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JD Vance told his seven-year-old son to “shut the hell up” when Donald Trump called and asked him to be his running mate.
Vance, 40, recounted the story on the “Full Send Podcast” on Friday. The Ohio senator was publicly announced as Trump’s running mate last month at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, with Trump calling him to break the news just minutes before.
“My son, who is seven, is in the hotel room with me,” Vance told the political podcast, which regularly hosts conservatives. “And he is really into Pokémon cards right now, he’s going through a Pokémon phase...he’s really into it.”
“So he’s trying to talk to me about Pikachu, and I’m on the phone with Donald Trump, and I’m like, ‘Son, shut the hell up for 30 seconds about Pikachu,’” he continued. “‘This is the most important phone call of my life. Please just let me take this phone call.’”
Vance has been married to wife Usha since 2014 and the couple have three children, two-year-old Mirabel, four-year-old Vivek and seven-year-old Ewan.
Vance’s latest comments come after a flurry of Democratic attacks that have labeled him “weird and creepy.” A video resurfaced from 2021 of Vance referring to women who have not given birth as “childless cat ladies” who “want to make the country miserable”. There has been strong pushback including from Jennifer Aniston and Kerstin Emhoff, tex-wife of Kamala Harris’ husband, Doug Emhoff.
In 2021, Vance also said parents should have “more power” when voting. The senator has also said that declining birth rates are a “civilizational crisis” driven by a “childless left.” A year later, Vance called for a nationwide ban on abortion.
The senator has the lowest polling of any GOP vice presidential candidate immediately following the RNC since the 1980s, The Independent previously reported. Trump’s former White House campaign manager, Alyssa Griffin, has called the senator “a disaster.”
Democratic rivals seized on the poor polling this week.
“As if the Republican Party needed another dumpster fire of their own creation, Trump and Republicans up and down the ballot are getting dragged even further down by JD Vance,” the DNC said in a statement on Monday. “Vance is making history as the most disliked VP nominee post-convention that our country has seen in decades.”
Meanwhile, Harris, the presumptive Democratice nominee, is neck-and-neck with Trump. The first polls released after Biden left the race showed Harris has won over Democrats. The average of four polls show Harris at 43.5 percent and Trump at 44.8 percent.
