WASHINGTON — Vice President JD Vance fat-shamed a conservative columnist who publicly mocked Zoomers for complaining about burritos costing $20 in a return to his old internet brawling ways after a months-long hiatus.
Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen, who is known to have President Trump’s ear and frequently accused Vance of undermining him on Iran, told students complaining about the high cost of a burrito to “cry me a river.”
“The burritos in the college cafeteria are included in your meal plan,” Thiessen further jabbed on X in response to Turning Point USA’s Andrew Kolvet’s discussion about a college student complaining about the price.
Vance couldn’t resist lashing out at him, sniping, “I’m surprised to hear Mark say this. If you’ve ever met him in person, it’s quite obvious the man has never missed a burrito.”
An order of a burrito at a Chipotle in Illinois with chicken, black beans, roasted chili-corn salsa, and brown rice currently costs $9.65 before taxes. In 2015, burritos at Chipotle cost around $6.50.
A Reddit user went viral last year for posting an image of a 2015 receipt at Chipotle that cost $21.45 for two chicken bowls and one chicken burrito with guacamole. Observers noted last year that the same order would now cost $30.80. Both prices were before taxes kicked in.
Polls consistently show that affordability is a top issue for voters, with 57% of Americans describing it as a full-blown crisis, according to a survey by the Guardian.
That comes after years of elevated inflation, as well as soaring prices in housing, college tuition, healthcare, and energy. One dollar in 2019 is the equivalent of $1.33 in today’s currency. In other words, America has experienced 33% worth of inflation over the past seven years.
And inflation continues to run hot, clocking in at 3.5% for the one-year period ending in June, above the Federal Reserve’s 2% target.
Early on in the second Trump administration, Vance had a reputation for getting into a lot of social media fights with random people and big names alike.
But earlier this year, the frequency of those skirmishes on social media largely disappeared.
White House chief of staff Susie Wiles and others had advised Vance to tone it down on social media, fearing he was coming across as too abrasive, the New York Times reported. The White House denied that report.
Vance later claimed that he gave up having X on his phone for Lent, but was interested in reinstalling it at some point in the future so he could be exposed “to unfiltered raw opinions, and that’s one of the things that I need to hear as a political leader.”
The veep’s decision to bring back some of his old school social media brawling comes amid a broader ideological battle brewing within the Republican Party as he has admitted to spending a lot of time reflecting on the difficulties of keeping the coalition together.
More traditionalist free-market conservatives have contended that people should be taking more personal responsibility and have better budgeting when things are too expensive. Traditionalists have also blamed the populist conservatives for championing policies causing higher prices, such as tariffs.
Populist conservatives have argued that something is wrong in the economy when basic goods and services are so expensive. They’ve also panned traditionalists for coming across as dismissive of those concerns.
Democrats have been seizing on the affordability issue as their top weapon against the GOP heading into the midterm elections, using the strategy Republicans deployed in the 2022 cycle under the Biden administration against them.
Specifically, Democrats have latched onto Trump’s use of tariffs and the war in Iran, blaming those policies for an uptick in costs.
“Costs are coming way down,” Trump said during a stop in Nevada Wednesday. “I took over the country, the prices were through the roof. In my first day, the press said, ‘What are you going to do about affordability?’ It was a word they devised: affordability. They never used that word before.”
Vance, who has long been on the populist side of the ideological battle within the GOP, has consistently conveyed sympathy to concerns about affordability.
“I think what it shows is that the past 40 years of economic policy, bipartisan economic policy, has failed,” Vance told Fox News’ Laura Ingraham Wednesday, when asked about affordability concerns.
“What I think is actually going to happen is these socialist candidates, they’ve caught the tail end of an economy that wasn’t working for most Americans,” he added. “Unfortunately for them, the Trump economy has made long-term investments in rebuilding that manufacturing base.”
In addition to being on opposite sides of Thiessen when it comes to the economic debate within the GOP, the two are also at loggerheads on foreign policy, with Vance being a longtime skeptic of foreign interventionism.
Thiessen spent weeks knocking Vance’s handling of negotiations with Iran, something the vice president has seemingly made clear didn’t go unnoticed.
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