JD Vance went on “The View” on Tuesday, and the show failed to destroy him, which is the show’s entire job.
“The View” has built 30 years of brand equity on the premise that Republican men who appear on it are walking into a trap. Fox News spends considerable airtime warning conservatives not to go. Conservative media celebrates the ones who survive. The whole apparatus exists to make the appearance of a Republican on a daytime talk show feel like a test of mettle.
Vance booked it to promote his new spiritual memoir, “Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith.” He walked in expecting carnage. Here is what happened instead. Whoopi Goldberg called him a racist, which he had already prepared remarks for and dispatched without visible difficulty. The hosts challenged him on immigration and inflation, which was exactly the advertised content and which he handled. Joy Behar pulled him aside during a commercial break and said, in Vance’s own telling on Gutfeld Tuesday night: “You know what? You’re like pretty good for a Republican.”
He described this as stunning. He said “Whoa.” He brought it up on Gutfeld as the highlight.
The Vice President of the United States, whose defining public moment before this was calling Democratic women “childless cat ladies,” went on the most famous liberal talk show in the country, called the “childless cat ladies” remark his “most boneheaded” comment, received mild pushback, and left with a backhanded compliment from Joy Behar that he is now treating as a trophy.
His summary of the experience: “I expected them to be absolutely vicious, and they were only a little bit vicious. It wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be.”
That is the lion’s den. A little bit vicious. Not as bad as expected. An off-camera compliment that made the news cycle.
The show that branded itself as the place where conservative men learn hard truths spent an hour mildly challenging the second most powerful man in the United States, after which he went on Fox News to describe how surprisingly pleasant the whole thing was. “The View” got a viral moment. Vance got a book tour anecdote. Nobody got destroyed.
When the most fearsome interview in American daytime television ends with the guest describing it as fine, what is the interview actually for?
Sources
Fox News: JD Vance left stunned following ‘The View’
Fox News: Vance walks back ‘childless cat ladies’ comment on ‘The View’
