JD Vance is playing an increasingly important role for the Trump campaign: as an attack dog.
The Republican vice presidential nominee appeared three times on Sunday’s show, attacking Vice President Kamala Harris as a “chameleon” and attempting to flip the script on Governor Harris. Tim Walz‘s characterization of him as “strange”.
The TV swing — two shows shy of the “full Ginsburg,” a term for a politician who appears on all five major Sunday shows — was Vance’s chance to slow the momentum of Harris-Walz and criticize its troubled rollout, including his past comments about the former president, his stance on abortion and his criticism of “childless cat ladies.”
The media onslaught comes as Trump and Vance’s campaigns struggle to gain traction in the week after Harris announced Walz as her running mate — and after a week in which former President Donald Trump didn’t stop in a contested state. The Democratic ticket has raised millions, attracted large, enthusiastic crowds at rallies and has begun to turn the race around: Harris now leads Trump in the national polling average by 538 votes and is ahead in the critical blue wall states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, according to a new New York Times/Siena College poll.
Vance was interviewed by hosts from ABC News’ “This Week,” CBS News’ “Face the Nation” and CNN’s “State of the Union” in Cincinnati. He was asked about his time on the program with Trump, their policy vision for the country and his recent lines of attack against Harris and Walz.
Vance said calling him and Trump strange was “basically schoolyard bullying” and “projection.”
“They can accuse me of whatever they want,” Vance told Dana Bash on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “I’m doing this because I believe that as vice president I will make people’s lives better, so I accept their attacks, but I think it’s a little bit of projection.”
Vance said he wanted to go public and “help define” the opposition.
“I think Kamala Harris, unfortunately, has run a campaign where every time she goes in front of voters, there’s a teleprompter. She doesn’t really talk to the media, not at all. She hasn’t, I don’t think, taken a single tough question from a reporter. So yeah, one of my jobs is to get out there,” Vance said on CBS’s Face the Nation.
Vance has become an aggressive attack dog for the Trump campaign and has kept a busy schedule. He has been to a rally in his hometown of Middletown, Ohio, since his selection and to other states where the Harris-Walz campaign has been followed in the past week.
Trump, meanwhile, has been less present on the campaign trail. He was absent from key battlegrounds last week, holding just one rally in Bozeman, Montana — where he took revenge on Sen. Jon Tester, one of the most threatened senatorial Democrats in a state that Trump will easily win in November. He also attended fundraisers in Wyoming and Colorado, and held an impromptu press conference with reporters at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, where he lashed out at the size of the crowd and attacked Harris’ intelligence.
Vance was asked about the former president’s attacks on Harris’ racial identity. During an interview with the National Association of Black Journalists, Trump said that Harris, whose parents are Jamaican-American and Indian-American, “happened to become black” in recent years and that he had repeated his false claims about Harris downplaying her racial identity.
According to Vance, Trump was trying to make it clear that Harris is “a chameleon.”
“She’s pretending to be one thing for one audience, pretending to be something else for another audience,” Vance told CNN.
Vance accused Harris of changing his views on issues ranging from fracking to the border and said Trump’s attacks were trying to paint Harris as “a fundamentally fake person.”
“She’s different depending on who she’s facing,” Vance said.
But he was also accused of doing so himself when it came to Trump. In the past, Vance has called Trump a “moral disaster” and questioned whether he was “America’s Hitler.” Vance said people should be allowed to change their minds when confronted with different facts and blamed the media for misrepresenting Trump.
“It’s reasonable to change your mind,” Vance said.
But even as Vance’s past comments and policy positions have resurfaced, he has stood his ground. He said he did not regret past comments he made about people with families getting more votes — “it’s not a policy proposal. It’s a thought experiment” — and shifted blame back to the other party. While calling for “pro-family” policies, Vance also supported more than doubling the child tax credit to $5,000 per family.
Vance, himself a Marine veteran, has continued to grill Walz about how the Democratic vice presidential nominee spoke about his military service. Walz said he was carrying “weapons of war” when he talked about gun control, and Republicans have criticized the timing of his retirement from the Army National Guard, just months before his battalion deployed to Iraq in 2005.
Walz came out of retirement to run for Congress. Harris’ campaign said Walz had “misspoke.”
On CNN, Vance accused Walz of “lying about his own record” and his military service “for political gain.”
“I am not criticizing his service. I am criticizing dishonesty — dishonesty that is committed in favor of and for the purpose of political gain,” Vance said.
Vance also defended his Indian-American wife, Usha Vance, after white supremacists attacked her online. Nick Fuentes — a well-known white supremacist who Trump previously had dinner with in November 2022, along with Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West — questioned Vance about his interracial marriage. But Vance pushed back, saying only a “smart” and “happy” man could marry Usha.
“My position is, look, if these guys want to attack me or my positions, my policies, my personality, come after me,” Vance said. “But don’t attack my wife. She’s out of your league.”
Despite all the recent attention on Vance and Walz, Vance said he agrees with Trump that the vice presidential pick has little impact on voters.
“I think President Trump is right about that. I think most people are going to vote for Donald Trump or Kamala Harris,” Vance said on CBS. “Most people are going to base their vote on who the presidential nominee is, not the vice presidential nominee. It’s just simple political reality.”
Isabella Ramírez contributed to this report.
