Will Trump Actually Hand the GOP to JD Vance?

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**Tim Rice** (1:17)
Hello and welcome back to another episode of Behind the Story. I am Daily Wire, DC Bureau Chief Tim Rice. And joining me today is my friend and colleague, Daily Wire Managing Editor, Dylan Houseman. Dylan, thank you so much for being here today.

**Dylan Houseman** (1:33)
Hi Tim, I'm excited to be here. Love Behind the Story, it's my favorite podcast. I listen to it every week, so I'm just more than honored to be on.

**Tim Rice** (1:41)
Well, that's always nice to hear. We appreciate that. We hope more people will follow your lead.
So as listeners know, usually this is where I bring on a reporter. And we get this behind the scenes scoop of how they got to a story that we published on our website. So we're going to do a little bit of that with you. There is a piece that I want, your most recent column that I want to use as a jumping off point. But then we'll just chat and give the behind the story listeners a little bit of that sweet sweet Dylan Houseman wisdom. So the piece is, and I encourage everyone to go read this as always on dailywire.com, is titled, Since When Has a Little Anointing Ever Hurt Anyone?, subtitle, A Lot of Times Actually. So Dylan, why don't you just start by telling us, what was the argument that you were making in this wonderful column?

**Dylan Houseman** (2:30)
Yeah, I noticed in the last, let's say, six weeks, four to six weeks, JD Vance, our vice president, he's been getting a lot more attention. Usually vice presidents, we don't really think too much about them. We don't pay that much attention to what they're doing. But ever since the Iran negotiation, MOU situation, where they kicked in the high gear, which is a couple months ago or so, he's really been in the spotlight a lot. He had the MOU where he was the face of it, and he was out there selling it to everyone. He had his book come out around that same time, so he was doing a book tour, doing a bunch of media, and suddenly, some of the statements he was making on foreign policy about Israel, about economics in his book, about religion in his book, started to catch people's attention and people started to say, wait a second, some of this doesn't sound quite right to me or it sounds like stuff that I like. That's what some Republicans and some conservatives were saying about some of his public comments. And so this entire discourse started where you had this kind of admittedly small online, I would say DC kind of based cadre within the Republican Party, within the right, who were suddenly being very critical of JD Vance. And then you had the backlash to that, which was JD Vance, his allies in the media, political operatives, etc.
Going very hard in the paint, trying to put down this, you know, beginnings of a rebellion potentially happening and acting very aggressively towards it. So I wanted to write about that. And my thesis essentially was that, look, JD Vance is almost certainly going to be the 2020 Republican nominee. I wouldn't put it at 100 percent, but it's overwhelmingly likely, I think, even people who like him or dislike him all would kind of agree on that for the most part. He's almost certainly going to be the nominee.
Most Republicans, as of now, like him and view him positively. So why not just let the process play out? Why do we have to have this aggressive stamping out of any kind of criticism or resistance to him whatsoever? And specifically to get to the anointing part, to wrap it all in a nice bow. I think what I noticed is that whenever people would make a criticism of Vance and say, oh, I don't like what he said about common good economics in his book, or I don't like how this Iran MOU is turning out, or I don't like that he has this about Tucker Carlson, whatever the specific criticism has been, the response from his defenders has not been, for the most part, to actually respond with substance and push back. It has been to say, you need to shut up because he's going to be the nominee. They've spoken about it as if it's inevitable, 100% certainty that he's going to be the nominee, which may be the case, but I just think it's, one, substantively not correct to argue that way, just in kind of an ethereal right and wrong sense, but two, I think it's politically kind of foolish, which is kind of what I laid out in the piece. So I think it's politically harmful to him to take that approach.