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Seth Meyers has claimed even he could be in with a chance of getting a role in Donald Trump’s potential second administration, after JD Vance was chosen as the Republican presidential candidate’s running mate.
The late night host waded in on Trump’s vice presidential pick on his show on Tuesday night, pointing out that Vance has previously called Trump a “moral disaster” and warned he could be “America’s Hitler”.
“Damn! If he can say all that and still get picked for vice president, I figure I got a chance for secretary of state at least,” said Meyers.
“I’m in the mix.”
Meyers went on to poke fun at Vance.
“Look at this guy. He looks like the politician in a sci-fi movie who’s secretly working with the aliens,” he said.
“He looks like a Funko Pop! Doll of himself. He looks like Teen Wolf graduated and came back to coach the team.”
Vance’s campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
On Monday, Trump finally put months of speculation to rest when he announced that he had chosen Vance to be his running mate in November’s presidential election, hours before the two of them put in an appearance at the Republican National Convention.
For months, Trump had effectively been holding open auditions for the chance to succeed Mike Pence as his deputy.
The process saw several candidates jostle for Trump’s affections by speaking at his rallies, defending him on cable news and social media and even showing up at his New York hush money trial in a sign of support.
Vance’s appointment comes after he’s appeared to have quite the change of heart about Trump.
Back in August 2016, during Trump’s first run for the White House, the Ohio senator told ABC News that he didn’t think Trump was “offering many solutions” to the problems of America’s rural working class.
In a separate interview with Charlie Rose that summer, Vance – who rose to fame as the author of best-selling memoir Hillbilly Elegy – said that he was “never a Trump guy”.
Then, he went even further, telling Kentucky radio host Matt Jones he considered the businessman “a fraud”.
In another interview that August, Vance said that he might even be prepared to vote for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election in order to stop Trump from winning.
After his later entry into Republican politics, CNN reported on a series of Vance’s now-deleted tweets. In one, from summer 2017, he referred to Trump as “a moral disaster” with “no domestic policy agenda besides tax cuts.”
In another, he said: “I go back and forth between thinking Trump might be a cynical a**hole like [Richard] Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he might be America’s Hitler.”
Vance later apologized for the tweets and sought to explain his conversion to Trumpism.
“Look, I was wrong about Donald Trump,” he told Fox News’s Bret Baier this June. “I didn’t think he was going to be a good president, Bret. He was a great president, and it’s one of the reasons why I’m working so hard to make sure he gets a second term.
“When you are wrong about something – you should change your mind and be honest with people about that fact.”
