After months of speculation, Donald Trump finally revealed on Monday that he has chosen J.D. Vance as his running mate. The 39 year old first-term U.S. senator from Ohio was long-rumored to be on the former president’s shortlist, so it is no surprise that the Biden campaign was ready with its first counterpunch not long after the announcement.
What is surprising, however, is what they chose to include in it. The social media post featured an excerpt from Megyn’s 2017 interview with Vance. The only problem? The clip was totally taken out of context.
On Tuesday’s show, Megyn was joined by Charlie Kirk, author of Right Wing Revolution, to fact-check the Biden campaign and discuss what Vance brings to the GOP ticket.
Adding Context
Not long after Trump posted on Truth Social that he had selected Vance as his vice president, the media and left began to unfurl their opposition research. “Already the media has got the knives out for J.D. … [because] his story is extremely powerful and will resonate with a lot of voters, so they are trying to make him into some demon,” Megyn said. “He is really not. He is a nationalist, populist, and he is conservative.”
Vance, who is the author of the bestselling memoir-turned-blockbuster Hillbilly Elegy, was quite critical of Trump in the lead up to the 2016 election, but he ultimately became an ardent supporter of Trump and the so-called MAGA agenda.
The perceived flip-flop is already being used against him, with the Biden-Harris team taking to X with a 40-second clip comparing some of the senator’s remarks about the forty-fifth president “then vs. now.”
One of the moments in that montage was cherry picked from an extensive feature Megyn did with Vance and his family back in June 2017 on her NBC show. “The new reformed Joe Biden who is going to ‘lower the temperature’ is out with an ad about J.D., and it happens to use a piece of my interview,” Megyn noted.
VANCE: I’ve criticized a lot of Trump’s rhetoric, and I’m not a big fan of some of the things that he’s said.
As Megyn pointed out, that soundbite does not reflect the point Vance actually made if you consider the entire exchange:
MEGYN: Do you think that it explains why when so-called coastal elites were getting very upset over the many offenses that Trump caused – some of the sexism, some of the foul mouthed language – that this was not particularly shocking because a lot of these folks had grown up around that?
VANCE: Absolutely. I’ve criticized a lot of Trump’s rhetoric, and I’m not a big fan of some of the things that he said. But there was almost a sense where people were offended by Trump, not because of the substance of what he said, but because of how he said it. Good society people should not talk in this way. And I just never quite understood that criticism.
“First of all, the campaign tweeted out that what he actually said was, ‘I’m not a big fan of his, a big fan of Trump.’ That’s not what he said, and there is a distinction between ‘I’m not his fan’ and ‘I’m not a big fan of one of some of the things that he has said,'” Megyn explained. “But secondly, take a look at the longer clip… It was completely bastardized by the Biden campaign… as are half of the things they are saying about him.”
Vance’s Appeal
Despite the editing, Megyn said there is no getting around the fact that Vance is on the record condemning Trump on multiple occasions. “He was critical of Trump in 2016 because virtually everybody was critical of Trump 2016,” Megyn said. “The media wants to pretend there is no evolution on Trump from 2016 to 2024.”
Kirk – who was transparent about the fact that he “lobbied” both behind the scenes and publicly to get Vance on the ticket – said he actually believes the senator’s past critiques are one of his assets.
“I talked to [Trump] multiple times about this,” he recalled. “And I said, ‘Mr. President, everyone around you is going to say that J.D. said bad things about you. I think that’s exactly why you should select him. Because there are a lot of people in the country that have said negative things about you that have grown and seen who you are and they want you as president again. And now you have a VP that can connect to them and say, ‘I was a skeptic, now I’m a believer. I was someone that wasn’t sure, and now I am a committed devotee.'”
In Kirk’s view, Vance represents an “olive branch” of sorts to those who have had a change of heart. He can speak to, Kirk said, those who once thought, “Who is this Trump guy? I don’t get it,” but now say, “Wow, maybe all of my operating assumptions have been incorrect. Maybe I have been focusing on the wrong things. Where ‘Trump micro’ might bother me – okay, Trump might say words I don’t like and tweet stuff. But ‘Trump macro’ is the best president of our lifetime, where we have peace and prosperity, and a border, and we don’t have men in women’s sports, all this stuff.”
At the end of the day, Kirk believes Vance gives Trump the chance to reach that voter. “I think J.D. Vance is a perfect person to be able to tackle that,” he concluded. “Politics is about addition not subtraction, multiplication not division, so I think it is actually a potential huge positive for the campaign.”
You can check out Megyn’s full interview with Kirk by tuning in to episode 839 on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch The Megyn Kelly Show live on SiriusXM’s Triumph (channel 111) weekdays from 12pm to 2pm ET.