Typically, when an episode of Fox News Channel’s “The Five” is on the air, it’s co-hosts Greg Gutfeld and Jesse Watters who are ripping into the sole Democrat on the panel, Jessica Tarlov, and setting her straight about the news stories or hot-button issues of the day. However, on June 16, 2026, it was Vice President JD Vance’s turn to get in on the action.
Within seconds of appearing on the program, Vance exposed a major problem in how Democrats view loving their own country and corrected Tarlov’s wrong-headed assumptions in the most gentlemanly manner possible. Tarlov attempted to explain away a new NBC News poll concerning American patriotism, saying it was just simple partisan math.
“Some of it is obviously partisan,” Tarlov said, going on to make the case that the country’s pride naturally dips “when your party is out of power.” Vance strongly disagreed. “I don’t think that’s right,” the vice president said. “Why does that need to be true? That if your party’s out of power, you should have less pride in your country?”
According to a report from PJ Media, that was just the tip of the iceberg. Vance then noted that conservatives do not operate that way, even when former Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden were in office, whom they strongly disliked and disagreed with, pointing out they still expressed love for and pride in their nation.
“I guarantee that when Barack Obama was president or Joe Biden was pretending to be president, that you had Republicans who still said they’re proud of America, they’re proud of our military, they’re proud of the great people of our country, they’re proud of our natural beauty,” Vance said. And then the vice president delivered the one-two punch.
He cited data from the poll that found only 29% of Democrats currently say they are proud of their country and Vance knew exactly where to place the blame. “What seems to me so bizarre about this is that we’ve allowed a culture to develop where people feel like the country is the country’s politics,” he went on to say.
“I think that’s actually connected to the violent rhetoric where if you disagree with somebody, you can justify killing them. It’s really, really a bad thing,” he added. “I wish Democrats, all of them, were proud of our country. We should be proud of our country.” The PJ Media report explained, “The NBC News survey released Sunday confirms exactly the kind of partisan rot he was describing. Just 56% of Americans overall say they’re ‘extremely’ or ‘very’ proud to be American, while 29% report having little or no national pride whatsoever.”
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The report then concluded by saying, “The split by party is staggering: 90% of Republicans say they’re proud of their country, compared to only 29% of Democrats. Age makes it worse. Roughly three-quarters of Americans 65 and older feel proud of the country, but that number collapses to just 36% among adults 18 to 34. And here’s the part Democrats really don’t want to hear: voters think their party cares more about hating Trump than building anything.”
Featured Image: screenshot from embedded video