Things got crazy during a press event in Allentown, Pennsylvania, when Vice President JD Vance was asked about an interview that White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles gave to Vanity Fair, bizarrely, given the magazine’s hostile stance to the Trump Administration, particularly a moment during the interview in which she attacked Vance as a conspiracy theorist.
Pressing him on the matter, a reporter asked Vance, “Unfortunately, I have to ask a bit of an off-topic question from affordability, because news events do intervene, and that is the interviews that White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles gave to Vanity Fair, in which she’s quoted as referring to you as excuse, and again, not my words, sir, but, ‘a conspiracy theorist of a decade,’ and described your transformation from someone who once opposed President Trump to now his vice president as an act of political expediency. I’d like to give you the chance to respond to that, sir.”
Beginning his response, Vance made jokes to defuse the situation and note that the media was hyping up something it shouldn’t, in its typical lying fashion, saying, “Well, first of all, if, if, if Susie, as like, I’ll trust, I’ll trust what you said. I haven’t looked at the article, I, of course, have heard about it, but conspiracy theorist. Sometimes I am a conspiracy theorist, but I only believe in the conspiracy theories that are true. And by the way, Susie and I have joked in private and in public about that for a long time.”
Continuing, he again used the matter to expose the media’s lies in entertaining fashion, saying, “For example, I believed in the crazy conspiracy theory back in 2020 that it was stupid to mask three-year-olds at the height of the COVID pandemic, that we should actually let them develop some language skills. I believed in this crazy conspiracy theory that the media and the government were covering up the fact that Joe Biden was clearly unable to do the job, and I believed in the conspiracy theory that Joe Biden was trying to throw his political opponents in jail rather than win an argument against this political opponent, so at least on some of these conspiracy theories, it turns out that a conspiracy theory is just something that was true six months before the media admitted it, and that’s that’s my understanding.”
Building on that, the vice president then said, “Now, look, I do want to say something about Susie, though, because again, having not read this article, Susie is a person I’ve come to know very, very well, and you know a lot of you probably ask yourself, what is it like behind the scenes, what’s going on actually behind the scenes of the Trump administration.”
He continued, telling the hilarious story and saying: “And I’ll tell you, the President is exactly in private who he is in public, like I’ll tell you a little story, a few, maybe actually a week or so ago, I walk into the Oval Office, and Marco and I are sitting there talking with the President about something. He says, ‘Stop,’ and he looks at our shoes and says, ‘You guys have terrible shoes.’ So he goes and gets a shoe catalog, and remember, this is the Christmas season, so the President’s got some holiday cheer. He goes and gets a shoe catalog and gets his favorite shoes and orders like four pairs of shoes for me and four pairs of shoes for Marco, because he’s like, you know, we need our Vice President or Secretary of State to look their very best, and you know, then we went back to talking about whatever major, you know, international issue we were talking about again.”
Using that story to praise the president and again try to defuse the situation with Susie Wiles, Vance then said, “He is exactly in private who he is in public, that’s not true of most people in Washington, DC, it’s not, and I’ve seen so many people who will say one thing to the president’s face, Democrats and Republicans, and then we’ll do the exact opposite behind the scenes. You know why I really, you know what they are, and you know why I really love Susie Wiles, because Susie is who she is in the president’s presence. She’s the same exact person when the president isn’t around.”
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Further trying to defuse the MAGA hostility to Susie Wiles, saying, “I’ve never seen Susie Wiles say something to the president and then go and counteract him or subvert his will behind the scenes, and that’s what you wanted to staff her, because as much as I love Susie, the American people didn’t elect any staffer, they elected the President of the United States, and what you want, and what you want in a staffer is a person who understands they are there to effectuate the will of the American people, and they’re there to follow the orders of the duly elected Commander in Chief of the United States.”
He then explained, “And Susie Wiles, we have our disagreements. We agree on much more than we disagree, but I’ve never seen her be disloyal to the President of the United States, and that makes her the best White House chief of staff that I think the President could ask for. And the last thing I’ll say is, if any of us have learned a lesson from that Vanity Fair article, I hope that the lesson is we should be giving fewer interviews to mainstream media outlets, so, so, with that, with that lesson internalized, I’m going to stop taking questions and just leave you, leave you with one final note, and again, it’s just a note of gratitude. This is the coolest job I’ve ever had.”
Concluding, the VP said, addressing the crowd, “I’m sure that every single person in this room made something happen to get me to this job. You went out there and voted, maybe you persuaded one of your relatives of. Maybe even volunteered or knocked on doors or made phone calls for us. I will never forget that my job every single day is to make it so that you guys can have a safe and prosperous life in this country that all of us love.”
Watch him here: