Republican vice-presidential hopeful JD Vance lashed out at Kamala Harris and Tim Walz during a whirlwind tour of political shows on Sunday as he attempted to seize back momentum to his own faltering campaign.
The Ohio senator claimed the pairing on the Democratic presidential ticket were “uncomfortable in their own skin” over their policy positions ahead of November’s election.
He also criticized Harris and Walz for what has become an increasingly successful attack line of their own: calling Vance and Republican candidate Donald Trump “weird” for their extremist positions on policies including abortion and gun control.
“I think what it is, is two people, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, who aren’t comfortable in their own skin, because they’re uncomfortable with their policy positions for the American people,” Vance told anchor Dana Bash on CNN’s State of the Union.
“And so they’re name-calling instead of actually telling the American people how they’re going to make their lives better. I think that’s weird, Dana, but look, they can call me whatever they want to.”
Seemingly oblivious to Trump’s fondness for belittling adversaries with juvenile name-calling of his own, Vance portrayed the “weird” line first aired by Walz as “fundamentally schoolyard bully stuff”.
Shortly after the interview, and without a hint of irony, a Trump-Vance campaign memo branded Harris “copy cat Kamala” for echoing a policy promising to make service industry tips non-taxable.
Vance was speaking as Harris and Walz concluded a buoyant first week on the campaign trail together, and new polling data showed them catching Trump or overhauling him in a number of crucial swing states.
Vance was also appearing on ABC’s This Week and CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday in the wake of growing criticism over his own recent performances, which include trying to clean up comments he made calling leading Democrats “a bunch of childless cat ladies”.
The embattled senator insisted this week that his remarks, gleefully seized upon and circulated by Democratic supporters, were sarcasm, and part of a media-orchestrated campaign to damage him.
Vance has struggled to create a new narrative following the controversy, and tried again on Sunday to switch focus back on Harris and Walz, the Minnesota governor she announced Monday as her running mate.
On CNN, he insisted that the Democrats were “insulting” Americans’ intelligence by refusing to set out an agenda if they won in November.
“If you go to Kamala Harris’ campaign page right now, they still don’t have a policy [or] policy positions about what they’re going to do,” Vance said.
‘I think that’s really insulting to Americans.”
Conversely, after criticizing Harris for a lack of policy, he then claimed she “really has been the one calling the shots” for the Biden administration because “Joe Biden clearly isn’t capable of doing the job”.
Talking to White House reporters Sunday, Harris said she would be rolling out her official policy platform “next week”. She said: “It’ll be focused on the economy and what we need to do to bring down costs.”
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During his CBS interview, Vance attempted to tie Harris to a number of what he said were policy failures afflicting the country. They included a claim that the as yet non-existent “Harris administration” was responsible for allowing people on the US terrorism watchlist into the country.
Harris, he said, was also to blame for Americans becoming hooked on fentanyl.
“If Harris was applying proper leverage to the Chinese and the Mexican drug cartels, we would not have so many,” he said.
“You walk into Beijing, you talk to [Chinese president] Xi Jinping, and you say: ‘Your entire economy is going to collapse unless you get access to American markets. You need to take this fentanyl seriously or we are going to impose serious tariffs and economic penalties for not following our laws and not helping us stem the flow of this deadly poison.’”
Vance also defended Trump for calling Xi and Vladimir Putin “lovely individuals” during a Friday rally in Montana.
“President Trump gets along with world leaders. There’s nothing wrong with him complimenting them as people if it makes him more effective diplomatically,” Vance said.
Republicans have also attacked Harris for not staging a press conference since naming Walz, which Vance repeated on Sunday.
Claiming he was confused by Democratic criticism of his position over expanding the child tax credit, he told Face the Nation host Margaret Brennan: “They should clarify it, maybe in an interview with you. But of course, Kamala Harris refuses to do interviews with anybody.”