Hey, Trump? No one likes Vance. Try again.

GOP vice presidential nominee JD Vance is, in the parlance of political strategists, “not good.”
The Ohio senator Donald Trump dumbly chose as a running mate has spent his first few weeks on the ticket flailing, defending cruel past comments about “childless cat ladies” while enduring an entirely fabricated yet somehow kind-of-believable online rumor that he … how can I put this? … has an affection for couches.
Yeah. It’s not good.
Vance is swiftly showing the world there can be a Republican more cringe than Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, and if Trump isn’t having buyer’s remorse, he certainly should be.
Here are some recent headlines Vance has garnered:
CNN host Harry Enten noted on social media: “JD Vance is making history as the least liked VP nominee (non-incumbent) since 1980 following his/her party’s convention. He’s the first to have a net negative favorable rating.”
As former GOP presidential candidate Jeb Bush once said: “Please clap.”
Undoubtedly, Trump has seen all this and is less than pleased that he’s paired with a mope. On Wednesday at the National Association of Black Journalists convention in Chicago, he was asked if Vance could be ready to serve as president on day one. Trump notably didn’t answer, instead saying: “Historically, the vice president in terms of the election does not have any impact. I mean, virtually no impact.”
That’s a nice way of saying: “JD Vance who? Never heard of ‘em.”
Vance’s problems are many, and growing. Back in 2021, he told Fox News: “We’re effectively run in this country, via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too. … You look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) – the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children, and how does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it?”
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Whoever vetted Vance for the Trump campaign apparently did not have access to a computer, because other examples of similarly weird comments by Vance are all over the place.
He once said: “The entire Democrat Party is like this childless cabal of people who don’t really care about the future.”
He posted on social media: “The cat ladies, man. They must be stopped.”
Vance seems to view women as baby-producing machines that need to up their game, and here in the year 2024, that sounds pretty damn weird.
Even the arch-conservative Wall Street Journal editorial board called out Vance’s “childless cat ladies” nonsense, suggesting he should have his wife do more appearances for him: “She might help persuade swing voters that Mr. Vance respects women more than his comments have made it seem.”
Fox News contributor Tomi Lahren clapped back at Vance, saying: “Don’t call women dumb. It just doesn’t work. On Republican women or liberal women, it just doesn’t work. There are much better ways to attack Kamala.” 
Outside the bad things about Vance that are true, an item completely fabricated by someone on social media has made the U.S. senator the butt of endless jokes. Someone falsely claimed that Vance’s book “Hillbilly Elegy” contains a passage in which Vance talks about how he once had sex with a couch.
The details don’t matter, because it’s 100% made up, but it still managed to go viral, even prompting The Associated Press to run a fact-check – which the news organization later retracted – declaring it untrue.
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For most normal political candidates, that kind of nonsense wouldn’t matter. But it’s clear there are enough people who don’t like Vance – or who think he actually seems like a guy who would be attracted to furniture – to provide fertile ground for such a lie to take root.
And therein lies the problem. Vance is profoundly unlikable. And he’s also a bad retail politician.
After more than a week of couch jokes at his expense, he spoke at a rally Tuesday and said this: “I would call her (his wife) up here to come and speak but then I think I’d have to sleep on the couch tonight.”
His campaign handlers likely face-palmed so hard they knocked themselves unconscious.
With Trump clearly rattled by presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris’ polling surge since she rose to the top of the ticket, the “Vance drag” his campaign is experiencing should prompt him to action.
C’mon, Donald. You gotta dump Vance.
Maybe replace him with someone who appeals to voters who aren’t bearded male misogynists. Or perhaps you could just jettison him, as you did with your last vice president (remember Mike Pence?) and all the former Cabinet members who now refuse to endorse you.
As you said, the vice president has “virtually no impact.” Be bold. Run without one.
It honestly couldn’t be worse than having the cat-lady-hating, alleged-sofa-enthusiast drip you were foolish enough to pick in the first place.
Follow USA TODAY columnist Rex Huppke on X, formerly Twitter, @RexHuppke and Facebook facebook.com/RexIsAJerk