Joy Reid: The Vice President Has Too Much Time On His Hands

In this guest column excerpt, journalist Joy Reid tells JD Vance to "Tweet less and govern more, James David; you are wasting our time and tax money."

Editor’s note: In lieu of Clapback Mailbag, we’re running an excerpt from Friend of ContrabandCamp and journalist Joy-Ann Reid, who had time to clap back at Vice President JD Vance. Instead of working to end the Republican shutdown, Vance decided to tweet that Reid should be grateful for her life in America.

[UPDATED] I learned of JD Vance’s dis track on me while on a Substack Live with Tommy Christopher. Had he not told me, I would be wholly unaware that JD had attacked me. And if I’m being honest, I still don’t care all that much (though my initial reaction to Tommy was pretty colorful, I have to say.

And while I suppose it’s good news that Vance is dispensing advice to women beyond “quit your job, find a right wing husband, have more babies and adopt fewer cats,” as was his habit during the campaign, I have to admit, I am surprised that the vice president of the United States has so much time on his hands that he’s scrolling old interviews of mine and posting on X-Twitter.

We are, after all, just one day into a Republican government shutdown, Trump’s disastrous tariffs are wreaking hell on our economy, likely prompting yet another Trump bailout of the farmers who largely voted for him and those tariffs, too. Unemployment is on the rise, prompted by Trump’s frenetic dogeing of any government agency, state or city he doesn’t like or that doesn’t sufficiently like him. Our health agencies are in the shaky hands of a former heroin addict/vaccine truther and a TV doctor from Oprah’s former show. And the former weekend TV host in charge of our military just forced our entire military leadership to watch him do a creepy, manosphere TEDTalk, after which the clearly mentally diminished commander-in-chief threatened to use U.S. cities as testing grounds for U.S. troops’ battle prep; even as he turns the DOJ into a star chamber for anyone who made him mad during his first presidency while his creepy border squad unleash a 1930s-style masked gestapo to terrorize anyone unfortunate enough to be Brown and outside. To say nothing of the disasters Trump’s unique combination of greed and dereliction are unleashing in the Middle East and in Ukraine, while he whines and pines for a Nobel Peace Prize and blows hundreds of millions of dollars on a golden White House ballroom with money we supposedly don’t have for healthcare. With all of that going on, the vice president of the United States is spending his time trolling me on Twitter??? And not even for the first time???

For this, we’re paying this guy $235,000 a year??? And y’all got on Kamala Harris with the whole “well, what has she done,” garbage. Sheesh! She at least negotiated a Central American public-private partnership to reduce traffic to the border and tried to get to the root causes of migration, and was the tie-breaking vote on key legislation. This guy, though? He TWEETS. I guess that’s what you call “reverse DEI.”

But forget all that. JD Vance is mad that I’m not sufficiently “grateful” to America. And to come to that conclusion, he reposted (with comment!) someone called End Wokeness, who pulled up a more than a year old clip of me in conversation with the great Ta-Nehisi Coates (it was a great conversation sponsored by Baldwin & Co. books, which you can find here) in which I talked about what my mother, Philomena, learned when she immigrated to this country in the early 1960s:

To which Vice President End Wokeness had this to say:

Well, I’ll be. Non-trolling advice from this guy:

Should VP Kamala Harris be “grateful” that her immigrant mother, who has the same ethnic background as Mrs. JD Vance, gave birth to a daughter who rose from a single-parent household and regular public schools to become the highest ranking woman of any race to hold office in this country’s history, only to have that daughter referred to as “the trash” by the man seeking her job? Oh right … you were just reversing one aspect of The Great Replacement by stealing a white man’s spot back from the Black and Indian lady, amirite, JD?

Just to be clear: I don’t feel the need to take advice, trolling or otherwise, from a man whose moral North Star is Curtis Yarvin. The idea that Black people owe ‘gratitude’ (to white people, presumably) when we succeed is just the same old racist balderdash that we’re used to from the right.

To read the rest of this column, please subscribe to Joy Reid’s Substack.