Does J.D. Vance really like Donald Trump? That question has been asked often.
After all, when Vance first emerged as a prominent public figure as the author of Hillbilly Elegy in 2016, he was considered a conservative but a Trump critic. He called Trump a “moral disaster,” with the potential to become “America’s Hitler.”
Vance changed his position on Trump over time, especially when he ran for office himself in a U.S. Senate campaign in 2022. Less than two years later, Vance was Trump’s running mate and then vice president.
“I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler,” Vance texted a friend in 2016. “How’s that for discouraging?”
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This week, Vance was caught on a hot mic talking about Trump’s first speech to Congress in his second presidency. While he didn’t say anything bad about the president, he did express apprehension about having to sit still for as long as 90 minutes, as part of the custom in which the vice president and the speaker of the House sit behind the president during joint sessions of Congress.
Vance starts by pointing out that the two men are not wearing the same tie, before saying, “I’ve gotta be honest with you,” and then whispering something inaudible to House Speaker Mike Johnson.
“By the way, I think the speech will be great. But I don’t know how you do this for 90 minutes,” Vance said to Johnson, who has been in office for a couple of years and has sat for long presidential speeches before, as reported by Yahoo News.
Johnson replied, “The hardest thing was doing it during Biden, when the speech was a stupid campaign speech,” which implies that Trump’s uncommonly partisan address was not a political speech. After saying this, Johnson appeared to turn his microphone down.
The speech, which is not the “State of the Union” address since an address in the president’s first year does not have that name, went on for nearly 100 minutes. Per Yahoo, it was the longest speech ever recorded by a president addressing a joint session of Congress, beating out a Bill Clinton speech by more than ten minutes.
USA Today also reported that the speech had lower TV ratings than any of the four such speeches Trump delivered to Congress during his first term.
Photo courtesy of the Political Tribune media library.
