JD Vance's one job is to clean up after Donald Trump — but he keeps making a bigger mess

In case it hasn't been mentioned in the past 15 seconds, a reminder: Sen. JD Vance went to Yale Law School. The Ohio Republican was selected as Donald Trump's running mate in no small part because of his overrated intellectual chops. In the 207-word announcement adding Vance to the ticket, Trump used the word "Yale" four times and even made sure to note that Vance graduated "Summa Cum Laude" from Ohio State University. Vance fashions himself a public intellectual, spending endless hours giving chin-scratching interviews on right-wing podcasts and to Ross Douthat of the New York Times. He name-drops far-right and even Nazi academics like Carl Schmitt and flings around plenty of five-dollar words. As Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei bluntly stated at Axios, "Vance can put an intellectual wrapper around Trump's red meat."

Watching interviews with Vance suggests his main job is to "translate" Trump's babble into coherent-sounding talking points. Vance lies just as much as Trump, but with a syntax that resembles normal human speech. On NBC News Sunday, Vance was asked about Trump's bizarre assertion he had "concepts of a plan" when he was asked during Tuesday's debate about healthcare. Vance claimed Trump didn't end the Affordable Care Act because his philosophy is "to fix problems even if he disagreed with the original legislation." This is false. Trump tried to kill the ACA in 2017 and failed only because a few Republican senators voted to keep it. Still, by using normal spoken English, Vance was able to set off fewer alarm bells.

The term "sanewashing" was coined to describe the bad habit of journalists who rewrite Trump's rambling nonsense into sentences that make sense, but for Vance, it's a full-time job. When Trump insisted that Vice President Kamala Harris "happened to turn Black," Vance went on clean-up duty, saying it "was an attack on Kamala Harris being a chameleon." It was a lie — Harris has always identified as Black — but it was coherent. When Trump mocked Congressional Medal of Honor recipients because they're "either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets—or they’re dead," Vance insisted he only saw "a guy who loves our veterans and who honors our veterans." When asked about Ukraine during the debate, Trump blathered, "I have a good relationship. And they respect your president. OK? They respect me," while refusing to say he wanted Ukraine to win. Vance zipped in afterward with a completely made-up plan about a "demilitarized zone" and a "guarantee of neutrality." It's all nonsense, but it was shaped like an argument and used big words, clearly meant to fool people who aren't paying close attention.

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Sometimes Vance is too eager to spin Trump's deranged rhetoric. After Trump contradicted himself multiple times on abortion, sometimes on the same day, Vance pretended this meant that Trump would veto an abortion ban. Vance had to backtrack, however, because the Trump campaign wants the anti-choice activists to believe — correctly, in this case — that he will sign an abortion ban.

But despite Vance's mastery of noun-verb agreement, he's not doing great at making Trump seem less weird. That's because Vance is quite weird himself, especially about cats, a previously unremarkable popular species of pet. First, there were all the clips of him ranting about "childless cat ladies," which Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., memorably called the "incel platform." Now he's pivoted to lying, repeatedly, about Haitian immigrants in his state of Ohio, falsely accusing them of eating cats. Vance even admitted it's a lie on national television, telling CNN's Dana Bash, "If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that's what I'm going to do."

It seems this was a slip-up because Vance then tried to spin his own gaffe the way he spins Trump's various nutty comments, arguing with Bash about what the word "create" means. The damage was done, however, because Vance blurting out the truth on accident fits with what Americans have seen of his personality in the past few months. Underneath his ever-present smirk, Vance seems to be bristling with barely contained rage, especially at anyone who would question the Trump campaign's use of tactics like overt lying and spreading unapologetically racist conspiracy theories.

But even while letting a bit of truth leak out, Vance continued to tell an overt lie: that he's interested in "the suffering of the American people." As the Republican governor of Ohio, Mike DeWine, was forced to point out, "Springfield has really made a great resurgence" because of the Haitian immigrants, who are there legally. The city has been trying to restore itself as a manufacturing center and has only made progress because immigrants have made up for a severe labor shortage. The suffering in Springfield is due to what Trump and Vance have done by spreading this lie. Schools have been forced to close and public buildings are being evacuated because of a flood of death and bomb threats. So the Republican governor has been begging his party's nominees to stop, but because they lack even a modicum of decency, they have kept pushing the weird hoax.

Despite failing repeatedly, Vance still acts as if he's a master at turning Trump's bizarre behavior into something that passes for normal. Trump has been traveling with Laura Loomer, a white nationalist "influencer" who specializes in bottom-feeder vitriol. Loomer posted on Twitter that "the White House will smell like curry & White House speeches will be facilitated via a call center," if Harris, who is Indian-American, wins. When asked about it, Vance pretended to believe Loomer was merely expressing personal food preferences, saying, "I don’t think that it’s insulting for anybody to talk about their dietary preferences." When NBC's Kristen Welker reminded Vance that his wife, Usha, is also Indian-American, he kept up the ruse by saying, "whether you’re eating curry at your dinner table or fried chicken, things have gotten more expensive." He seems to think this sounds clever, but he just sounds dim. Even the dumbest person gets that Loomer's point is people of Asian heritage are not "real" Americans.

Vance's antics continue to backfire on him. In mid-July, when Trump first picked the freshman senator, only 29% of Americans said they had an "unfavorable" view of Vance. His unfavorability rating now stands at 45%, a full 16-point jump. In the same amount of time, Harris' "unfavorable" rating fell from 53% to 47%, a healthy six-point shift in the right direction. The takeaway is that the more voters see Harris, the more they like her. The opposite is true for Vance, but he just keeps talking, assured in his view that Americans will soon fall in love with having a smug bully tell obvious lies to their faces.