J.D. Vance came to Trump’s defense when confronted with the fact that the presidential candidate had dinner in 2022 with white supremacist Nick Fuentes, who recently attacked Vance’s wife, Usha Vance, a child of Indian immigrants. Fuentes said last month he doesn’t expect Vance — “the guy who has an Indian wife” — to “support White identity.”
“What kind of a man marries somebody named Usha?” Fuentes, who has often praised Hitler, said. “Clearly, he doesn’t value his racial identity, his heritage.”
During an interview that aired Sunday on This Week, ABC’s Jonathan Karl asked Vance about Fuentes’ remarks and Trump’s dinner with the white supremacist alongside controversial rapper Kanye West, who has praised Hitler multiple times. Vance responded, “The one thing I like about Donald Trump is he actually will talk to anybody, but just because you talk to somebody doesn’t mean you endorse their views.”
Some of Fuentes’ views include that “perfidious Jews” and anyone who “suppresses Christianity” should be “absolutely annihilated.” “When we take power,” Fuentes said a Dec. 2023 livestream, “they need to be given the death penalty, straight up.” The white supremacist had previously praised Trump but declared “war” against his campaign in an X post on Friday, writing, “Tonight I declared a new Groyper War against the Trump campaign.” Groypers are far-right extremists and internet trolls and are linked to the nationalist America First PAC.
In his ABC interview, Vance continued to defend Trump, saying, “Donald Trump has spent a lot of quality time with my wife. Every time he sees her, he gives her a hug, tells her she’s beautiful, and jokes around with her a little bit.”
This isn’t the first time Vance has justified Trump dining with Fuentes. In May, he was asked about the dinner after Vance tried to claim President Joe Biden is anti-semitic.
Vance also told Karl that “if these guys want to attack me or attack my views, my policy views, my personality, come after me, but don’t attack my wife. She’s out of your league.”
But over on CNN’s State of the Union, Vance complained that his opponents, Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, has been labeling him and Trump by calling them “weird.”
“I want to move on to something that Governor Walz has called you and Donald Trump, and that is weird,” anchor Dana Bash said to Vance during a Sunday interview. “The New York Times reports that, when Donald Trump was asked about it, he said: ‘Not me. They’re talking about J.D.'”
“Well, certainly, they have levied that charge against me more than anybody else,” Vance said. “But I think that it drives home how they’re trying to distract from their own policy failures. I mean, look, this is fundamentally schoolyard bully stuff.”
It’s curious that Vance is calling Walz’s “weird” label as “schoolyard bully stuff” when mere days ago, Vance said during a campaign event in Detroit, “President Trump in particular has the best sense of humor of anybody I’ve ever seen in American politics. He loves to joke. He loves to… make fun of anybody that’s out there.”
President Donald Trump discussing Venezuela at a press conference at Mar-a-Lago.
Why Venezuela Could Be a Turning Point in Gen Z’s Support for Trump
When Donald Trump called himself “the peace president” during his 2024 campaign, it was not just a slogan that my fellow Gen Z men and I took seriously, but also a promise we took personally. For a generation raised in the shadow of endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it felt reassuring. It told us there was a new Republican Party that had learned from its failures and wouldn’t ask our generation to fight another war for regime change. That belief stood strong until the U.S. overthrew Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
Growing up in the long wake of the wars in Iraq in Afghanistan shaped how my generation learned to see Republicans. For us, “traditional” Republican foreign policy became synonymous with unnecessary conflicts that caused young people to bear the consequences. We heard how Iraq was sold to the public as a necessary war to destroy weapons of mass destruction, only to become a long conflict that defined the early adulthood of many millennials. Many of us grew up watching older siblings come home from deployments changed, and hearing teachers and coaches talk about friends who never fully came back. By the time we were old enough to pay attention, distrust of Bush-era Republicans wasn’t ideological, it was inherited from what we had heard.
As the 2024 election was rolling around, that dynamic had flipped. After watching wars in Ukraine and Gaza dominate headlines while Joe Biden was president, the Democrats were now the warmongers. My friends constantly told me how a vote for Kamala Harris was a vote to go to war. On the other hand, Donald Trump and the Republicans were the ones my friends thought could keep us safe. “I’m not voting for Trump because I love him,” one friend told me. “I’m voting for him because he cares about us and I don’t want to go fight in a stupid war.” For many of my friends, much of their vote came down to one question: Who was less likely to send us to fight? The answer to them was pretty clear.
Fast forward to now, and Venezuela has begun to complicate that belief. Even without talk of a draft or a formal declaration of war, the renewed focus on U.S. involvement and troops on the ground has brought back the same language of escalation my generation was taught to distrust. Young men online have been voicing the same worries, concerned that the ousting of Maduro mirrors the early stages of wars they were raised to fear. When I asked a friend what he thought about Venezuela, he shared that same sentiment. “This is how all these wars always start,” he told me. “They might try to make it sound like it’s not actually a war, but people our age always end up being the ones that pay the price for it.” For young men who supported Trump because they believed he represented a break from interventionist politics, Venezuela blurs the line between the “new” Republican Party they thought they were backing and the old one they were raised to reject.
For many young men, Venezuela has become a major part of a broader shift of how they view Trump. A recent poll from Speaking with American Men (SAM) found that Trump’s approval rating has fallen 10 percent among young men, with only 27 percent agreeing with the statement that Trump is “delivering for you”.
Gen Z men’s support of Trump was never about ideology or party loyalty, it was about the idea that he had their back and would fight for them. But that’s no longer the case. Recently, Trump proposed adding $500 billion to the military budget. Ideas like that will only hurt the president with young men. My friends don’t want more military spending that could get us entangled in foreign wars; they want a president who keeps them home and fights for their economic and social needs. As Trump pushes for a bigger military and more intervention abroad, the promise that once made him feel like a protector of young men now feels out of reach.
For my generation, Venezuela isn’t just another foreign policy dispute, it’s a conflict many young men worry they could be the ones sent to fight. Gen Z men didn’t support Trump because he was a Republican, but because they believed he was different from the old Republicans. He would be a president who would have their back, fight for their interests and keep them from fighting unnecessary wars. Now, that promise feels fragile, and the fear of being the ones asked to face the consequences has returned. For a generation raised on the effects of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the idea of another war isn’t abstract, it’s personal.