(LifeSiteNews) — Vice President JD Vance told evangelical podcaster Bryce Crawford that spiritual reality is often more visible in people than in classified files. Asked whether Washington rooms ever feel dark, Vance said the feeling usually attaches to persons, not places.
“I’ve been in meetings with world leaders where various issues are being discussed and somebody will say something or somebody will make an observation and I will like feel a certain darkness about it,” he said. “It sort of sets off every spiritual alarm bell in my body like whatever that person just said I need to be very careful because that’s not a great thing.”
With regard to places where he has had similar feelings, he added that the battlefield at Gettysburg once made “the hairs on the back of my neck stand up” because “so many people died there.” But “most of the time … when I feel something either positive or negative, it’s usually centered around people rather than places.”
He also linked a similar unease to parts of the AI industry, saying that some of the things happening with certain AI companies makes one “feel like there is some really, really weird spiritual dark energy” involved.
Crawford later pressed him on an AI image President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social last April apparently depicting him as Our Lord Jesus Christ. This post was uploaded on the Second Sunday of Easter according to the Catholic Latin Rite calendar and Easter Sunday for Eastern Orthodox Christians.
Either someone has hacked into Trump‘s TruthSocial account or he is losing it… pic.twitter.com/vLhmHnLmG9
— John-Henry Westen (@JhWesten) April 13, 2026
At the time, LifeSiteNews editor-in-chief John-Henry Westen called the image “outrageously irreverent and even blasphemous.” Citing St. Thomas Aquinas, he argued that ascribing what belongs to God to a creature “drags God down to our level.” He quoted 2 Thessalonians 2:3-4 on the “man of sin” who “gives himself out as if he were God,” and wrote: “Now I’m not saying that Trump is the Antichrist, but he seems to be trying to make himself look like it.”
Westen said the post was “seriously confusing” after previous positive gestures from the White House to the Christian faith, such as a beautiful statement honoring St. Joseph, and added that despite these, Christians were “gravely concerned for the eternal destiny of (Trump’s) soul.”
In the interview, Vance claimed Trump did not intend to “post a meme of himself as God,” explaining that staff will bring him memes and sometimes if he thinks it is funny, he will direct for it to be put on Truth Social.
“He did not mean to like mock or mimic God,” Vance asserted, “that’s just not who he is.” After the backlash, Trump “took it down,” which Vance read as recognition that “this didn’t come across the right way.”
However, at the time, Trump did not attribute the meme to a misguided joke but said he thought the image depicted him “as a doctor that had to do with the Red Cross,” adding, “only the fake news could come up with that one (Trump as Jesus).”
Christianity provides ‘sense of contentment,’ trust in Divine Providence
Crawford then turned to the July 2024 assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, addressing the uncanny timing of Trump’s well-known head turn at the moment the shot was fired that apparently may have saved his life.
Vance acknowledged one could simply accept a mere physical explanation for this coincidence but called it “a very spiritually impoverished way to look at things.”
“Coincidences like that don’t happen without the hand of Providence,” he asserted. Trump’s first conversation with Vance about his intention to add him to the GOP ticket as the vice-presidential candidate happened that Saturday morning; Trump even floated announcing Vance on stage that day, then decided against doing this in Pennsylvania.
Having been there, and with the prospect of being brought up on stage with Trump, Vance wondered what would have happened “if both of us had lost our lives.”
If the shooter had succeeded, he said, “we would have had real civil strife” and “an illegitimacy to our entire political system.”
In commenting on possible trepidation or fear of assassination, he added, “for me at least being a Christian gives me a certain sense of contentment about these things. It’s fundamentally like, as my grandmother said, if God wants me to be here, I’ll be here. If God wants me to not be here, I won’t be here … It’s all in God’s hands. I’m going to go do my job as long as he gives me the ability to do it.”
Focused on ‘doing as much of God’s work as possible right now,’ not worrying about the future
On the subject of end times, Vance said he has been “fascinated by end times prophecy” since receiving a Bible as a child but that dwelling on dates of when in such monumental events may happen is “probably bad for me spiritually.”
This being the case, the Vice President said, “I think that there are like things about the world that make me feel like not shocked if the Antichrist was walking among us. But, again, I try not to focus too much on it.”
He pointed again to AI: firms holding “a burial ceremony for the old model” while employees cry; chatbot “romantic partners”; a wife using ChatGPT as a marital counselor that “just tells me that I’m right all the time.” That, he said, “sort of short circuits that social part of our brain” and is “kind of satanic.”
Vance’s solution with regard to this topic was practical rather than apocalyptic. While conceding he “wouldn’t be shocked if we are living in the end times,” he said what he is “trying to focus on is doing as much of God’s work as possible right now and if that leads to the end times, OK. And if that leads to us building a better world that thrives and survives for a very long time after I’m gone, that’s great too.”
RELATED:
Everything you need to know about Catholic teaching on the Antichrist
Fr. Ripperger: The Antichrist will ‘present himself as the solution’ to humanity’s problems
Is Trump trying to look like the Antichrist?
‘Antichrist spirit’: Marjorie Taylor Greene slams Trump’s Jesus image as ‘more than blasphemy’