Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance had a relaxed tone as he sat down for an interview with Joe Rogan on the latter’s podcast.
He had no idea what he was in for.
Thursday’s episode of The Joe Rogan Experience marks twice now in as many weeks that the fight commentator and former Fear Factor host has left a member of the Republican ticket looking foolish in selectively edited clips of his show. Vance, having clearly expected either the kind of freewheeling conversation Rogan is known for with his non-political guests or at the very least to not be challenged on his claims, walked into a rhetorical shooting gallery.
On Twitter/X Thursday after the interview, clips of Vance’s conversation were going viral — but they were being shared by the Harris-Walz campaign and its allies, not Vance or his running mate.
That was thanks to Rogan’s decision to press Vance — harder than some actual journalists — on his abortion stance. The host quizzed Vance as to what had been wrong with the precedent set by the Supreme Court in 1973, and further dug into why Republican lawmakers were passing overtly religious legislation, including bills that would prosecute women who sought abortion in states where it was legal if they returned home to states where the procedure was banned.
Vance could only sputter that he hadn’t seen those laws, and his statement in defense of the bans seemed even less prepared: Democrats, he argued, were going “way too far” with abortion rights and had begun to “celebrate” abortion.
Rogan replied, dismissively: “I think there’s very few people who are celebrating, though.”
Two other clips being shared after his interview involved the vice presidential contender LARP-ing through a scenario where he was forced to defend himself from a home invasion in the immediate wake of the assassination attempt against Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, and one other where he speculated that the Trump campaign would win “the normal gay guy vote”. Forget the Secret Service protocol, the one that saw Mike Pence whisked away on January 6 — the vice presidential nominee would like to play out his John Wick fantasy if his family is endangered.
If Vance was looking to inspire voter turnout or merely appear “normal”, in his words, it’s hard to say he achieved that. What’s more likely is that he just handed the Harris-Walz campaign another crate of ammunition to remind voters — particularly women — how unprepared he is for their scrutiny.
What he also managed to do, possibly, is vindicate the people in Kamala Harris’s inner circle who have been whispering against the prospect of the vice president sitting down with Joe Rogan. It’d been discussed, and Rogan himself revealed this week that he declined to travel to meet Harris out on the campaign trail, but Thursday’s episode is an example of the kind of pitfalls that The Joe Rogan Experience often comes with.
Vance’s conversation with Rogan was more than three hours long. Harris, smartly, has not and will not be sitting down for any three-hour interviews before the campaign season ends. The propensity to let one’s guard down is too great; the range of topics uncomfortably wide for someone trying very hard to frame a conversation in the final week of a presidential race. Rogan’s specialty, to quote one commentator ahead of the Vance interview, is to give his guests an endless amount of rope with which to hang themselves.
JD Vance obliged on Thursday. It’s hard to say how much was due to Rogan, and how much was due to Vance’s own propensity to say inconvenient things when pressed by interviewers, especially in front of a conservative-leaning audience when his guard is lowered.
Harris, if she values her time and any momentum she has in the polls, should probably avoid doing that.
