JD Vance Says His Dog and Son Showed How They Hate the Media

JD Vance.
Peter Casey

Like father, like son.

Vice president-elect JD Vance said at Mar-a-Lago Wednesday that the “second best day” of Donald Trump’s campaign was when his four-year-old son, Vivek, “told the media, they were all ‘fake news.’”

(Not to be confused with Vance’s seven-year-old son, Ewan, who was told to “shut the hell up” when he tried to talk about Pikachu while Vance was on the phone with Trump to accept the nomination for vice president.)

Vance added that the next day on his plane, his dog “took a s--t” next to the press, which “speaks to how we think of fake news,” Philip Wegmann of Real Clear Politics reported Wednesday.

Trump and his team have been holding court at Mar-a-Lago since his victory last week. The America First Policy Institute hosted a gala at the resort Wednesday night celebrating Trump’s cabinet nominations, which Vance spoke at.

Speaking outside of his bubble of supporters and directly to the media, Vance had a different tune.

“Seeing the country from the perspective of a seven-year-old, a four-year-old and two-year-old, with all the crazy s--t that they say, the observations that they have,” Vance told NBC News in the final days of the campaign. “The way that my four-year-old points to some of your colleagues who have cameras and says, ‘Daddy, is that the fake news?’ It’s like, ‘No, we’re not allowed to say that, son.’”

In September, after Trump falsely claimed that Haitian migrants were eating the pets of people in Ohio, Vance painted himself as a peddler of fake news.

“The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes,” Vance said on CNN. “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”

He quickly back-tracked and said, “I say that we’re creating a story, meaning we’re creating the American media focusing on it.”