A photo of Republican vice presidential nominee and Ohio Senator JD Vance has gone viral after Democrats pointed out that he was sitting right next to a newspaper with a lead headline touting low inflation rates.
In a Thursday morning post to X, formerly Twitter, Republican Congressman Dan Waltz of Florida shared an image of himself and Vance inside an airplane pointing at a bottle of Diet Mountain Dew with a copy of the latest edition of The Wall Street Journal on a table between them.
“Ready to campaign with my fellow Diet Mountain Dew fan @JDVance,” Waltz wrote in the post, which had more than 2.7 million views at the time of publication.
Responses to the post quickly began to note that the main headline of the newspaper read “Inflation Hits Lowest Level Since 2021,” potentially undermining a key line of economic attack that Vance and former President Donald Trump have been attempting to use against Vice President Kamala Harris.
Jeff Swensen
“Great pic, guys! Quick question, what’s that headline say?” Democratic Congresswoman Gwen Moore of Wisconsin wrote in response to Waltz.
“Happy to see Republicans share @KamalaHarris’s good news on inflation!” added Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, also a Democrat.
“JD Vance enjoys a celebratory Diet Mountain Dew after reading the Wall Street Journal headline that ‘Inflation Hits Lowest Level Since 2021,'” @ReallyAmerican1 wrote while sharing a version of the photo that crops out Waltz and highlights the headline. “He can barely couch his excitement. That’s GREAT news!”
JD Vance enjoys a celebratory Diet Mountain Dew after reading the Wall Street Journal headline that “Inflation Hits Lowest Level Since 2021.”
He can barely couch his excitement.
That’s GREAT news! pic.twitter.com/ZfAlLs1Dyb— Really American 🇺🇸 (@ReallyAmerican1) August 15, 2024
Newsweek reached out for comment to the office of Vance via email on Thursday night.
Waltz responded to Wasserman Schultz by pointing out a smaller headline under the main headline that reads “The Taliban Celebrate Third Year in Power,” while claiming that Harris “owns that debacle.”
U.S. inflation reached a high of 9.1 percent in June 2022, the highest rate seen in decades. However, economists have largely attributed the spike to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, rather than President Joe Biden and members of his administration. Inflation rates around the world simultaneously saw similar increases.
Inflation has recently been decreasing, with the U.S. Labor Department announcing on Wednesday that the year-over-year rate reached 2.9 percent in July, the lowest since March 2021.
Economists previously told Newsweek that the U.S. economy has been recovering from pandemic-era issues like high inflation rates relatively well when compared to other Western countries.
Trump and Vance have continued to attack Harris and her running mate Tim Walz on the economy despite indicators that the Democrats may not be as vulnerable to the issue as previously thought.
A recent survey conducted for Financial Times and the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business found that voters trust the Democratic presidential ticket to handle the economy over the Republicans for the first time in almost a year.
In a economics-focused news conference on Thursday that former President Barack Obama adviser David Axelrod later described as “a nervous breakdown in public,” Trump warned that the country would experience “a stock market crash like 1929” if he does not win in November, a claim he also made before his 2020 election loss.
