What A Day - Could Vance Sink Trump? History Says: Maybe!

Episode Date: August 17, 2024

It’s been about a month since former President Donald Trump chose J.D. Vance to be his running mate on the Republican ticket. And in that short amount of time, the Ohio senator has made history… as one of the most unpopular picks for the job ever. The latest polls show more than 40 percent of Americans have an unfavorable opinion of Vance, prompting some to question whether he could sink Republicans’ hopes of winning the White House in November. To better understand the extent to which Vance has become an albatross for the Trump campaign, Max and Erin look at four other unpopular V.P. picks in modern history, from former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin all the way back to former President Richard Nixon’s turn as President Eisenhower’s running mate in the 50s. They’ll explore the effects each candidate had on his or her respective ticket, and what it could all mean for Vance and the Republicans this year.

So, Max, when I think of the great duos, I think of, you know, Batman and Robin, Simon and Garfunkel, Kirk and Spock. Bert and Ernie. Bert and Ernie, two complementary figures who uplift one another's strengths and compensate for each other's weaknesses. I take issue with the idea that Ernie has weaknesses, Erin, but continue. Well, there's a duo in the news right now whose two halves are not adding up to a greater whole, although they are adding up to a kind of whole. Donald Trump and his recently selected running mate, Ohio Senator J.D. Vance. Oh, yeah. Vance has, I believe, the lowest favorability rating of any VP candidate ever at this point in the race. Only one in three look at him favorably. Yeah. Vance, it turns out,

is a cornucopia of unpleasantness. From his sinister stare to creepy comments about childless cat ladies and agreeing with a podcaster who said that post-menopausal females' only purpose is to take care of grandchildren. The rollout has not gone well. To give you a sense of the reception a month in, here's a recent clip from the podcast Today in Ohio put out by the Cleveland Plain Dealer. The question I come away after all of this discussion about J.D. Vance over the last month is, did the Trump people do any vetting? Right. I had the same thought. It's like, how do you not find all of the wacky stuff he said and this kind of exposure? Ohio is J.D. Vance's home state.

When you lose the home team, you are in trouble. It's not going well. It's not going well. And the discussion isn't even, can the campaign make people like Vance? It's, has this gotten so bad that the drama of firing him from the ticket would actually be preferable to keeping him on? Less Simon and Garfunkel than Liam and Noel Gallagher. Okay, one for the Gen Xers. Yeah, Gen X, what's up? I'm Erin Ryan. And I'm Max Fisher. And this is How We Got Here, a series where we explore a big

question behind the week's headlines and tell a story that answers that question. Erin, welcome back. Thank you, Max. Our question this week, is J.D. Vance such a disaster that he could actually sink the Republican ticket in November? Obviously, it's hard to isolate the Vance effect specifically. Trump is down in the polls for a lot of reasons right now. For one, he's barely campaigning since the failed assassination attempt. For another, his opponent, Joe Biden, dropped out of the race, of course, replaced by the far more popular Kamala Harris. Still, like you said, Vance is deeply unpopular. And he's weird.

He constantly says and does weird, off-putting things. Our story this week is about four other times in which a vice presidential nominee became a liability for the ticket, what effect it ultimately had on the campaign, and what that tells us about the likely political impact of the Vance debacle. Our first story about a ticket-sinking Veep candidate is also by far the most notorious. Thomas Eagleton, who was the Democratic vice presidential nominee back in 1972. Ah, yes, the dreaded Eagleton affair. Never good when your name becomes an official affair.

And still to this day, every time there's an unpopular vice presidential nominee, you see headlines about Eagleton fiasco haunts campaign or whispers of Eagleton as ticket struggles and polls. Max, tell us the story of Eagleton, which does sound like a made up name of a vice presidential candidate in America, but was a real guy. Well, I'm sure George McGovern wishes that it was a made up name. So, OK, 1972, George McGovern is the Democratic nominee, and it was a very hard-fought, hard-won primary, which means that he is at the DNC when he is trying to pick his vice presidential candidate. So, he's up to the wire, and he keeps going to people and getting told no. Like, Ted Kennedy is his first choice. Ted Kennedy says no, which, by the way, is not a good sign for your campaign when nobody wants to be vice president.

It gives you a sense of where we're going here. Yeah, Kennedy is like, no, thank you. He doesn't want to touch this with a 10-foot pole. So McGovern eventually ends up with his fourth choice, which is a popular young Missouri senator named Thomas Eagleton. And because this is all happening very quickly, because they have to get him on the ticket right away, and also just because back in this era,

they didn't really do vetting the same way they do now. They didn't do all the like the forms and the interviews and the background checks. It was just like a chat between George McGovern and Thomas Eagleton. And you didn't ask any uncomfortable questions because it's two gentlemen. Right.

Instead of the internet, they had like a series of hamsters and quill. Honestly, bring back the hamsters and quill. I'm ready for it. So, okay. Eagleton signs on to the ticket. And very quickly, like within a couple of days, it starts to come out that Eagleton had this thing in his past in the 60s where on three different occasions he had been hospitalized for depression and received electroshock therapy. Oh.

And this, yeah, I know. It's a serious issue. And it becomes a, a like very big issue on the campaign trail. It's coming up all the time. And people who were involved in this will swear up and down that the concern was never, is he mentally or emotionally fit to be vice president, but rather that it was this quote unquote finger on the button issue that it's like, it's the cold war. Is he going to be able to go through the high stakes standoff with the Soviets? And like, I don't know if I believe that.

Maybe it's a distinction without a difference. But anyway, finger on the button. It's like dominating coverage of the campaign. We want somebody with untreated depression to be managing our nuclear arsenal. No, Ronald Reagan wasn't eight years later. Oh, okay. So we're jumping ahead.

Actually, it did go to Richard Nixon, who absolutely 100% had untreated depression. Okay. That turned out great. It worked out great. So in any event, national newspapers are calling for Eagleton to drop off the ticket. Big Democrats are calling for him to drop off the ticket. It's becoming a huge issue.

There's this issue that comes up within the campaign where, like, George McGovern's people want access to Eagleton's doctors to interview him and they can't get it and they want his medical records and they can't get it. It's very messy. And then finally, because of the like drop in the polls, public calls for Eagleton to drop out, personal friction between them, on day 18 of Eagleton joining the ticket, George McGovern asks him to drop off and he does. Oh my goodness. So we've got a clip of Eagleton speaking to CBS News the day after he resigned from the Democratic ticket. I thought it would fade away during this month of August. You know, I'd go to enough cities so that Barry

Serafin would get tired of asking me in every city of the country about my health and that it would run its course. But an argument can be made that it would linger on. So I'm not here to say who's categorically right or who's categorically wrong. I'll just say that George McGovern could not have been finer to me. I believe in him as much as I did in Miami. And I'm going to work for him, maybe work for him doubly hard. Oh, my gosh. You can hear the sadness in his voice. I know.

America is a mean fucking country sometimes. Yeah, especially to men with mental health concerns that they try to get addressed. Right. God forbid. Yeah, with the technology of the day. George McGovern and his replacement VP candidate, Sergeant Shriver, his real name on his birth certificate, Sergeant Shriver, went on to a historic loss against Richard Nixon, winning only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia. The biggest blowout in any U.S. presidential election ever. We should say McGovern was probably never going to win. Before Eagleton even came on to the ticket, polls had Nixon with a 10 to 20 point lead for months.

People were so weird back then. I know. How can you prefer Nixon to anyone? Boy, did they. I would rather vote. Like, his wife was much more appealing than he was. Anyway, that was, you know what? We look back on the past with rose-colored glasses, but people were out of their minds. America has always been America, for better or worse. Yes. Oh my gosh.

But after Eagleton, Nixon's lead jumped to 30 points and then gradually fell. He won with a 23-point lead. Honestly, if I were somebody who was going to vote for Nixon and I saw he was up 30, I would be like, you know what? I'm going to the beach on election day. It'll be fine. Well, you were not alone, it turns out. A lot of people felt that way. So, okay, Erin, what do you think?

What does LaFerre-Eagleton tell us about the pickle of a ticket that Trump and Vance find themselves in now? I think it tells us a lot about the way that people were terrible back then, back in the day. But I think it tells us that the only way to justify removing somebody from the ticket after the convention is if something earth-shattering comes out. And we've been kind of hearing this like drip, drip, drip of weird stuff that seems like generated by oppo researchers about Vance, but none of it is earth shatteringly bad. It's not a Cass's belly to pull him off the ticket that would give everyone who might want

to do that already the face saving excuse to be like, well, we had to do it because it came out that he said this. Right. Like if it revealed that Vance is actually three Peter Teals in a trench coat, then they might have to figure out how to replace him. But I think that this tells us that something seismic needs to happen in order for a seismic change,

like a replacement of a running mate to happen. Now, okay, let's move on to the second big instance of a vice presidential candidate, arguably, not for sure, but arguably hurting the ticket. Here's the fateful moment from 2008 when Senator and Republican presidential nominee John McCain took aim at

the glass ceiling and then flinged a great Alaskan moose at it. To help me fight the same old Washington politics of me first and country second, my friends and fellow Americans, I am very pleased and very privileged to introduce to you the next vice president of the United States. Some of life's greatest opportunities come unexpectedly, and this is certainly the case today. Oh my gosh. Remember that? I remember that very, very well. The exact moment. It was a Hail Mary from the McCain campaign. And for a while, people were like excited about her. And I remember people having bad dreams about her. She really triggered the libs. She did. You truly cannot overstate how fully Democrats freaked out over Sarah Palin's

nomination. Like up until this point, Obama had generally had a slight lead in the polls. But now here's this young new governor on the Republican ticket. She's energetic. She's folksy. She's pretty. Sure. It just is like she's bringing this new energy that had not been there before. And within a few days, McCain pulled ahead in the polls for the first time in the race. But then, as voters got to know Palin better, and as Palin became more erratic on the campaign trail, she went from an asset to a liability. To talk about what happened, I spoke with my co-host on Hysteria, Alyssa Mastromonaco. Alyssa, among her many other jobs in Democratic politics, vetted potential running

mates for John Kerry in 2004 and Barack Obama in 2008. When I asked her about past vice presidents that have hurt the ticket, Palin was the first person she named. Here's Alyssa. At the beginning, when McCain picked her, we were scared to death. Nobody knew that much about her. She came out, she had a dynamic young family. She was getting huge crowds, which is something that we had sort of cornered the market on. And then famously, she did the interview with Katie Couric, where it became clear that she was not ready for primetime. She couldn't really talk about foreign policy in any meaningful way. She couldn't even list newspapers that she read

daily. And I think after that, it was the race to try to tidy her up enough to make it through the election. But I think that she is one person, one VP pick that people were like, record scratch. Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. We should actually play that Katie Couric clip that Alyssa mentioned because it drives home how much of a disaster Palin became in the campaign. When it comes to establishing your worldview, I was curious, what newspapers and magazines did you regularly read before you were tapped for this to stay informed and to understand? I've read most of them, again, with a great appreciation for the press, for the media. Like what ones specifically? I'm curious that you... All of them, any of them

that have been in front of me over all these years. I have a vast variety of sources where we get our news. I miss her, I'll be honest. I miss her too. You know, honestly, that would be one of Donald Trump's

more coherent responses to a question. That is a great point. Exactly with the words that she, I think, you know, Sarah Palin flew in a plane shooting wolves so that Donald Trump could fly in a bigger plane. So what lessons from the Palin debacle can we learn for today? I don't know how you feel about this, but I kind of think this is actually pretty analogous to what's happening with Trump and Vance right now, minus the bump that Palin initially brought. But the like latter half of Palin and McCain, she became more and more of a liability. She was sucking up more and more of the oxygen because so much of the day to day coverage was about like various scandals from Palin's past as governor and like wild things that she was saying in the

campaign trail that were freaking people out. And she like, yes, had this fan base, but she was just alienating more and more people. And that became what the campaign was about, was about like Sarah Palin's baggage and bullshit. And then it also led to a big split within the campaign where like the last month or two, McCain and Palin were essentially running two different campaigns that hated each other and that were just openly sniping at each other. And I'm really crossing my fingers. It feels like that's where we're going with Trump and Vance. It really does feel like that. But, you know, I was thinking about Eagleton in the context of Palin and how health became something that people were kind of grossly prodding into.

I remember in 2008, look, Sarah Palin does not need to be defended in any way, shape, or form. However. I am pointing out that there was sexism in some of the ways that we talked about Sarah Palin, specifically with regard to whether or not she was really the mother of her youngest child. That Drake stuff was weird. Which was really, really weird and gross.

She had a young child who was born not long before she was nominated for McCain's running mate. And there was some kind of public speculation that it was really her daughter's kid and not hers. And that it wasn't, people were like trying to dissect timelines, like it really mattered to her fitness or unfitness for office. I actually worked at the Atlantic when this was happening. And the absolute leading figure on the like Trig Palin birthgate conspiracy theory was Andrew Sullivan who worked there at that point and he and his two interns literally took over a conference room and they called it the Trig Palin

war room and no one was allowed to go in there because they were spending all day every day trying to like blog their way into the truth about anyway anyway. That's so gross. It's gross. Like that is so gross. And like nobody is talking in a gross way about women like that today. We've learned our lesson. Yeah, I mean, she was treated very oddly because she was unfit for office for many other reasons. We just picked the wrong one to focus on. We picked the wrong one.

Yeah, Andrew Sullivan got it wrong. What? I was surprised too. That's great. That never happened again. There is one other element of the like Palin example that is really sticking in my head, which is that like, look, maybe McCain-Palin we're going to lose no matter what anyway. Maybe she like provided a boost and then the like way that she pulled down the ticket equalized out to zero. But she did change the party forever.

Absolutely. In a way that like, I don't think McCain like at all anticipated or saw coming or like understood, which was reckless foolhardy. And I think it's less likely because J.D. Vance is not as popular, but he does represent a real like turn for the Republican Party and the like version of the future it could have. And you do wonder if Trump elevating him into this disastrous ticket, even if it loses horribly, as I hope it does, does change the trajectory of the party in a way that I don't think would be good. So now it's going to be run instead of by just a barking reality TV star.

It's kind of smarmy, slimy. Peter Thiel's party. Ivy League slimy. Peter Thiel's party. Ivy League. Yes. Peter Thiel lap dogs. I mean, if Vance follows the Palin example of like just by getting elevated, pulling the party in his direction, I feel like that's where we go. But who knows?

Great. So, Max, to get some historical sweep in our investigation into dud VPs past and present, I also spoke to presidential historian Alexis Coe. And Alexis mentioned a name I hadn't expected, Richard Nixon. Wait, Nixon? But he won four times. Twice as Eisenhower's running mate in 52 and 56, and then twice leading the ticket in 68 and 72. Yeah, but the first of those races was actually pretty iffy for Nixon. Here's Alexis Coe to explain. So in 1952, he made it on to Dwight Eisenhower's ticket.

And Eisenhower was like pretty iffy about the whole thing. But at the time, Nixon was this like real star in America. And so Eisenhower went with it. And the thing that Nixon kept saying is, I don't come from wealth. You know, his parents owned a grocer and they owned a gas station. And, you know, at the same time, though, he had been bankrolled for a number of years by donors who were paying for expenses at the time that get Nixon off the ticket. Because as the campaign progressed, it was the thing that people kept responding to no matter what either candidate said. They wanted to talk about the money, about Nixon being this tricky dick. So the conclusion was, okay, have a press conference. And he starts to give this impassioned speech about how he took money just a little bit for this and that.

But here's the thing. And then he refocuses the argument. And this was just a completely winning line. He talked about how the one thing that was a gift was checkers, a cute little spaniel that his little girls had loved. And no matter what happens, he's not getting rid of the dog. The dog belongs to the girls. And the whole country was completely charmed. Okay, this story feels very relevant. Yeah, okay, so Vance needs to get his kids a puppy.

Honestly, that's kind of what needs to happen. Is he just like, I don't like being in the position of giving J.D. Vance campaign advice. Tips? I don't think he'll get a puppy. He doesn't seem like a dog guy. I guess what I would say is that a lesson we have learned here is that in order to turn around a nosedive like this, what would have to happen

is Vance would have to radically reframe the public's understanding of him through something like this. And I don't know that he has that in him. Yeah, he would have to radically reframe the public's understanding of him through something like this. And I don't know that he has that in him. Yeah, he would have to radically humanize himself. And the opportunity to do that often comes at the conventions when people's spouses and people's children have a chance to speak. I remember being at the Republican convention, covering it, not attending it, in 2012. You were a delegate, I thought, right? I was a delegate for the great state of denial.

We were watching the intro to Mitt Romney as the nominee, and there were all beautiful, kind seeming wife and his lovely children who authentically seem to admire him, who seem like they were brought up well and know him well because he was a hands-on involved father and is a hands-on involved grandfather. So there are all of these humanized- You make it be nostalgic for him. I know. And well, it was almost as humanizing as that documentary that came out about Mitt Romney on the campaign trail when he tried to iron a suit that was on his body. No, come on. It's sweet. See, right. So there are opportunities that these candidates have to humanize themselves. And the opportunities generally come at times when people who like them and know them are able to be the center of attention.

And I just think that point has passed with Vance. I think that point has passed with Vance. And I think that's a really good insight that it's usually by invoking and surrounding yourself with your family. And what is the one topic that brings out the absolute weirdest shit that J.D. Vance says? Family. Family. So that's the one thing that's one place he can't go. Yeah. Yeah. He's just and also it brings out the absolute worst elements of the American right, because they are completely bothered by the fact that he is married to somebody who is Indian, and that his children are biracial.

And that is the gross attack that's happening against J.D. Vance. Yeah, yeah. Alexis mentioned another problematic running mate, Dan Quayle, who ran alongside George H.W. Bush in the 1988 election. Here's Alexis. Quayle was immediately sort of divisive because he seemed secretive. That's a big thing here. If your vice president is trying to hide something, it's quite obvious from the beginning.

And with Quayle, there was a sort of vulnerability with his academic record. He refused to release any of his records. And that actually would have been, it was a good thing and a bad thing. It was a good thing because he was not from a family of wealth like Bush. He did not immediately go to these great schools. He had barely gotten in. But as it turns out, he had failed the comprehensive examination for freshmen at, I think, DePauw University. So it wasn't the most flattering record. And one of his former professors went on record when he wouldn't give his records because, of course, the media doesn't just take no as an answer. They're going to then go to the university they at least know you graduated from and talk to your old professors.

And one of the old professors called him vapid. Oh, great. Back in the day when being disliked by a professor was a liability for a Republican. I know. I feel wild to think. I know. Another big hit for Quayle came in the vice presidential debate when he compared himself to JFK, which yielded this famous line from his opponent, Democratic vice presidential nominee Lloyd Benston. Senator, I serve with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy. That would be made into merch if it were said today. Bush and Quayle did, of course, go on to win in November and by something of a landslide.

So it's hard to say for sure that Quayle did too much damage. Yeah, I went back and read some news articles from like the campaign about Dan Quayle. And they were all saying like kind of what some people are saying now about J.D. Vance, where it's like, look at the polls, look at his low approval rating. There was one poll that people paid a lot of attention to where if you put Bush and Dukakis side by side, Dukakis being the Democratic candidate, Bush led by nine points. But if you put their VPs next to them, Bush only led by three points, which is a way to suggest that like having Dan Quayle next to George H.W. Bush really hurt him. But the thing is, is he went on to win by eight. So it just like I think maybe this is a case where like, yes, people didn't like him. Yes, it did hurt the ticket in the sense of it's the way that people viewed it. But I don't get the sense that it actually changed that many votes.

I hate to harp on this because it's kind of a cliche scapegoat. But back then we were not living within the 24 hour nonstop news cycle that we're living in currently. And I have to imagine that if Dan Quayle could somehow be injected into the race as the vice presidential nominee today, we would have the internet. We would have kind of nonstop clips of him sounding and looking a little bit vapid. And once that insult hit and started sticking, we would see that kind of constantly being fed to us. And I think back then, it wasn't as omnipresent. It wasn't bombarding people all the time like it is today. Okay, Max. So there's another big unknown variable in determining what effect J.D. Vance will end up having on the

Republican ticket. And that variable is Donald Trump. I asked Alyssa, my Hysteria co-host and former veteran of Running Mates, what options Trump actually has if he decides that Vance is too much of a liability. Here's Alyssa. I mean, any research on this topic literally leads you to if the VP had a stroke or died or something, you know, like that is that that is not I mean, knock, knock wood. I'm never going to be an asshole like that's not the case. So I really don't know what options he has. If you do any sort of like conventional research, it says that by the time ballots are being printed, you know, the horse has left the barn.

Like there's no way to change the VP. But with Donald Trump, I guess you never know. This all brings us back to our big question that we posed at the top of the show. Based on what we've seen in these past moments in history, is it possible that J.D. Vance could actually sink the entire Republican ticket? Well, look, I mean, to kind of level set, like we looked for all of the worst VP candidates that we could find in history. And we found four. And two of them actually won their races. And the two who lost were probably going to lose anyway.

So I think it's just a reminder that even the, like, absolute worst VP candidates in history, like, there's not a ton of evidence that they can definitely pull down a ticket. There's some that they can definitely pull down a ticket. There's some that they can. It does feel like J.D. Vance is absolutely going to be in that top tier of worst VP candidates in terms of his impact on the ticket of all time. But I think that it's tough to say exactly how much of an impact it's going to have. If it turns out that he's Palin scale, somewhere between the Palin scale and the Eagleton scale, that feels like that could be a couple of points off of their national vote share, which might be enough to swing it though. I think that as long as the Trump campaign is having him front and center out there on the,

like he, like Donald Trump is not campaigning and Donald Trump is the reason that people are voting for that ticket, not J.D. Vance. Nobody is voting for Trump Vance because of Vance. I think you could maybe propose that there are people out there who are voting for Trump Vance because of Vance. I think you could maybe propose that there are people out there who are voting for Harris-Walls partly because of Walls. They're excited about Walls, which I don't think is happening with the Trump-Vance ticket at all. No, it really doesn't seem like it. So I don't think that Trump can blame Vance for his campaign floundering at this point because he's not doing shit. He's got to go out and campaign himself if he wants to try

to bring his numbers back up right but that's it's a good point the fact that he's not campaigning is taking all of the things that make vance a drag on the ticket and exacerbating all of them and like vance of course is himself exacerbating it and it's also now we've just got a self perpetuating cycle where everybody sees it so we're all looking for it and there's so much evidence of it because this guy is so fucking online. And he's been on so many podcasts that like there's just a lot of evidence of him saying bad shit knowing all this. How do you think it's likely to play out like for Vance and his role on the ticket? Okay. So I have a wild theory and I have a reasonable theory.

My reasonable theory is that they'll sort of kind of float on to the election. And I think Donald Trump is fundamentally a lazy person. And so he will do as little work as possible to try to achieve victory. And then after, if he doesn't win outright on election night, or if he loses by any close election, he'll just put all of his effort into fighting the results. Or he'll blame Vance forever. Or he'll blame Vance forever. Or he'll blame Vance forever, which would be funny.

But funnier still would be if Trump tried to fire Vance, which is technically possible because like a lot of people, I went down a rabbit hole when Vance started tanking. And I looked up the Republican Party rules. The deadlines. Exactly. Exactly. So the vice president can be replaced on the ticket after the convention if and only if they reconvene a convention, which can be done digitally with a third of the delegates. So they would have to reconvene a digital convention and revote on the vice presidential nominee in order to replace Vance.

But time is of the essence because different states have different deadlines. And the longer time goes by, the less states actually could replace Trump on the ticket because the ballot deadline would have expired. So Trump could do something wild and try to regain attention and regain headlines by firing Vance, which would be very chaotic. But Max, you and I agreed it would be very, which would be very chaotic. But Max, you and I agreed it would be very. It would be very funny. Very funny.

The humiliation of J.D. Vance would be amazing. Utter and complete. I think it's unlikely that he will like formally fire him because it's very complicated. He won't know how to do it. He'll start to hear no's from lawyers and like won't like that. I think that that is much likelier, probably not the likeliest outcome, but likelier that he will try to fire J.D. Vance by Truth Social post. He will just post that like, I have fired J.D. Vance and then just hope that it, it's like that bit from The Office, I'm declaring bankruptcy. And then the campaign will just be

forced to go on with this zombie veep where like J.D. Vance is formally on the ticket, but Trump is pretending that he's not. And that is what I am crossing my fingers for. And that's what America should be crossing its fingers for. That would be really, really funny. I am crossing my fingers, but also I hate myself. So I don't know if it's best for America. It sounds like it goes into the bad for America, but funny category. That's fair.

Okay, Max, to bring us back to the stakes, because there are stakes here of all of this, let's go out with a clip from someone we haven't heard from directly yet. Here's J.D. Vance himself turning on the charm for a rally on Wednesday in Byron Center, Michigan. She says she's having fun. But while she's having fun, Americans are suffering under her policies. When she laughs during a speech, remember that there are American families crying this very day because they cannot afford groceries. When she does these rallies and does these events and does these fake dances, remember that there are parents who lost their children to drugs or violence who will never see their children move again, much less dance again. What?

What? What? What does that mean? How has he figured out the creepiest possible way to say everything? You're not allowed to dance anymore, J.D. Vance's America, because a child somewhere is suffering. That child's not going to dance anymore, Aaron. Yeah, we are the tiny town from Footloose, nationalized.

No dancing until all the kids are alive. Okay, I'm changing my vote. I hope he stays on the ticket forever. How We Got Here is written and hosted by me, Max Fisher, and by Aaron Ryan. It's produced by Austin Fisher. Emma Illick-Frank is our associate producer. Evan Sutton mixes and edits the show. Jordan Cantor sound engineers the show.

Audio support from Kyle Seglin, Charlotte Landis, and Vasilis Fotopoulos. Production support from Adrienne Hill, Leo Duran, Erica Morrison, Raven Yamamoto, and Natalie Bettendorf. And a special thank you to What A Day's talented hosts, Trayvon Anderson, Priyanka Arabindi, Josie Duffy Rice, and Juanita Tolliver for welcoming us to the family.