going to force Vance out? It’s highly unlikely—not because Trump gives a fig about Vance, but because he would have to admit a mistake of that magnitude. So they’ll all just have to put up with even more “JD Vance so weird” stories.
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