Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., on Sunday said former President Trump should swap out his “incredibly bad choice” of Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, as his running mate.
During an appearance on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Schumer was discussing the upcoming presidential election when he decided to address “the addition of JD Vance” to the GOP ticket.
“It’s an incredibly bad choice,” Schumer said. “I think Donald Trump, I know him, and he’s probably sitting and watching the TV, and every day, Vance, it comes out Vance has done something more extreme, more weird, more erratic. Vance seems to be more erratic and more extreme than President Trump.”
Donald Trump picking JD Vance as his running mate "may be one of the best things he ever did for Democrats," @SenSchumer says.
"Every day, it comes out Vance has done something more extreme, more weird, more erratic…I'll bet President Trump is sitting there scratching his head… pic.twitter.com/hxNUFyklfi
— Face The Nation (@FaceTheNation) July 28, 2024
“And I’ll bet President Trump is sitting there scratching his head and wondering, ‘Why did I pick this guy?’ The choice may be one of the best things he ever did for Democrats,” Schumer said.
Referring to Trump, the former president and 2024 Republican presidential nominee, Schumer said “the president has about 10 days – 10 days before the Ohio ballot is locked in.”
“And he has a choice: does he keep Vance on the ticket?” Schumer said. “He already has a whole lot of baggage, he’s probably going to be more baggage over the weeks because we’ll hear more things about him, or does he pick someone new? What’s his choice?”
The left has gone after Vance in recent days over a 2021 interview in which the Ohio senator appeared to disparage “childless cat ladies” in the Democratic Party.
“We are effectively run in this country, via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they wanna make the rest of the country miserable, too,” Vance said three years ago, specifically calling out Vice President Harris and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., as being part of that group.
On an episode of Fox News’ “The Brian Kilmeade Show,” Trump 2024 senior campaign adviser Chris LaCivita said Vance’s interview is being “blatantly taken out of context,” adding that the Trump-Vance campaign is not against “childless women” as the liberal media is saying.
Vance, the author of “Hillbilly Elegy,” a memoir adapted into a Netflix film about his time as a Yale Law School student reflecting on growing up in Appalachia, was propelled into national headlines when Trump announced him as vice presidential running mate at the start of the Republican National Convention.
Republicans have billed Vance, whose mother is 10 years sober, as speaking to forgotten working class Americans.
But the Harris campaign has attempted to counter that messaging.
In a video shared weeks ago, Harris claimed Vance would be “loyal only to Trump, not to our country” and a “rubber stamp for [Trump’s] extreme agenda.”
But Vance, a Marine veteran who served in Iraq, shot back during a campaign rally with Trump in Minnesota Saturday.
Kamala Harris questioned my loyalty to America. I enlisted in the Marines for this country. I went to Iraq for this country. I built a business for this country. And my running mate took a bullet for this country. What the hell has Kamala done to question our loyalty to America? pic.twitter.com/WykF5pRY4Y
— JD Vance (@JDVance) July 28, 2024
Asked about how Harris should handle Republican criticism of her immigration policy, Schumer told CBS host Robert Costa that Democrats in Congress and the Biden-Harris administration “put together the toughest border policy that would have stopped the flow from the border that we’ve seen in a very long time.”