Republican senators divided over Trump sticking with Vance

Republican lawmakers are divided over whether former President Trump should ditch his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), who has become a magnet for controversy and negative press coverage since Trump tapped him for the role earlier this month.

Some Republican senators think Trump should have picked a woman or a person of color to help broaden his appeal beyond his hardcore base of supporters.

Several wondered if Trump ignored his professional political advisers and listened instead to his son Donald Trump Jr. and conservative media celebrity Tucker Carlson in picking Vance.

“I would assume he’s not real happy,” one Republican senator said of how Trump is handling the barrage of negative publicity that’s hit his running mate over the past 10 days.

“I don’t think Trump likes any discomfort. He can create discomfort himself, but he doesn’t like external discomfort coming in, and JD’s struggling. I would assume he’s not real happy,” they added.

Others, however, are defending the pick, saying Vance can help Republicans in key swing states in the Midwest. And Trump has stood behind his running mate.

Still, the discontent is not limited to the Senate. A number of House Republicans told The Hill last week that they had concerns about Vance’s foreign policy positions, lack of experience and inability to expand the Republican coalition beyond Trump’s base.

Senate Republicans familiar with private conversations with Trump or top members of his team say many of their colleagues recommended other options, such as Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), the vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and Sen. Tim Scott (S.C.), the Senate’s only Black Republican, who played a key role in crafting Trump’s 2017 tax bill.

“It’s pretty generally thought that it was his son and Tucker Carlson who talked him into it. I’m sure Susie Wiles and [Chris] LaCivita didn’t,” the senator said, referring to Trump’s two top campaign advisers. “Because they’ve done so well up until this point in being able to widen” Trump’s appeal as a candidate.

“Unforced errors,” the senator added.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) tried to talk Trump out of picking Vance while aboard Trump’s plane en route to the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, according to The Washington Post. Graham argued Rubio would pick up more swing votes in battleground states.

And other Republican senators privately warned weeks ago that if Trump would make a serious political mistake if he picked a white man as his running mate.  

“Even Trump is smart enough to say two white men on the Republican ticket in 2024 is a bad idea when you have really good alternatives, and he has really good alternatives,” another GOP senator told The Hill in the spring. “Tim Scott — I think Tim’s No. 1.”

A third senator said Trump may help himself in the general election if he found a different running mate but predicted the former president wouldn’t want to go through the turmoil of shaking up the ticket, even though Democrats just energized their fundraising by dumping President Biden.

Under Republican National Committee (RNC) rules, the committee can replace Vance as a nominee for vice president only in the case of “death, declination, or otherwise.”

“Trump would hate anything that brings him down, but he would never think he made a mistake,” the senator said.

The senator mimicked Trump’s signature line on his reality TV show “The Apprentice” — “You’re fired,” the source said in an attempt to imitate Trump’s voice.

“Youth has benefit, but experience matters too — more than two years. Before you ever run for the United States Senate, you ought to at least run for county sheriff,” the senator added. “Sounds like it was a knock-down, drag-out fight until the decision was made.”

Instead of tapping Rubio or Scott, as many GOP senators wanted, Trump picked Vance, a rising conservative star in hopes that he would amplify his message to white, working-class base, especially in the key Midwestern states of Michigan and Wisconsin, and in Pennsylvania.

Now Vance, who was elected to the Senate in 2022, is drawing sharp scrutiny for his past comments about abortion as well as his past private criticisms of Trump, which fueled a multiday media firestorm.

Senate Republican Whip John Thune (S.D.) defended Vance when asked about the wave of negative publicity.

“The reporting is [Trump] is very pleased with that pick and confident that he’ll be a help to him — not just at the top of the ticket but in downballot races, in parts of the country we’re trying to expand our appeal,” Thune said.

Asked if Vance would bring new voters to support the GOP presidential ticket, Thune said his colleague appeals “demographically and geographically to blocs of voters that obviously we want to have in our coalition as we head into November.”

GOP strategists think Vance, the bestselling author of “Hillbilly Elegy,” will have traction with white, working-class voters in Pennsylvania and Michigan, especially.

But Republican senators say Trump is likely to be angry over new reporting about 90 emails and text messages that Vance exchanged years ago with a former Yale Law School classmate. In those messages, Vance referred to Trump as a demagogue, predicted Black people would suffer if white people vote for Trump, and called Trump a “reprehensible human being.”

While Vance is on record as criticizing Trump publicly in 2016, before he defeated Hillary Clinton, the newly unearthed private messages have thrust Vance’s earlier views back into the media spotlight.

Republican senators predict Vice President Harris, the likely Democratic presidential nominee, will throw these comments back in Trump’s face on the debate stage and continue to use them as political ammunition throughout the campaign.

Vance’s past comments on abortion are also giving Democrats ammunition to blast away at Trump.

In a podcast recorded in 2022, Vance mused about the possibility of George Soros sending an airplane to Columbus, Ohio, to “load up disproportionately Black women to get them to go have abortions in California” and called for a federal response.

Democrats have focused on Vance’s comments in 2021 that “two wrongs don’t make a right” when asked whether abortion laws should allow for exceptions for rape and incest.

And the vice presidential hopeful provoked a huge media backlash when his flip remark from 2021 about the nation being governed by “childless cat ladies” resurfaced on social media.

Polling after the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee showed Vance had the worst net favorable rating of any nonincumbent vice presidential candidate since 1980.

A Senate Republican aide said the negative attention Vance is drawing now will be a source of friction in the Trump campaign.

“Knowing Trump, I can’t imagine he likes what he sees. He’s probably like, ‘Why did I listen to Don Jr.?’” the source said.

“It was a very confident and cocky pick,” the aide added.

A former Republican presidential campaign strategist echoed the view that Trump made the vice presidential pick based on his personal preference, instead of objective political criteria.

“Vance was picked when the [Trump] campaign was feeling extremely confident. I don’t think he was picked for political reasons, I think he was picked because Trump really liked JD Vance,” said one Republican strategist, who added that Trump’s team had concerns about Rubio’s residency status, since both he and Trump live in Florida.

Some Republican senators believe Trump picked Vance because he expected Democrats to stick with Biden as their nominee and saw him as a strong counterpoint to Biden in Midwest swing states.

Trump in an interview on “Fox & Friends” last week defended Vance as “fantastic” and insisted he expected that Harris would probably wind up as the Democratic nominee.

“No, it wouldn’t have mattered. And I thought she was probably going to happen anyway,” he said.

He praised Vance as “essentially for the worker.”

“He’s seen the worker be horribly abused and taken advantage of. … He’s doing a great job, and he’s been very well-received,” he declared.