JD Vance’s closing argument that the first female vice president in U.S. history is “trash” isn’t going over quite like he planned.
The Republican vice-presidential candidate was hit with swift and brutal backlash after he told a crowd in Atlanta Monday night that “we are going to take out the trash in Washington, DC, and the trash’s name is Kamala Harris,”
“Oh, oh, oh, J.D. Vance. You just effed up in a way that I’ve never seen in my political life, and I worked for Sarah Palin,” MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace said during a panel discussion with the Bulwark’s Tim Miller and actor Rosie Perez.
Wallace, a former Republican communications director, was so shocked she had producers play Vance’s clip a second, then a third time.
“In my humble view, lights out,” she said. “Women. You can disagree with us. We’ve actually learned to take it for our whole careers all the time in every form. But you call us trash?”
“It’s a bookend on the childless cat lady thing,” panelist Miller said.
Soon after Vance was tapped to be Donald Trump’s running mate in July, a 2021 interview with Tucker Carlson came to light in which the Republican vice-presidential candidate said the country was being run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”
That interview “created this firestorm of reminding women—and men—why they hated Trump in the first place,” Miller said, adding that the “trash” comment was having a similar effect.
During MSNBC’s Morning Joe on Tuesday, guests continued to express disbelief.
“This guy’s judgment is so flawed,” former senator Claire McCaskill said, pointing out that already the Republican ticket is struggling to connect with female voters. The “trash” comment is not likely to help, she said.
“What is wrong with this guy?” agreed Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson. “He’s supposed to be smart! He wrote a book.”
Trump and his supporters have been fixated on “garbage” imagery ever since comedian Tony Hinchcliffe opened the former president’s Madison Square Garden Rally on Oct. 27 with a firestorm of racist jokes, including calling Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage.”
President Joe Biden attempted to defend Puerto Ricans in response, and MAGA land jumped on his garbled phrasing to accuse the president of calling all Trump supporters garbage.
Since then, has Trump donned a sanitation worker vest and rode around in a garbage truck to get back at Biden, who’s not even the nominee; Megyn Kelly has wrapped herself in trash bags; and Vance has been workshopping “take out the trash” zingers as his closing argument.
And yet even C-SPAN, that most neutral and unassuming of political broadcasters, couldn’t help but point out the Republicans’ hypocrisy.
The network best known for showing politicians shuffling around half-empty rooms posted Vance’s clip to X, formerly Twitter, with a longer pull-quote that fully encapsulated the madness.
“The citizens of this country, they are not garbage,” Vance said, before adding 35 seconds later, “The trash’s name is Kamala Harris.”
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