Vice President JD Vance has spent the week crisscrossing media outlets and television talk shows to promote his new book and to defend President Donald Trump’s policies as well as the pair’s recently announced agreement with Iran, a deal critics have labeled a giveaway intended to end their unapproved and deadly military campaign.
Yet Vance, who in the early stages of Trump’s first term harshly criticized the president before becoming one of his most loyal supporters, delivered some of his most audacious remarks to date on a podcast on Thursday, June 18.
You might recall that Vance once wrote that he vacillates “back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical a–hole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler,” according to PBS.
Yet he’s now astonishingly claiming Trump is the most intelligent president in American history.
During an appearance on Steven Bartlett’s “Diary of a CEO” podcast, the author and MAGA spokesperson argued that Trump is “extremely intelligent, generous, and a strong leader in human relations,” despite the president’s widely recognized public image.
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“People would say that he was dumb or that he wasn’t smart. He’s super smart, like he reads a lot. He understands people at an instinctual level better than anyone I’ve ever known. From a pure IQ perspective, he’s a very smart person,” Vance blathered.
Vance kept praising Trump’s intelligence, even as the president has spent the past year publicly bragging about “acing” cognitive tests that he seems to mistake for IQ tests. Doctors use those four tests to diagnose mental impairment or cognitive decline.
“It’s interesting. If you give Donald Trump an IQ test with the other 45, 46 presidents that the United States has had, I guarantee he’d be either near the top or at the top,” Vance extolled.
Social media had a substantial response to Vance’s groveling, with critics calling him out and probing the motives behind his defense.
“I’d put him at probably #5. But that’s because the other 40 are dead,” one X user quipped about Trump’s intelligence.
“There is no amount of money you could offer me to humiliate myself on a daily basis the way Vance does. The guy simply has no core, no shame, no charisma. He is the purest sock puppet to ever disgrace political office, an empty suit making human sounds,” another commenter asserted.
This commenter did not hold back: “JD how does the trump sh-t sandwich taste? Get used to it you are going to be eating a lot of em groveling for his endorsement, don’t worry dems will retake the government then you will really need to eat a bunch of sh-t sandwiches.”
Yet another wrote, “Yeah I sometimes have to kiss my boss’ a– too. I get it. I would never say it on National TV, but you do you, boo. I’m guessing 95-105 and that was 20 years ago at best.”
It remains unclear why Vance felt compelled to defend Trump’s intelligence levels, though opponents suggest the move is primarily aimed at diverting attention from the Iran deal intended to end Trump’s costly military campaign against the Islamic Republic.
Critics have characterized the war as shortsighted, lacking a coherent strategy or endgame, and have accused Trump and his cabinet of underestimating Iran’s ability to retaliate by closing the Strait of Hormuz and driving gas and oil prices higher for more than three months, leaving Trump looking, to say the least, less than brilliant.
