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Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance is being widely mocked after he appeared to struggle to answer a simple question on why Americans might want to go for a drink with him.
“Why would people in Wisconsin want to have a beer with you?” a reporter asked Vance at a campaign stop in Eau Claire on Wednesday.
In an awkward moment, the Ohio Senator laughed and then stumbled over a response.
“Uh well, I guess, I guess they’d, they’d like, they’d want to have a beer with me because I actually do like to drink beer,” he said.
“I probably like to drink beer a little bit too much but that’s OK, I’m sure the media won’t give me too much crap over that.”
He quickly changed tact to heaping praise on his running mate instead: “But look, I, I mean, my, my… the reason I’m doing this and the reason I think Donald Trump is doing this – and I think the media often slanders him but… I’ve never met a guy who likes normal people more than Donald Trump.”
A clip of the moment was quickly shared on X where social media users piled in to mock the Yale Law graduate, former venture capitalist and author, with several quickly branding Vance “weird” – echoing the highly successful attack line first coined by Kamala Harris’s new running mate Tim Walz.
“Yikes. He’s weird,” one person posted.
“JD Vance channeling his Ron DeSantis vibe,” another commentator chimed in, alluding to the Florida governor’s own string of awkward moments during his failed presidential run earlier this year.
“Those ‘gotcha’ questions, ya gotta watch out for those,” another X user wrote sarcastically. “Snagglepussed on a beer question. This guy doesn’t have the chops.”
“He really is the absolute worst at public speaking,” said a third. “Maybe he should have had a few beers beforehand. Might have made him a bit more likeable and relatable… although probably not.”
Others said Vance’s performance made a nonsense of the Republican argument that Harris is awkward and suggested he should take US Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh out to a bar, given the conservative judge’s declaration of his love of beer during his heated nomination hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2018.
Since his unveiling as Trump’s running mate at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee last month – a conference that had a beer theme, incidentally, in tribute to its host city – Vance has suffered a baptism of fire on the national stage, failing to land meaningful blows on the opposition and leading to rumblings in Republican circles that Trump may have made the wrong choice.
A clip of Vance joking about being denounced as racist for drinking Diet Mountain Dew previously went viral while he has faced a huge backlash over his comments branding Kamala Harris and other women “childless cat ladies.”
When Walz made his first public comments as Harris’s new running mate on Tuesday, he roasted Vance over a wild rumor circulating online.
“Like all regular people I grew up with in the heartland, JD studied at Yale, had his career funded by Silicon Valley billionaires, and then wrote a bestseller trashing that community.
“That’s not what Middle America is. And I got to tell you. I can’t wait to debate the guy... That is, if he’s willing to get off the couch and show up.”
