Five takeaways from J.D. Vance’s interview with The New York Times

J.D. Vance keeps showing up.

The Republican vice presidential nominee and first-term senator from Ohio is talking to reporters at campaign rallies. He is scheduling network and cable interviews. And he is sitting down with The New York Times.

Something has shifted in American politics when it is noteworthy that a candidate willingly faces one unscripted question after another. But here we are.

Republican vice presidential nominee Senator J.D. Vance. Credit: AP

In his latest appearance with the news media, Vance sat down with Lulu Garcia-Navarro, co-host of The Interview, a New York Times podcast that features an hour-long conversation with a single guest every Saturday.

Here are five takeaways from Vance’s interview:

His critics call him spineless. He says he is complex.

Donald Trump seems unlikely to describe himself as reflective. Vance cannot stop.

The interview opens with Garcia-Navarro telling Vance that, as she prepared for their meeting, a persistent question emerged from people: “Which J.D. is going to show up?”

It is not the most flattering question for a politician, but Vance does not flinch. Instead, he embraces it, saying that holding conflicting opinions and emotional complexities is “sort of the nature of being an American in 2024”.

“Isn’t that how most people are?” he said. “Sometimes they’re frustrated with what’s going on in the country. Sometimes they are a little bit more optimistic. Sometimes it’s both, right?”

The interview quickly moves on to questions about specific issues and moments, but Vance returns again and again to this theme. It is also part of his strategy with the news media, which is not to doubt his sincerity. But Vance, a onetime Never Trumper now campaigning by the former president’s side as his running mate, understands that the nation’s fractured mediascape means that audiences for different media outlets will have contrasting opinions about him.

He sees such self-described complexity as a good thing. “If you see somebody in all their complexity, they don’t fit the caricature,” he said.

He regrets saying ‘childless cat ladies’. Sort of.

Vance’s attacks on “childless cat ladies” set off an avalanche of criticism when he joined the Republican ticket, and it quickly coloured many Americans’ views of him.

In the interview, he expressed regret for not wording it differently: “I think most people who probably have watched this have said something dumb — have said something that they wish they had put differently.”

Still, he defended the sentiment behind the phrase, and traced the inception of that opinion to a moment when he was a young Ivy League law school student riding a commuter train in the north-east and watched a poor black mother and her children.

“Clearly, I could tell by the way she was dressed she didn’t have a whole lot of money,” he said.

Vance, whose family received government assistance when he was young, remembered admiring the mother’s patience with her young children, who were misbehaving, while other passengers projected annoyance or frustration at being disturbed.

JD Vance with his mother, Beverly Aikins.Credit: Bloomberg

“It just sort of hit me like, ‘OK, this is really, really bad’,” Vance said. “This thing that we do where we make motherhood or fatherhood, or we just — there’s this, again, I do think that there’s this pathological frustration with children that just is a new thing in American society. I think it’s very dark.”

He said that pathology has surfaced in the country’s political culture, giving the example of “deranged” people who choose not to have children because they are worried about climate change.

“That is a bizarre way of thinking about the future,” he said. “Not to have kids because of concerns over climate change? Um, I think the more bizarre thing is our leadership, who encourages young women, and, frankly young men, to think about it that way.”

He said he would not include Vice President Kamala Harris in that category. “I should have put this in a better way,” he said about the controversy. “But the point still remains.”

That’s just, like, his opinion, man.

“Have you ever seen the movie The Big Lebowski?”

That was Vance’s unlikely response to a question about one of his most provocative leaked emails, in which he proclaimed to a friend a decade ago, “I hate the police”.

The email exchange revolved around the friend’s suggestion, in the wake of the killing of Michael Brown, a black teenager, by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, that police officers should wear body cameras.

Vance said he had sent the email at an emotional moment, after a suitcase containing his wife’s family heirlooms had been stolen from his car in San Francisco. Vance described his dismay with the police by quoting The Big Lebowski, the 1998 cult classic starring Jeff Bridges as The Dude.

Jeff Bridges in a scene from The Big Lebowski.

“So I love The Big Lebowski and The Dude has his car stolen,” Vance said. “He says, ‘Hey, are you, like, investigating it?’. And the cop kind of chuckles and says, ‘Yeah, we got a couple of detectives down at the crime lab’. That was kind of the response that I got to, ‘Are you guys going to try to recover this stuff?’ I was frustrated at the police. I fired off a frustrated email to a friend.”

The Dude abides; Vance vibes.

On Trump and 2020, he really doesn’t want to go there.

Vance is sick of answering questions about an election that unfolded two years before he was ever a candidate for office.

But joining the Republican presidential ticket as Trump’s running mate means there is no escaping the former president’s unresolved grievances, including his four-year insistence that he was cheated out of a second term.

Vance’s refusal to answer whether Trump won in 2020 was widely considered his weakest moment in the debate with Tim Walz this month. And, predictably, he has repeatedly been asked to clarify that moment.

His interview with Garcia-Navarro ends with that question, five times. And Vance sidesteps each time, refusing to say that Trump lost in 2020 and making it clear that he would not have voted to certify the 2020 results.

Usha Vance has her husband’s ear. But not his spotlight.

Usha Vance has been a frequent companion to her husband on the campaign trail in recent months, but she has rarely joined him onstage and she has been reluctant to engage with reporters.

Yet, she has been a key sounding board for him in numerous ways, including helping him prepare for the vice presidential debate, behind the scenes, of course.

JD Vance with his wife, Usha, who has accompanied him on the campaign trail. Credit: AP

Vance’s interview suggested that his wife, a trained litigator he met in law school, has played that role for him for years, an eyewitness to both his political and his religious conversions.

In his story of his eventual embrace of Trumpism, Vance tells of being at a business dinner with a hotel executive. The executive complained that he had to pay more to employ US citizens instead of hiring immigrants without legal status as cheaper labour, and he blamed Trump. Vance recalled feeling horrified by that perspective. He agreed with Trump that illegal immigration was to blame for low wages even though at the time he despised Trump’s approach.

“It’s funny because my wife was there,” Vance said. “She’s brought this up many times to me. This is, in her view, when things really, really shifted for me.”

Usha Vance was also a central figure in her husband’s recent decision to be baptised. She was raised in a Hindu household that, as Vance described it, was “not especially religious”. She encouraged him to pursue his interest in Catholicism “in sort of a good-for-your-soul kind of way”.

Vance said he never would have converted without her support.

“I feel – felt – kind of bad,” Vance said. “Like, ‘Oh, you didn’t sign up to marry a weekly churchgoer and are you OK with this?’. And she was sort of more than OK with it, and that was a big part of, I guess, the confirmation that this was the right thing for me.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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