JD Vance’s attempt at a joke during a rally in North Carolina fell flat after he was forced to point out that the ‘mistaken’ slip-up was a joke.
‘And because we need somebody who will actually fight back against the fart left, we need Michael Watley in the United States Senate,’ Vance told a crowd in Greensboro, North Carolina.
The room erupted into cheers and chants of ‘Michael’, before Vance added: ‘Now, you may not have even heard that, but I actually, I usually don’t mispeak, but I just called them the fart left, not the fart left.’
The room chuckled before he said: ‘I promise that was an accident. So do the fake news. Who will accuse me of bad language? I promise I did not mean to call them the fart left. I meant to call them the far left.’
The Vice President has often tried to appear as if he’s in on the joke, but the painful laughs from the crowd told another story.
Attendees appeared to fall asleep, and others happily scrolled through their phones while Vance delivered his speech.
The convention centre where the rally was held has a capacity of around 3,000, but local news reported the number of attendees as only around 300.
This could be due to Trump’s comments about North Carolina just days before Vance’s rally.
In Gastonia, North Carolina, Trump said: ‘North Carolina, it was beautiful, it was apple pie, right? And now it’s one of the most violent and one of the worst in the whole nation.’
Trump went as far as calling the cities of North Carolina ‘blood-soaked killing fields’ and claiming that the state was ‘criminally dangerous.’
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