Trump should have listened to him
Politico playbook:
The WSJ editorial board is joining the pile-on over Sen. JD VANCE’s (R-Ohio) comments about “childless cat ladies.”
In a tough piece posted last night, Paul Gigot and colleagues call the comment “the sort of smart-aleck crack that gets laughs in certain right-wing male precincts” but that “doesn’t play well with the millions of female voters, many of them Republican, who will decide the presidential race.”
They see the speed and breadth of the coverage of Vance’s remark as evidence “that this is Mr. Vance’s first big cultural impression, and not a good one.”
They are unimpressed with Vance’s efforts to clean things up on Megyn Kelly’s podcast yesterday (“he wasn’t at all apologetic”), and they come away with this surprising conclusion about the episode: “One possibility is that at some level Mr. Vance really doesn’t respect people who make different life choices.”
And then they move on to attack some of Vance’s other past ideas. His proposal that families without children should pay higher taxes is “bad policy” and “bad politics” and would amount to using the tax code “as a political and cultural weapon against people who don’t share his values.”
The editorial gives voice to what’s been a quiet murmur we’ve been hearing from some corners of the right all week: Does DONALD TRUMP regret picking Vance?
They suggest that the campaign put Vance’s wife out there to reassure suburban voters that he doesn’t really hate women. Somehow that doesn’t strike me as adequate to stanch the bleeding.
Trump is losing it. He was cocky and assumed he was going to win and he listened to Tucker Carlson and Uday and Qusay instead of the people who understood the election was close even with Biden in the race. They thought they could start the MAGA revolution victory party already. It was always delusional and apparently they were so high on their own supply during the decision making process that they didn’t realize Biden was very likely to drop out and be replaced by Kamala Harris. Either that or they truly believe it wouldn’t make a difference because they’re are so racist and sexist that they believed it would make no difference.
Whatever the case, naming Vance with obviously very little vetting was a monumental mistake. Even the Wall St. Journal is appalled. Making Rupert mad is never a good idea for Republicans, even Trump.