JD Vance says if Donald Trump had died in 2024 assassination bid he may have thought it was conspiracy

JD Vance says if Donald Trump had been killed in the 2024 assassination attempt he may have thought it was a conspiracy.

The US vice president, 42, said he would have "assumed very dark forces had taken out" Mr Trump, who at the time was running for the presidency.

And he added he may not have accepted even another Republican as the next president, stating: "There would have just been an illegitimacy to our entire political system."

Mr Trump, 80, survived the assassination bid during a Republican rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July 2024 when a bullet grazed his ear and a supporter was killed.

The gunman Thomas Crooks, who had got on a nearby rooftop with ​a direct line of sight to Mr Trump, opened fire while he was speaking on stage.

Crooks, 20, was shot and killed by law enforcement at the event.

Mr Vance said many Trump supporters would have assumed a conspiracy had robbed them of their chosen president, and he said he would have also had those thoughts "in the back of my mind".

"I would have assumed very dark forces had taken out Donald Trump, right as he was about to come back into the White House," Mr Vance said.

Speaking to Christian podcaster Bryce Crawford, the vice president also cited artificial intelligence (AI) during a discussion about "end times".

"End times", along with "end of days" or " last days", is a phrase sometimes used in religious contexts to refer to the period before the arrival on earth of a messiah and the last judgement, during which tumultuous events are prophesied to occur.

Mr Crawford asked Mr Vance about his interest in the "end times", which the vice president laughingly said had been more of an obsession in his youth during the late 1990s, when people were talking about the possibility as the millennium loomed.

"There are... things about the world that make me feel... not shocked if the antichrist was walking among us, but, again, I try not to focus too much on it," Mr Vance said.

He cited "IT companies" and the use of AI as a substitute for human interaction as things that concern him.

"I think that's kind of satanic," Mr Crawford said, when Mr Vance recalled the story of one acquaintance using AI as a marriage counsellor.

"Yeah, when you completely divorce the human from the social element that God made us for, OK that's very, that's very bad," Mr Vance said.

It comes amid a midterm election landscape which his been transformed by snowballing opposition to tech firm data centres, which are in construction across the United States, and which Mr Trump has supported.

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Mr Vance also defended Mr Trump for posting on social media earlier this year an AI-generated image of himself as Jesus, which Mr Crawford said had offended him.

The US president initially claimed he believed the image was of him as a doctor, then took down the post amid widespread criticism, including from some of his own supporters.

Mr Vance said: "He did not mean to, like, mock or mimic God, that's just not who he is."

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