In one of his awesome appearances just days before the November 5 presidential election, United States Senator from Ohio and then-2024 GOP vice presidential candidate JD Vance sat down for a fiery interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper and, during the interview, slammed Tapper to his face about CNN’s lies and misinformation.
The back-and-forth spat between Sen. Vance and Jake Tapper was precipitated by Tapper asking Vance about an article written by former Trump Chief of Staff John Kelly for the New York Times in which Kelly argued that Trump meets the definition of a fascist. Tapper asked about that and repeatedly pressed Vance about Kelly’s claims that Trump will be and rule as a “dictator.”
Exasperated at one point by Tapper’s continual questions about Trump’s rhetoric, Vance said, “You’re taking words out of context. If you’d like to put up a clip and actually put him in context, I think the American people would realize that Donald Trump is a hell of a lot more reasonable than the people like Liz Cheney, who would like to lie us into war.”
Further, Vance responded to Tapper’s questions by slamming CNN for its integrity, noting that it pushed the Russia Hoax, which was entirely untrue. He said, “Now, Jake, we also should remember, I mean, step back a little bit. Ask yourself a basic question about network integrity. You guys talked about the Russia hoax nonstop.” Tapper, trying to defend his network, interrupted and snapped, “The FBI was investigating it! The FBI was investigating it so we were covering that—”
Vance, responding to Tapper’s interruption by interrupting him, noted that CNN relied on the word of anonymous federal personnel. Doing so, he fired back, “And so you took the words of unnamed FBI agents and put them on your network as though they were the gospel truth. You did it again and again.”
Continuing, as Tapper tried to insist that Vance’s characterization of what CNN did was “false,” Vance said, “A viewer of your network would’ve believed that Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin conspired in 2016. Now that was totally and preposterously false.” Further, Vance said, “You covered it in a way that gave credence to anonymous sources [and] accusations. You did it yourself. Your network did it, Jake.”
At another point, Vance slammed Kelly, saying that he has a “worldview that’s so oppositional to peace.” Tapper responded by firing back, “So all those 10 people, including the former vice president, Mike Pence, all of these people are — have this horribly damaged worldview, and they’re all just going after Donald Trump because they want to send people into war?”
Indignantly adding to that, Tapper snapped, “That’s really your argument?” Vance didn’t back down. Responding to Tapper’s indignant questioning, he said, “Absolutely. All of the people, Jake, they came into office thinking that they could control Donald Trump, that when he said he wanted peace in the world.”
Also during the interview, Vance asked, “Can we talk about the issues that Americans care about?” Tapper, indignant then too, fired back, “I’m talking about things that Donald Trump has said,” the CNN host rebutted. “If you have an issue with whether or not he’s talking about the economy enough, that’s between you and your running mate. I’m talking about things he has said this week.” Vance told him, “You guys seem to care more about Donald Trump’s past than the future of the American people. We’re running this campaign on making the American Dream affordable.”
Watch them here:
Featured image credit: screengrab from the embedded video
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