Vance Says Trump Assassination Would Have Sparked Civil Strife

Vice President JD Vance has said that if the July 2024 assassination attempt on Donald Trump had been successful, the country would have faced "real civil strife" from which it might never have recovered.

In a podcast released Tuesday with Christian host Bryce Crawford, Vance said he would have personally suspected a conspiracy had Trump been killed. "I would have assumed very dark forces had taken out Donald Trump, right as he was about to come back into the White House," he said, adding that such an event would have rendered the entire political system illegitimate in the eyes of many.

The wide-ranging, hour-long conversation touched on Vance's Catholic faith, his meeting with Pope Francis a day before the pontiff's death, and the rush to explain away divinely touched events through science. Vance cited the Butler, Pennsylvania shooting, where a bullet grazed Trump's ear and a supporter was killed, as a moment of divine intervention.

On darker topics, Vance said he had felt "a very dark spiritual energy" at Gettysburg, and described meetings with world leaders that set off "every spiritual alarm bell in my body."

Asked about the end times, Vance laughed about his youthful obsession with the millennium, recounting a friend who racked up credit card debt expecting the world to end in 2007. He said he would not be shocked "if the antichrist was walking among us," pointing to AI companies replacing human interaction as a worrying trend. When Crawford called AI marriage counseling "satanic," Vance agreed, saying it divorces humans from the social element God made them for.

Vance also defended Trump's controversial AI-generated image of himself as Jesus, saying the president "did not mean to mock or mimic God." He described Trump as a "ballbuster" who likes to keep things light and was not trying to offend anyone.