Vice President JD Vance delivered a devastating response to a reporter who tried to corner him with a “gotcha” question about being a conspiracy theorist on Tuesday.
The reporter referenced White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles calling Vance “a conspiracy theorist for a decade” in a Vanity Fair interview, asking for the vice president’s response.
Vance laughed before delivering a response that turned the tables on the mainstream media’s favorite tactic of dismissing inconvenient reality as “conspiracy theories.”
“Sometimes I am a conspiracy theorist, but I only believe in the conspiracy theories that are true,” Vance said. “And by the way, Susie and I have joked in private and in public about that for a long time.”
Then Vance proceeded to list several so-called “conspiracy theories” that turned out to be exactly right:
For example, I believed in the crazy conspiracy theory back in 2020 that it was stupid to mask 3-year-olds at the height of the Covid pandemic, that we should actually let them develop some language skills. You know, I believed in this crazy conspiracy theory that the media and the government were covering up the fact that Joe Biden was clearly unable to do the job. And I believed in the conspiracy theory that Joe Biden was trying to throw his political opponents in jail rather than win an argument against his political opponents.
So, at least on some of these conspiracy theories, it turns out that a conspiracy theory is just something that was true six months before the media admitted it, and that’s my understanding.
Vance’s response sums up what conservatives have been saying for years: the media uses the “conspiracy theory” label as a weapon to discredit questions about the left’s actions.
Remember when questioning Biden’s mental fitness was dismissed as a right-wing conspiracy? Or when suggesting COVID-19 leaked from a lab was treated as dangerous misinformation?
The vice president went on to effusively defend Wiles, calling her an extremely effective chief of staff whose loyalty to President Trump is beyond question.
“Susie Wiles, we have our disagreements. We agree on much more than we disagree, but I’ve never seen her be disloyal to the president of the United States,” Vance said. “And that makes her the best White House chief of staff the president could ask for.”
“If any of us have learned a lesson from that Vanity Fair article, I hope that the lesson is we should be giving fewer interviews to mainstream media outlets.”
Wiles herself denounced the article as “a disingenuously framed hit piece on me and the finest President, White House staff, and Cabinet in history,” and said that “significant context was disregarded” and the article was designed “to paint an overwhelmingly chaotic and negative narrative about the President and our team.”
The mainstream media’s playbook is always the same: find an out-of-context quote, amplify it, and then demand that administration officials respond to manufactured drama.
But Vance’s response demonstrates exactly how to handle these bad-faith “gotcha” attempts: own it, turn it around, and expose the media’s game for what it is.
They aren’t called the “enemy of the people” for nothing, folks.