Republican Vice Presidential Candidate JD Vance was recently praised for how he handled a hostile interview with the New York Times. Reporter Lula Garcia-Navarro hammered him with “gotcha” questions. However, Vance, in his quick-witted ability to navigate attacks with intellectual prowess, turned the tables on the interviewer.
At one point in the interview, Garcia-Navarro attempted to pit the Ohio senator’s past criticism of former President Donald Trump against him. In 2016, Vance claimed Trump was a divisive figure in American politics that would be detrimental to the nation’s overall well-being. Democrats have continually pressed Vance on these comments.
The New York Times reporter asked Vance, “That’s interesting. So what I’m hearing you say is that in 2016, you felt that the divisiveness and the language was a symptom of perhaps a problem with Donald Trump, and by 2018, you saw it as the solution to the problem?”
However, Vance brilliantly maneuvered the hard-hitting question, explaining his prior stance and how he came around to supporting Donald Trump. Instead of the issues stemming from Trump, Vance eventually saw it as an issue caused by the media and the polarized state of politics. “I’d put it slightly differently. I think that in 2016, I saw the divisiveness in American politics as at least partly Donald Trump’s fault. And by 2018, 2019, I saw that divisiveness as the fault of an American political and media culture that couldn’t even pay attention to its own citizens,” he began.
Furthermore, Vance illustrated how Trump represents disaffected Americans who have seemingly been ignored by the political establishment, which fueled his meteoric rise to the White House in 2016. “And Donald Trump was not driving the divisiveness, he was merely responding to it and giving voice to a group of people who had been completely ignored. And he was doing it in a way that really did poke his eye at that diseased media culture. I’ll put it this way: I don’t know that anybody else in 2016 possibly could have done what Trump did. And I think his rhetoric actually was a necessary part of it,” he added.
Following the interview, Vance has been praised for his tactical handling of the “gotcha” questions he faced from the left-leaning reporter. Conservatives have rallied behind Vance as a future leader of the party, where some have considered him a once-in-a-generation leader who could redefine Republican politics.
“JD Vance is one of the most remarkable Americans of our lifetime. The political landscape hasn’t seen the likes of his intellectual caliber or rhetorical skills in decades, and we likely won’t see it again for decades more. Vance recently sat for an interview with NYT reporter Lulu Garcia-Navarro and put on a master class in effortlessly disarming a combative interviewer. Garcia-Navarro peppered him with one hostile inquiry after another—“gotcha” questions that rang more like accusations from a prosecutor than probing questions from a legitimate journalist, concerning Vance’s tone, his changing positions on Trump, and even his beliefs about the 2020 election—to which Vance responded with a level of fluency and calmness that look almost superhuman,” commentator Robert Sterling wrote on X.
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