CBS News host Margaret Brennan should have known better than insisting to Vice President J.D. Vance that the illegal aliens who poured over our open border during the Biden administration had been vetted. Was she unaware that Vance’s debating skills are second to none?
On her Sunday morning program, Face the Nation, Brennan parroted the liberal talking point, and J.D. swatted her down like a fly. This left the hapless host sputtering like Sen. Mazie Hirono during Pete Hegseth’s Senate confirmation hearing.
In the exchange below, Brennan declared, “These people are vetted!” She promptly gets the smackdown she so richly deserves.
Brennan recalled Vance’s statement from an August interview with CBS: “You said, ‘I don’t think we should abandon anyone who has been properly vetted and helped us.’ Do you stand by that?”
Vance replied by stating the obvious. They have not all been properly vetted. He reminded her of the migrant who planned a terrorist attack in Oklahoma.
She tried to speak over him. “No, but there are 30,000 people in the pipeline – Afghan refugees.”
Vance explained, “My primary concern, Margaret, is to look after the American people. … .”
As he spoke, just as Hirono tried so ineffectively to do during the Hegseth hearing, Brennan carried on her own conversation and drew her own conclusions. “So, no. … These people are vetted! These people are vetted!”
Vance calmly continued his remarks. “Just like the guy who planned a terrorist attack in Oklahoma a few months ago? He was allegedly properly vetted and many people in the media and the Democratic Party said he was properly vetted. Clearly he wasn’t. I don’t want my children to share a neighborhood with people who are not properly vetted.”
With the most peculiar expression on her face, perhaps realizing the weakness of her point, Brennan said, “No, and that was a very particular case. It wasn’t clear if he was radicalized when he got here or when he was living here.”
Brennan’s foolish argument that it mattered when this man was radicalized was the limit for Vance. And he quickly shut her down, “I don’t really care Margaret. I don’t want that person in my country, and I think most Americans agree with me.”
His remark, “I don’t really care Margaret,” spawned a hundred memes on social media. Here are a few:
HotAir’s David Strom titled a post about the interview, “I’d Like to Report a Murder: JD Vance Just Killed Margaret Brennan on Live TV.”
In another exchange, Brennan tried to hit Vance, who is a practicing Catholic, on the Trump administration’s criticism of the assistance the Church, and specifically the group Catholic Charities, provide to illegal aliens. Zeroing in on the core issue, Vance asked Brennan, “When they receive over $100 million to help resettle illegal immigrants, are they worried about humanitarian concerns? Or are they actually worried about their bottom line?”
Below, just six days into the Trump-Vance administration, Brennan demands to know when Americans will start seeing lower prices at the grocery store as they had promised on the campaign trail.
And on it went. Brennan seems unaware that the legacy media can no longer rely on the type of “journalism” they’ve been practicing over the past decade. She might want to consult her colleagues, Norah O’Donnell and CNN’s Jim Acosta, about the realities of the new media landscape. Peddling talking points handed down by the Democratic Party no longer works. After years of lying to viewers, the public’s trust in the traditional media has cratered, dragging their ratings down with it. And viewers, in meaningful numbers, have turned to alternative sources for their news, particularly since the 2020 presidential election.
President Trump sure knew what he was doing when he chose Vance for the VP slot.
The entire interview was fire. I knew Vance would be good. I just didn’t think he’d be this good.
Elizabeth writes commentary for The Washington Examiner. She is an academy fellow at The Heritage Foundation and a member of the Editorial Board at The Sixteenth Council, a London think tank. Please follow Elizabeth on X or LinkedIn.
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