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Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick, Senator JD Vance, gave a speech during night three of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee arguing for Republicans to put aside their differences and join the MAGA movement's proposed "big tent."
The term "big tent" has long been used to describe political parties that encompass a variety of similar ideological views and policy priorities. Stephen Colbert, host of the Late Show, thinks Vance and the Republicans may have another use for it.
“It’s a holding area where we will eventually keep the immigrants before we deport them," Colbert said, impersonating Vance. "But tonight, we’re gonna let Rudy Giuliani sleep there.”
While Colbert had plenty of jokes about the evening, he did take time to explain why he thought it was dangerous for Trump to pick Vance as his vice president.
“You’ll recall that on January 6th, the only thing that saved our democracy was Mike Pence actually following the Constitution," Colbert said. "Vance would have no such qualms.”
Colbert then showed his receipts; he played a clip from February 2024 in which Vance says he basically would have gone along with Trump's plan to overturn the 2020 election.
“If I had been vice president, I would have told the states, like Pennsylvania, Georgia and so many others, that we needed to have multiple slates of electors, and I think the U.S. Congress should have fought over it from there,” Vance said at the time.
Colbert also speculated that Trump picked Vance because of Vance's ties to Silicon Valley and its seemingly endless hose of investment money.
"Earlier this year, Vance flew to San Francisco to host Trump and two dozen tech and crypto investors at a private dinner," Colbert said. “Can you imagine being stuck at a dinner between crypto bros and Donald Trump? 'Waiter, I’ll have the Chicken a la Cyanide.'”
Despite his ties to the tech and finance world, Vance made clear he's going to try to sell MAGA populism to the Rust Belt, in particular Pennsylvania and Michigan where Trump lost in 2020.
He gained notoriety after liberals went wild for his book, Hillbilly Elegy, in 2016. The book discusses his family life growing up poor in a rural area and shares his ideological views on escaping poverty. The book has received pushback from Rust Belt and Appalachian communities, criticizing it for supposedly ignoring the need for structural changes and instead blaming poverty on people's moral and character failings.
