Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance was struggling long before last week, but an eight-day stretch helped capture why the Ohio senator wasn’t a great choice for the GOP’s national ticket.
On Wednesday, Sept. 4, he delivered a ridiculous and widely mocked answer about what can be done to address the cost of child care. A day later, he lamented that deadly mass shootings in schools are a “fact of life” — a comment that sparked fierce and immediate pushback.
On Monday, Vance threw his support behind a ridiculous and racist conspiracy theory about immigrants abducting and eating pets, and on Tuesday, he endorsed a brazenly illegal response to Donald Trump’s 2020 election defeat. That evening, the former president distanced himself from Vance’s rhetoric about abortion policy during a nationally televised debate.
Two days later, the senator sat down with CNBC hosts to discuss the economy, and he managed to top off a brutal eight-day stretch with an interview in which he didn’t appear to have any idea what he was talking about.
After badly flubbing the basics on the inflationary effects of tariffs, Vance tried to argue that immigration is bad for the economy:
‘Housing costs are unaffordable … people can’t afford to live a good life in this small Ohio town,’ he said. ‘If the path to prosperity was flooding your nation with low-wage immigrants, then Springfield, Ohio, would be … the most prosperous city in the world,’ Vance said. ‘America would be the most prosperous country in the world, because Kamala Harris has flooded the country with 25 million illegal aliens.’”
So, a few things.
First, the “25 million illegal aliens” figure is ridiculously wrong. Given Vance’s apparent interest in immigration policy, it’s weird to see him struggle with such a basic detail.
Second, the vice president is not chiefly responsible for federal immigration laws — though she did endorse a bipartisan solution that Vance’s running mate killed, despite the legislation’s merits, because he was afraid helping the country might hurt his 2024 candidacy.
Third, while it’s true that housing costs in Springfield, Ohio, have gone up, it’s because the local economy is improving — despite Trump’s insane claims that the community has been destroyed by pet-eating immigrants. Fourth, the idea that Springfield has suffered economically as a result of immigration is the exact opposite of what has actually happened in reality. As Vance really ought to know — he ostensibly represents Ohio — we’re talking about a community on the rise, not decline. But perhaps most notable of all was the hapless senator’s insistence that if immigration benefited the economy, the United States “would be the most prosperous country in the world.” Whether Vance understands this or not, the United States is already the most prosperous country in the world. In fact, we’re the most prosperous country by a wide margin. Such confusion is to be expected from Trump, who’s relationship with reality has long been fractured, but Vance is supposed to be the more knowledgeable one. It leads to an unavoidable question: Is the Republican senator really this confused about issues he claims to care about, or is the vice presidential hopeful assuming that voters are foolish enough to believe demonstrable nonsense?
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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