**DISCLAIMER: This article was first published in July of 2024**
After more than a year of bizarre back and forth, former President and now-Republican 2024 presidential nominee Donald J. Trump formally announced his vice presidential running mate pick, less than 48 hours after he was the target of an unhinged assassination attempt at his Pennsylvania rally.
The big announcement was made just in time for it all to be certified during the first evening of the Republican National Convention.
As we’re all aware now, Trump ultimately went with Ohio’s far-Right Republican Senator J.D. Vance as his running mate pick.
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Vance was a controversial choice, to say the least, as no one will soon forget his law school roommate’s receipts that showed Vance compared Donald Trump to none other than Adolf Hitler.
Now, one of Trump’s former high-ranking White House officials has spoken out to talk about just how big of a “gamble” Donald’s VP choice really was.
Donald Trump’s former White House communications official, Alyssa Farah Griffin, spoke with CNN’s Anderson Cooper on the heels of the news and said that J.D. Vance is actually a very effective communicator, but the skeletons that the senator and VP candidate has in his closet, ranging from extremist political ideas and positions to blatant attacks against Trump himself, shouldn’t be ignored.
“It’s a strategic gamble, but I think it speaks to just how confident the Trump campaign is,” Griffin told CNN.
“Strategic gamble, why?” Cooper questioned.
“There are major vulnerabilities with J.D. Vance,” Griffin answered. “You have tons of times that he’s been on the record, back when he was a Never Trumper, calling the most terrific names that you could … America’s Hitler, among others.”
“But he’s also someone — his talent, to give him credit, he’s incredibly savvy,” the former Trump official goes on to explain. “He can appear on mainstream media and give a coherent, eloquent version of MAGA and go toe to toe with the best interviewer. But then he’ll appear on extremely far-right media where he’s said much more outrageous things that I’m sure Democrats everywhere are digging up now to portray him as the most extreme version of MAGA.”
What this means, according to Griffin, is that “There’s going to be a big dump of some of the things he said on Steve Bannon’s ‘War Room’ and elsewhere that I think the campaign needs to be ready for, whereas a Doug Burgum would be about as safe as can be. However, J.D. Vance, I think, really resonates in key Pennsylvania. He’s got the story, he’s got that national profile, so there’s some pros and some major cons.”
You can watch Griffin’s appearance on CNN here:
Featured image via Wikimedia Commons/Gage Skidmore, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license
