Did Trump really call Vance 'incompetent'? Here's the truth

In early December 2025, a claim spread on multiple platforms (archived, archived) that U.S. President Donald Trump appeared to call Vice President JD Vance "incompetent" during a Cabinet meeting on Dec. 2. The alleged quote read as follows:

I think [Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz] is a grossly incompetent man. I thought that from the day I watched JD [Vance] destroy him in the debate. I was saying, who is more incompetent, that man or my man? I had a man and he had a man; they were both incompetent.

By "the debate," Trump appeared to be referring to the Oct. 1, 2024, vice presidential debate. At the time, Walz was the Democratic vice presidential nominee.

News media sites BuzzFeed (archived), The Daily Beast (archived) and others published stories with headlines claiming Trump seemingly "roasted" Vance or otherwise appeared to insult him. One widely circulated Facebook post (archived) by account Occupy Democrats claimed:

That's a lot of jumbled pronouns and tortured sentence structure, so let's try to sort this out. The "that man" piece was clearly referring to Walz and the "my man" clearly meant Vance.

The video and the quote are authentic. However, Trump was not referring to Vance when he said "incompetent" — rather, the White House confirmed in an email to Snopes that he was calling his own debate opponents as incompetent, not Vance. When Trump said "I had a man and he had a man," "he" in this case referred to Vance, not Walz.

Beyond the White House's confirmation, the full context of Trump's comments indicate he was not calling Vance incompetent. Trump's later remark that "I had a man and a woman" likely referred to former President Joe Biden and former Vice President Kamala Harris, who replaced Biden as the 2024 Democratic presidential nominee after Biden dropped out of the race in July. Trump debated both Biden and Harris during the 2024 election cycle.

The quote above continued:

I had a man and a woman. I thought she was very incompetent too, but now she's leading the field and I think she's leading the field for the nomination. 

The video (archived) of the Cabinet meeting is publicly available on the official White House YouTube account, with the relevant portion beginning at 2:13:37 when a reporter asked (at 2:13:29) whether Trump thought Walz "should resign over the fraud scandal in his state," referring to allegations that Walz failed to prevent sweeping fraud in his state's social services system:

We asked the White House for clarification regarding whether Trump was calling Vance incompetent, particularly given his later comment about having "a man and a woman" who were both incompetent, and the White House responded: "He was referring to his own opponents."

In short, while Trump's language may have appeared convoluted or confusing to some listeners, in referring to his opponents as incompetent, Trump meant that both he and Vance faced incompetent debate opponents — not that Vance himself was incompetent.

Many of the stories and posts clarified further down in the published text that he may not have been referring to Vance. For example, Occupy Democrats Facebook post said deeper in the text: "The 'they were both incompetent' part could possibly have meant Walz and Biden," despite the beginning of the post reading: "Trump calls J.D. Vance 'incompetent' and then confuses himself in a bizarre Cabinet meeting rant that has SUPERCHARGED the cognitive decline concerns."

Given the full context of Trump's comments (however confusing to some listeners), it's likely these posts and articles used attention-grabbing headlines for clicks and views as opposed to factual reporting.