Somebody in the White House leveled Kamala Harris Thursday with a line that would have made Don Rickles blush. The real shocker? It wasn’t President Donald J. Trump, notorious “Insulter-in-Chief.”
In fact, Trump was off spending his day hosting a bunch of cute school kids, relishing again in his newfound role as “grandfather-in-chief.”
No, the mic-dropping, jaw-dropping smackdown of the former vice president came from current Vice President J.D. Vance.
Vance was speaking Thursday morning on “Vince,” the new Rumble podcast hosted by Vince Coglianese that replaced Dan Bongino’s show starting Monday.
Coglianese asked Vance “How are you doing the job differently than Harris did it?”
“Well,” replied Vance, “I don’t have four shots of Vodka before every meeting.”
C’mon, he didn’t really say that, did he? Yup. Listen for yourself:
Hysterically funny? Wildly inappropriate? A clever way for the likely 2028 GOP candidate to keep the highest polling Democrat for 2028 pinned to the mat? That’s for another time.
What’s interesting is the juxtaposition between Vance’s TKO of Harris and Trump’s XOXOs with school children when signing the executive order dismantling the Department of Education.
What an adorable scene: The very large president squeezed behind a small desk, signing the EO, surrounded by kids in school desks signing their own versions of the order.
Aww…
This came just days after the adorable scene of Elon Musk’s son Lil X trotting with Trump to Marine One.
It happens a couple of weeks after the cute … if less-than-sanitary … appearance of Lil X in the Oval Office.
And it also happened less than a month after the powerful scene of Trump signing the executive order keeping males out of women’s sports, surrounded by young girls and young women. The president looks to be protecting the girls who could be his granddaughters.
Not incidentally, this is just weeks after the vice president forcefully interjected himself into the White House meeting between Trump and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, smacking the Ukrainian in front of the entire world for being disrespectful to the President.
Am I suggesting the White House is creating a good cop, bad cop strategy with Trump and Vance? No, of course not. You could no more remove from Trump the “mouthy construction guy from Queens” than you could remove the hair gel from Gavin Newsom.
In fact, here’s a quick look at Trump’s Truth Social account from Friday.
He went off on the “sick terrorist thugs” attacking Tesla, suggesting they could serve their 20-year prison sentences “in the prisons of El Salvador, which have become so recently famous for such lovely conditions!”
He called veteran New York Times columnist Maggie Haberman “Maggot Hagerman, the really dumb ‘scammer’ who constantly writes about me for the Times, using anonymous, made up (nonexistent!) sources, and who … is a big part of the Scam.”
U.S. District Court Judge James Boasberg? He’s “a local, unknown Judge, a Grandstander, looking for publicity, and it cannot be for any other reason, because his ‘Rulings’ are so ridiculous, and inept.”
Yes, the Orange Man of the “Mean Tweets” is still around. More subtle, but still around.
However, two things are clear.
First, the White House this time around is working hard to show off the warm, funny, gracious grandfatherly side to Trump that those who meet and know him have long insisted was there. They are demonstrating the real person that both the legacy media and social media refused to show in his first term. And now that what was formerly Twitter has been liberated by Lil’ X’s daddy, those special, personal, humanizing Trump moments are being seen and spread, or in the case of the photo of Trump and Lil’ X at Marine One, cooed over.
Second, Trump 47 has a wingman in Vance ready at a moment’s notice to jump into the dogfight with guns a’blazing. He now has someone willing to draw heat away from the president, to attack his foes, to help remove the pressure on Trump to smack back at every slight, to give the chief executive more breathing room to do the actual job he’s been elected to do.
And as Vance showed Tuesday, he can share the burden of being the Chief Smart-Aleck.
This one-two punch serves several purposes: First, it neutralizes the Saul Alinsky “Rules for Radicals” strategy of isolating and demonizing an enemy that was used so effectively by the Left in Trump’s first term. (A strategy, not incidentally, now being used against Elon Musk.)
Second, it creates a far less toxic atmosphere around the White House than in Trump’s first term. It’s harder to throw obnoxious questions at the president—and for Trump to respond with serious bite—when there’s a little tot tugging his sleeve or school kids at his side. It’s also a lot riskier in other settings—whether you are a snotty reporter or petulant foreign leader—when you know J.D. Vance is ready, willing and definitely able to jump in and double-team you.
A more genial Trump and more civil Oval Office is better for everyone.
