Fauxfended CNN Anchor Tries Shaming JD Vance Over Kamala Harris Interview Meme, He's Having None of It

On Thursday and right around the time advance clips of the Kamala Harris-Tim Walz interview on CNN were being dropped, GOP vice presidential nominee JD Vance took to the Twitter/X machine to poke a little fun at the current VP ahead of the release of the full interview.

"BREAKING," Vance wrote. "I have gotten ahold of the full Kamala Harris CNN interview."

The clip he shared was the infamous viral one of Miss South Carolina Teen USA, Caitlin Upton, from 2007 where she gave a really bad, word salady answer to host Mario Lopez's question "Recent polls have shown a fifth of Americans can't locate the US on a world map. Why do you think this is?" during the Miss Teen USA beauty pageant.

BREAKING: I have gotten ahold of the full Kamala Harris CNN interview. pic.twitter.com/c6nfcJrFJy
— JD Vance (@JDVance) August 29, 2024

In fairness to Upton, she sounded far more coherent than Harris does on most days.

But perhaps because the video Vance shared was closer to the mark than Harris' media defenders care to admit, fauxfended CNN anchor John Berman made an issue of it during an exchange with Vance Friday, trying to shame the Ohio Senator by pointing out that Upton once admitted she contemplated suicide over the fallout from her answer.

A stern-faced Berman then asked Vance if he was "aware" that Upton had considered taking her own life at one point:

"I'm not sure you're aware, in 2015, Caitlin Upton did an interview in 'New York Magazine' about all the social media attention this clip got, and she said: 'I definitely went through a period where I was very, very depressed, but I never let anybody see that stuff except for people I could trust. I had some very dark moments where I thought about committing suicide.'

So when you posted this last night, were you aware that the woman you are posting a picture of had contemplated committing suicide for the attention that it received?”

Vance was having none of it, not the first time around when Berman asked him about it, and not the second time around when Berman suggested maybe Vance should apologize:

"No, certainly not, John. And my heart goes out to her and I hope that she's doing well.

Look, I've said a lot of things on camera. I've said a lot of stupid things on cameras. Sometimes when you're in the public eye, you make mistakes. And again, I think the best way to deal with it is to laugh at ourselves, laugh at this stuff, and try to have some fun in politics.

I posted a meme from 20 years ago and I think the fact that we're talking about that, instead of the fact that American families can't afford groceries or health care, young families can't afford to buy a home to raise their families, those are the real crisis that we should focus on. And there's nothing that says that we can't tell some jokes along the way while we to deal with a very serious business of bringing back our public policy.

Politics has gotten way too lame, John, way too boring. You can have some fun while making a good argument to the American people about how you're going to improve their lives.
[...]
John, I'm not going to apologize for posting a joke, but I wish the best for Caitlin."

Watch the exchange below:

CNN is NOT happy about that meme that @JDVance posted dunking on Kamala Harris.

“Were you aware that the woman you were posting a picture of had contemplated committing suicide?” pic.twitter.com/UgkRsQNLhW
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) August 30, 2024

The good news here is that though Ms. Upton - who in the past has retweeted conservatives/Republicans including Donald Trump - wasn't a fan of the tweet she, by her own admission, has been doing much better in the years since the video caught fire. Vance, too, is doing well.

As for John Berman, well, the real shame that should be felt is by him and his colleagues over the Thursday "interview" that wasn't. It was 50 shades of embarrassing but yeah, the real issue here should be tweets from JD Vance. Sure.