One of the manifold remarkable aspects of the 2024 US presidential race is how quickly the news cycle moves on. Just over two weeks ago, an assassination attempt was made on Donald Trump — an episode that was expected to dominate and “reshape” the race. And yet the sheer volume of election news since then has made this feel like a distant memory. Indeed, in the past week, the number of Americans looking up “Trump shooting” online has been eclipsed by the number putting another search term into Google: “JD Vance couch”.
The search relates to a rumour that Vance, Trump’s running mate, had confessed to having sex with a couch in the pages of his bestselling memoir Hillbilly Elegy — a rumour that, while utterly baseless, has been seized upon by meme makers. But while this is hard to blame on Vance, a series of misjudgments, blunders and a strong cringe factor are not. And those have combined to keep the senator from Ohio trending on social media for all the wrong reasons.
Vance has made several attempts, over the past week or so, to come across as a likeable kinda guy who can crack jokes and make people laugh — a guy like Trump, in other words. The problem is that he can’t seem to pull it off. Trump is naturally very funny; Vance is not. And somehow, despite the fact that the former was born into a life of privilege while Vance was born in an impoverished home to a drug-addict mother, it is Trump who manages to come across, to his supporters at least, as a man of the people.
Last Monday, at a rally in his hometown of Middletown, Ohio, Vance made a weird crack about how Democrats would probably call the fact that he drinks Diet Mountain Dew racist. “It’s good!” he said as a few members of the crowd laughed halfheartedly, before doing a very awkward faux laugh and pointing his finger at the crowd Trumpily with an “I love you guys”.
A montage of awkward moments from the speech was shared widely, as was an accidentally hilarious video of Vance backstage at a rally in Virginia. In the clip, Vance goes through the “ton of crap” (including bottles of Diet Mountain Dew) that had been laid out for him to eat and drink before saying to camera, in distinctly Michael-Scott-from-The-Office fashion, “If I ate even half this stuff of course I’d balloon up like crazy,” and then asking for campaign donations.
Trump would never. Vance might be the millennial, but it is the boomer former president — perhaps because of his background in and affection for television — who has a better sense of how the moving image and the internet work. Trump often gives incredibly long and rambling speeches — I was in the crowd in 2022 when he announced he would run for the presidency again and many superfans were trying to leave before he’d finished — but he understands that it is the clips and soundbites that will be watched by millions of people and that only they really count.
Trump also has a keen grasp on the magic of plausible deniability. While Vance went on television in 2021 to rally against childless “cat ladies” — and doubled down by posting the same phrase on social media — Trump often tends to be more cunning. He deploys phrases like “a lot of people are saying” or “I’ve been hearing” in order to put some distance between himself and an offensive comment, and uses body language to signal what he really means.
“There’s a script of what he’s saying, but then there’s also a meta script of what it means to people,” Donna Goldstein, an anthropologist at the University of Colorado Boulder and co-author of a 2016 paper on Trump’s entertainment value, tells me. “A lot of it has to do with bullying other people, but it’s all done in this clownish, gesture-ish way . . . He often just gestures the final sentence, which is then highly interpretable, and so he’s off the hook.”
Vance has a further problem that Trump doesn’t share: he has a real ideology. Trump has changed his position on abortion many times, for instance; Vance has openly called for a national ban. While Trump has started calling for unity, Vance talks about “completely replacing the existing ruling class with another ruling class” and the need to “overthrow” the “people who currently actually control the country”.
Vance is too serious for listeners to brush off his comments with an “oh he’s only joking” — something I often hear from Trump’s supporters. He lacks Trump’s charisma, confidence and comedy value, and he also lacks the subtlety of Trump’s style, which is often under-appreciated. If the former president wanted a running mate who would make him shine, Vance was a great pick.