The most embarrassing aspect of Vice President JD Vance’s tough guy schtick is that he really does seem to think he’s selling it. His recent jabs at Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, the Democrat running for Michigan’s open Senate seat, as the latest cringeworthy example. As a recent Michigan event campaigning for El-Sayed’s Republican opponent, former Rep. Mike Rogers, Vance sneered, “Whatever you want to talk about, Abdul, keep my wife’s name the hell out of your mouth because she’s way out of your league,” trying and utterly failing to imitate the tone of a man who is truly outraged over an insult to his wife.
Vance’s act wasn’t just painful because he’s such a bad actor. It’s that it made no sense at all. With “out of your league,” Vance was trying to imply that El-Sayed said something sexually untoward about Usha Vance, or even that he hit on her. But El-Sayed did no such thing. Instead, the Michigan Democrat was responding to a racist comment that Vance made at a prior campaign event, where Vance falsely accused El-Sayed of supporting “sharia law” and fantasized about how horrified his deceased “Pawpaw” would be to see El-Sayed running.
