J.D. Vance’s Most Scathing Criticisms of Trump

Donald Trump has named Ohio Senator J.D. Vance as his vice presidential running mate, bucking the wishes of Republican donors and the party establishment.

Trump posted on Truth Social Monday afternoon that he was choosing Vance, saying that Vance “will be strongly focused on the people he fought so brilliantly for, the American Workers and Farmers in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Minnesota, and far beyond …”

It’s an interesting pick, given the senator’s previous, quite vocal criticisms of Trump. Vance was only elected to the Senate in 2022, partially due to the fame of his bestselling book, Hillbilly Elegy, published in June 2016, which was later adapted into a movie. The book, based on Vance’s life growing up in rural Ohio, drew criticism for trafficking in myths and stereotypes about the white working class. 

In the book’s heyday, it was seen as an insight into the voter attitudes that gave rise to Trump, even though the then presidential candidate was not mentioned in the book. Vance even criticized Trump while promoting the book, saying, “I think that he’s noxious and is leading the white working class to a very dark place.”

“I’m a Never Trump guy,” Vance said in an interview with Charlie Rose in 2016. “I never liked him.” In February of that year, he reportedly privately wondered whether “Trump was America’s Hitler.”

A few months later, when the infamous Trump Access Hollywood tape came out, Vance warned, “Fellow Christians, everyone is watching us. When we apologize for this man, lord help us.” Throughout 2016 and 2017, Vance liked tweets critical of Trump, including that he committed “serial sexual assault” and was “one of USA’s most hated, villainous, douchey celebs.” In a set of since deleted tweets, Vance also criticized Trump’s response to the 2017 neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, writing, “There is no moral equivalence between the anti-racist protestors in Charlottesville and the killer (and his ilk).”

But of course, like many other Republicans, the self-described “Never Trump” Republican soon changed his tune on Trump, fully backing Trumpism by the time he began his run for the Senate in 2022 and fomenting right-wing attacks on “wokeness” and “critical race theory.” His time in the Senate has continued along those lines, as he has sponsored culture-war bills like one that would completely gut diversity, equity, and inclusion principles in the federal government and claimed he would have tried to overturn the 2020 election results if he was vice president.

The possibility of Vance becoming Trump’s running mate drew objections from several top Republican donors who were concerned about his lack of experience, both in business and in politics. Other top candidates like North Dakota’s Doug Burgum and Senator Marco Rubio of Florida were seen as safer picks, particularly with Rubio’s foreign policy orthodoxy.

But Vance won out in the end thanks to his antiestablishment credentials. He had the support of Silicon Valley tech moguls like Peter Thiel and David Sacks, and Rubio was opposed by several in the Trump camp, including Donald Trump Jr, whom Vance seems to have successfully buttered up.

One Republican strategist criticized Vance’s lack of experience when he was still only on Trump’s V.P. shortlist, saying, “J.D. Vance is a guy who wrote a book and helped with a Netflix show.” Well, now J.D. Vance is the Republican vice presidential nominee, and if Trump wins in November, he’ll be a heartbeat away from the presidency.

Thanks to Wisconsin state law, guns will be allowed in the outer perimeter of the Republican National Convention even after Saturday’s assassination attempt against Donald Trump.

People can open-carry guns and conceal-carry with a permit in a less strict perimeter surrounding a “hard” perimeter controlled by the Secret Service around the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee as the RNC begins tonight. A Milwaukee city ordinance, however, bans tennis balls and paintball guns in the outer perimeter. Effectively, an AR-15 can be carried within walking distance of the RNC hall, but a paintball gun can’t, and it’s all thanks to Wisconsin’s open-carry laws.

“[It’s] utterly ridiculous,” Milwaukee City Alderman Robert Bauman told ABC News. “I mean, I could just picture this image of somebody coming up to the entry point with, you know, an AR-15 strapped over one shoulder, a long rifle over another, and two pistols in his belt, and the cops asking him, ‘You got any tennis balls?’”

Wisconsin’s laws also prevent local governments from passing gun laws stricter than what the state allows, preventing efforts to have guns added to the city’s ordinance. Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers, a Democrat, asked the Secret Service to extend a gun prohibition to the softer outer perimeter but was rebuffed, with the Secret Service stating that it was an issue of state law.

“Unless there’s something that is against state law, we have to respect Second Amendment rights, especially in regards to open-carry and conceal-carry if you’re licensed,” said Milwaukee Police Chief Jeffrey Norman.

With Republicans having a strong pro-gun reputation, there was always going to be an issue of how firearms would be allowed at the RNC. But the fact that guns can’t be restricted thanks to open-carry laws, supported by Republicans, in the wake of an assassination attempt against Trump seems like an oversight at best, and dangerous at worst. The gunman who targeted Trump on Saturday was just outside of the Secret Service’s perimeter too.

Granted, the convention will be in a closed arena this time, unlike in Pennsylvania where the Trump shooting took place. But with Republicans still engaging in escalated political rhetoric, the Secret Service will have to be running a tight ship.

The Republican Party appears to have gone all in on Donald Trump’s messianic status in the wake of the assassination attempt, advancing a theory that the felonious, adulterous, insurrection-inciting, election-denying, convicted rapist was spared by God—even if that same God chose not to save a retired firefighter who died from the bullets shot at Trump.

By Monday, House Speaker Mike Johnson was already a full believer that the former president’s life was spared by an act of divine intervention. Pointing to a history of what he believed to be God-like acts that guided the historic leaders of this country, Johnson claimed that Trump had experienced his own God-given miracle.

“Not to over-spiritualize everything, as you and I are accused of, Ben—but this is a big thing,” Johnson told Ben Shapiro. “I think God’s gonna give our nation another chance, and I think President Trump is gonna be the leader that does that.”

Online, Johnson had gone even further, claiming Sunday on X (formerly Twitter) that “GOD protected President Trump.” But he wasn’t the only right-wing leader to make the overzealous claim. Evangelical minister Franklin Graham told Fox News that Trump was spared by “God’s hand of protection.” From inside prison, former Trump adviser Steve Bannon stated that Trump “wears the armor of God”; Texas Governor Greg Abbott added that Trump was “truly blessed.”

Johnson has already announced that a “full investigation” will be conducted of the Butler, Pennsylvania, shooting.

“The American people deserve to know the truth. We will have Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle and other appropriate officials from DHS and the FBI appear for a hearing before our committees ASAP,” Johnson posted on social media Sunday.

So far, little is understood about the shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, or his motives, save that he was a 20-year-old white male from Bethel, Pennsylvania. Former classmates described him as a bullied “loner” and “outcast” with a penchant for wearing military and hunting clothes, and who was by all measures “definitely conservative.”

In the days following the assassination attempt on Donald Trump, Republican lawmakers and right-wing media pundits have ramped up the religious rhetoric when speaking about the former president’s narrow brush with death. While prayers and well wishes were to be expected, conservatives’ insistence that Trump survived the attempt on his life by divine intervention, just so that he could be reelected, crosses the line into cult territory.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, a known Christian nationalist, took to X (formerly Twitter) Sunday to share his theory that “GOD protected President Trump” during the chaotic shooting, which killed one rallygoer and injured two others. Florida Senator Marco Rubio, whose hopes of being named vice president on Monday were reportedly dashed, expressed a similar sentiment. But these comments only skimmed the surface of Republican reactions.

“God spared our great leader Donald J. Trump,” said Representative Mary Miller Monday during a breakfast with the Illinois delegation to the Republican National Convention, according to the Chicago Sun Times.

During a prayer at that same event, Demetra DeMonte, the Republican National Committeewoman for Illinois, reportedly said, “Thank you for sparing Donald Trump … surely you sent an angel.”

Fox News hosts Emily Compagno and Kayleigh McEnany also argued Monday that the failed assassination attempt against their Republican candidate was proof of God’s guiding hand in the universe.

“And there by the grace of God, President Trump is still standing there before us,” Compagno said, calling the former president’s subtle head movement “a miracle at a minimum.”

“It is a miracle,” McEnany agreed. “Providence comes to mind, you know. He clearly had Christ protecting him in that moment.”

On Newsmax, anchors Bianca de la Garza and Larry Elder discussed the belief that Trump had survived due to divine intervention.

“Speaking of divine intervention, the greatest football catch in NFL history is called the Immaculate Reception. I call this the immaculate protection,” Elder said. “Just a fraction of an inch. He could’ve been hit in the head.”

But Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick might take the cake for most over-the-top cultism.

Patrick took to X to share a text he sent to Trump shortly after the attempt on the former president’s life.

“By the slightest turn of your head in a mere microsecond or the shield of a teleprompter, your life was spared by the Grace of a Merciful and Holy God,” Patrick wrote. “I shared with you not long ago, on our flight to Houston, that God has had his hand on you since you first ran for President. That I believe. No man could survive all you have been through without the Grace of God upon you.

“The Bible verse ‘And who knows but that you have come to your royal position for such a time as this?’ appears in the book of Esther 4:14,” Patrick wrote. “Praise God your life was spared ‘For such a time as this.’”

The religious fervor for Trump was quick to spread online, as some people claimed to spot a spiritual sign hanging above Trump’s rally before the former president had even mounted the stage: a flag that got twisted looked kind of like an angel.

As MAGA world fuels rumors that Trump’s attempted assassin was linked with antifa or DEI, his former classmates in Pennsylvania say the shooter was a conservative.

According to The Philadelphia Inquirer, former classmates remember 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks as a mild-mannered right-winger. “He was definitely a conservative,” said Max R. Smith, one of his ex-classmates.

When remembering Crooks, a classmate described a debate in American history class. “The majority of the class were on the liberal side, but Tom, no matter what, always stood his ground on the conservative side,” Smith said. “That’s still the picture I have of him. Just standing alone on one side while the rest of the class was on the other.”

Others echoed the description, painting him as a quiet loner, while another former student described him as “a quiet kid, not obviously political or violent in any way.”

Public records seem to back up the claim that Crooks was on the right, Crooks registered as a Republican in September 2021, the month he turned 18.

Some have also noted that Crooks appeared to be sporting a T-shirt from gun fanatic YouTube channel “Demolition Ranch.”

On Biden’s Inauguration Day, however, a 17-year-old Crooks also allegedly made a $15 donation to a “Progressive Turnout Project PAC,” which has been given much attention. As Ryan Grim at DropSite news reports, this contribution shouldn’t be given too much weight. The email-based PAC regularly spams inboxes with confusing links and flashy colors and can hardly be seen as demonstrating much about the shooter’s ideology.

The FBI has still not found a possible motive for the shooting.

Judge Aileen Cannon may have dismissed Donald Trump’s classified documents case on Monday, but not everyone was on the same legal page as the Trump-appointed judge.

Democratic lawmakers and legal scholars jointly torched Cannon’s 93-page decision, accusing the ruling of breaking precedent and effectively handing Trump everything he had been hoping for: a near-indefinite delay that erases the case from the immediacy of the 2024 presidential race.

New York Senator Chuck Schumer called for the decision’s immediate appeal, describing the ruling as “breathtakingly misguided” and ”wrong on the law.”

“This is further evidence that Judge Cannon cannot handle this case impartially and must be reassigned,” Schumer told HuffPost.

Representative Dan Goldman also joined the chorus, claiming that Cannon knew that the Supreme Court “has upheld Special Counsel appointments time and time again.”

In an interview with HuffPost, the New York representative argued that the “Trump-packed Supreme Court” had handed Trump an immunity ruling related to his time in office, but that Cannon had “manufactured immunity for him” after term had ended.

Cannon rejected the case on the basis that the Independent Counsel Act, which she claimed served as the foundation for special counsel Jack Smith’s appointment, had expired and therefore invalidated Smith’s work on the case. That notion had been elevated by just one Supreme Court member—Justice Clarence Thomas—who wrote in a concurring opinion in Trump’s immunity ruling on July 1 that “if there is no law establishing the office that the Special Counsel occupies, then he cannot proceed with this prosecution.”

Cannon began hearing arguments in June over whether Smith’s appointment to the case was constitutional, but she caught considerable flack from legal experts for taking up the arguments, including from former Trump attorney Ty Cobb, who argued that there were mountains of legal precedent behind Smith’s appointment.

Smith has the ability to appeal the dismissal, though his office has not yet announced what their next steps will be.

Donald Trump is already celebrating Judge Aileen Cannon’s decision to toss his entire classified documents case.

Trump took aim at Democrats and his court cases in a long rant, praising “this dismissal of the Lawless indictment in Florida” as a good first step that should be “followed quickly by the dismissal of the ALL the Witch Hunts,” mentioning his cases in New York, Washington, D.C., and Georgia.

The former president and convicted felon seems to be trying to tie Cannon’s dismissal of his classified documents case to any sympathy he’s gained after he was shot at a rally on Saturday. It’s more of the political opportunism that Trump is known for, continuously complaining about unfair treatment and claiming that everything is rigged against him. His supporters will probably start repeating it, especially since many of them have blamed Democrats and the left for the attempt on Trump’s life.

Cannon has long been suspected of either incompetence or rigging the case in favor of the former president and convicted felon. Trump has made no secret of his approval of Cannon and his expectation that she would dismiss the case, even hinting at it last month. Other reports seem to indicate that Cannon may have been biased toward Trump from the moment she was assigned the case. The fact that she went beyond the facts of Trump’s mishandling of classified documents and used a dubious constitutional argument to dismiss the case suggests bias, as the ruling will likely be reversed and will end up adding a longer delay.

The fact that Trump is now celebrating Cannon not only seems like a blatantly corrupt arrangement, it also shows that Trump isn’t changing his tone after the shooting.

“Getting shot in the face changes a man,” fellow Republican National Convention speaker Tucker Carlson told Axios, but it wasn’t even two full days after the shooting that Trump was back to his bombastic self.

If Trump’s post, Monday morning after one of his cases was dismissed, is any indication, his definition of unifying the country might be different from what the average person expects. Even his fellow Republicans are worried about how he will act at the Republican National Convention this week, fearing chaos from a nominee who goes off script even in normal speeches. No matter how much his speech is “toned down,” there will definitely be drama at the convention, and Trump will probably say something inflammatory.

Donald Trump and his team are pushing a so-called pivot toward unity in the wake of Saturday’s assassination attempt on the former president, and the media is absolutely eating it up—with positively no actual evidence to suggest that anything has changed.

While Trump’s allies were quick to blame Democrats and the media for Saturday’s shooting, the former president’s team has opted to go a different route, and switch up the script on his speech at the Republican National Convention. Trump is now touting the address, scheduled for Thursday, as a chance to “bring the country together.”

As a result of Saturday’s chaotic events, and early reports out of the Trump camp, many outlets are optimistically reporting a likely shift in rhetoric from the Republican candidate who has been using the same deeply divisive, violent, racist, anti-immigrant rhetoric for the past eight years.

“Trump will adopt an unfamiliar, almost benevolent posture, and call for unity in the face of tragedy,” Politico reported Monday, citing Trump’s “near-death experience,” which “would rattle and forever change even the strongest among us.”

Maggie Haberman of The New York Times said during a CNN interview Sunday that Trump seemed “completely normal” after the attempt on his life, but noted that she thought the former president might choose to recognize this as a “different kind of moment.”

Haberman pointed out that Trump hasn’t yet started selling merchandise featuring the photograph of him with blood on his face and his fist in the air, which could be a sign of a tonal shift.

But immediately after, Haberman warned against making such predictions. “Anybody who is trying to predict, number one, what the rest of this campaign looks like, or how he is going to talk about it, or how Democrats are going to talk about him, I think it is a mistake. There’s a lot we don’t know,” she said.*

Tucker Carlson certainly thinks Trump’s turn toward the light is real. “Getting shot in the face changes a man,” the erstwhile Fox News host told Axios.

In the same piece, Jim Vandehei and Mike Allen speculated about Trump’s next moves.

“He could unify America,” they wrote. “Imagine he gave a speech featuring something he rarely shows: humility. Imagine him telling the nation that he has been too rough, too loose, too combative with his language—and now realizes words can have consequences, and promises to tone it down and bring new voices into the White House if he wins.”

Similarly, Elliot Ackerman penned a piece for The Atlantic arguing that “Trump could take a different path” than the one he’s been set on for almost a decade. “Trump has called his enemies ‘bad people’ in the past, but now he’s suffered a near-death experience,” Ackerman wrote. “Sometimes that changes people.”

This kind of speculation is pure fiction, however, as Trump’s assassination attempt has only emboldened his preexisting victim complex, which has convinced him he’s the target of systemic political persecution, and not criminal prosecution. By Monday morning, when it was announced that Judge Aileen Cannon had tossed Trump’s classified documents case, the former president was back posting his same old martyred talking points on Truth Social.

“As we move forward in Uniting our Nation after the horrific events on Saturday, this dismissal of the Lawless Indictment in Florida should be just the first step, followed quickly by the dismissal of ALL the Witch Hunts—The January 6th Hoax in Washington, D.C., the Manhattan D.A.’s Zombie Case, the New York A.G. Scam, Fake Claims about a woman I never met (a decades old photo in a line with her then husband does not count), and the Georgia ‘Perfect’ Phone Call charges,” Trump wrote.

“The Democrat Justice Department coordinated ALL of these Political Attacks, which are an Election Interference conspiracy against Joe Biden’s Political Opponent, ME.”

He did include one limp appeal toward unity: “Let us come together to END all Weaponization of our Justice System and Make America Great Again!”

It took about 36 hours for Trump to abandon his call to unite a divided America and get back to talking about himself. As the Republican National Convention begins, it’s worth remaining skeptical of Trump and his team’s attempts to paint him as a changed man. Trump was desperate to widen his appeal to centrist voters long before this weekend, and he will continue to use Saturday’s violent unfoldings to distract voters from his own equally violent rhetoric.

* This story has been updated to include Maggie Haberman’s full quote.

It seems like Judge Aileen Cannon is just making it up as she goes along.

On Monday, the Trump-appointed district judge threw out Trump’s entire classified documents case, seemingly using one concurring opinion from the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling as justification to do so. In her 93-page ruling, Cannon ruled that the appointment of special counsel Jack Smith violated the Constitution—drawing outrage from legal scholars and reporters alike.

“Just to be crystal clear: SCOTUS has upheld special counsels repeatedly,” wrote Chris Hates on X. “Cannon is a district court judge, her job is to apply controlling precedent. She’s doing this because she thinks the MAGA court is on the same page as her and Trump’s lawyers and will go along.”

Instead of honoring precedent, Cannon seems to have relied on Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s concurring opinion in the immunity ruling earlier this month. In that decision, Thomas was the only judge to make the argument that the Department of Justice misstepped in its special appointment of Jack Smith. The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, which has struck down Cannon’s decisions in the past, will take up her decision next.  

Regardless of how the federal courts rule, Cannon will still get to hand Trump a win by continuing to delay Trump’s trial, as she has done for the past 18 months.
One person who isn’t mad? Donald Trump himself. On Truth Social, Trump wrote that the dismissal “should be just the first step,” calling all the cases against him scams, hoaxes, and “Political Attacks,” and further pressing for the  “dismissal of ALL witch hunts” against him.

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has a strong message for any Democrats in Congress who have “resigned” themselves to a Donald Trump victory: Retire.

A Sunday report in Axios about Democrats discussing Joe Biden’s prospects following Saturday’s assassination attempt against Trump included an anonymous quote from a senior House Democrat: “We’ve all resigned ourselves to a second Trump presidency.”

Ocasio-Cortez’s response on X (formerly Twitter) got right to the point.

“If you’re a ‘senior Democrat’ that feels this way, you should absolutely retire and make space for true leadership that refuses to resign themselves to fascism,” she said. “This kind of leadership is functionally useless to the American people. Retire.”

Ocasio-Cortez’s point seems to be that the anonymous Democrat’s attitude flies in the face of the message the party has tried to convey over the past several months, even years, about the right-wing threat to democracy. Ocasio-Cortez was widely criticized for calling Trump a fascist following the 2020 Democratic National Convention, and ever since, that language has become part of mainstream Democratic discourse. No Democrat who has loudly criticized the fascist tendencies of Trump should be now saying, “Well, he’s probably going to win now.”

Trump has never officially conceded losing the 2020 election, repeatedly accusing the media, courts, and voting mechanisms of being rigged against him. When Trump engages in antidemocratic rhetoric, the entire Republican Party falls in line behind him. Ocasio-Cortez has tried to back up her words with actions like initiating impeachment proceedings against conservative Supreme Court justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas. If other Democrats in Congress, no matter how senior, are now responding to Trump and Republicans with shrugs after months and years of sounding the alarm, what purpose are they serving in office?