Trump has long talked about his survival as divinely guided, a theme Vance took up. The vice president said that if the bullet had killed Trump, \u201cwe would have had real civil strife in a way that I don\u2019t know that the country could have ever come back from.\u201d<\/p>\n
Get Starting Point<\/p>\n
A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday.<\/p>\n
Vance said many Trump supporters would have assumed a conspiracy had robbed them of their chosen president, and he said he would have also had those thoughts \u201cin the back of my mind.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI would have assumed very dark forces had taken out Donald Trump, right as he was about to come back into the White House,\u201d Vance said. \u201cThere would have just been an illegitimacy to our entire political system.\u201d<\/p>\n
Most of the hour-and-ten-minute conversation was an amiable chat about faith, Vance\u2019s own spiritual journey, his Easter meeting with Pope Francis the day before the pontiff\u2019s death last year, and human frailty and fallibility. But it occasionally touched on darker themes.<\/p>\n
Crawford asked Vance whether, as vice president, he had ever been in a room that was \u201cspiritually dark.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve been in meetings with world leaders where various issues are being discussed, and somebody will say something or somebody will make an observation and I\u2019ll feel some darkness about it, it sets off every spiritual alarm bell in my body,\u201d Vance said. He added he also felt \u201ca very dark spiritual energy\u201d in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, probably because of the carnage at the Civil War battlefield.<\/p>\n
Vance cites AI during a discussion about \u2018end times\u2019<\/p>\n
Crawford also asked Vance about his interest in the \u201cend times,\u201d which the vice president laughingly said had been more of an obsession in youth during the late 1990s, when people were abuzz about the possibility with the coming millennium. A chortling Vance recounted a story of a friend who was obsessed that the world would end in late 2007 and ran up major credit card debt.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere are, like, things about the world that make me feel, like, not shocked if the Antichrist was walking among us, but, again I try not to focus too much on it,\u201d Vance said. He cited \u201cIT companies\u201d and the use of artificial intelligence as a substitute for human interaction.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think that\u2019s kind of satanic,\u201d Crawford said when Vance recounted the story of one acquaintance using AI as a marriage counselor.<\/p>\n
\u201cYeah, when you completely divorce the human from the social element that God made us for, OK that\u2019s very, that\u2019s very bad,\u201d Vance said.<\/p>\n
Crawford asked Vance about Trump\u2019s post on social media of an AI-generated image of himself as Jesus earlier this year, which Crawford said offended him. Trump initially contended he thought the image was of him as a doctor, then took down the post amid widespread criticism from even some of his own backers.<\/p>\n
Vance defended the president. \u201cHe did not mean to, like, mock or mimic God, that\u2019s just not who he is,\u201d Vance said, adding that the president often tries to keep things light and constantly makes jokes. \u201cHe\u2019s a bit of a ballbuster, for those of us who work with him, and he just likes to have a good time. And I think that if people appreciated that, they would recognize, he\u2019s not trying to offend people, he\u2019s trying to keep things light.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Trump has long talked about his survival as divinely guided, a theme Vance took up. The vice president…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":210990,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[119],"tags":[552,35012,2541,1665,169,168,27090,51,1194],"class_list":["post-210989","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-jd-vance","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-assassinations","tag-christianity","tag-general-news","tag-james-david-vance","tag-jd-vance","tag-political-violence","tag-politics","tag-washington-news"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@people\/117199625754699955","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/210989","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=210989"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/210989\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/210990"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=210989"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=210989"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=210989"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}