JD Vance discusses end times, AI, and defends Trump's AI-generated Jesus image

JD Vance has said he is “doing as much of God’s work as possible” and that he is OK “if that leads to the end times”, which he says “are coming”.

The US vice-president made the comments during a Monday podcast interview with Bryce Crawford, a 22-year-old evangelical host with over a million YouTube followers and videos featuring sensationalist headlines including “Preaching the gospel in Chicago’s deadliest neighborhood” and “Debating a ‘gay’ pastor”.

Speaking about the Christian prophetic notion that the world as humanity knows it will end one day, Vance said: “Do I think we are in the end times? I don’t know.

“While I’m fascinated by it, I think that focusing on it too much can be very bad,” he said, adding that if his work “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”.

Vance, who published a spiritual memoir earlier this summer about his conversion to Catholicism, said: “I think you got to just kinda try and have an attitude of: the end times may be coming, in fact they are coming, it’s just a question of whether they’re coming thousands of years down the road, or a few months down the road.”

He said: “I think there are things about the world that make me feel, like, not shocked if the antichrist was walking among us.”

Vance pointed to artificial intelligence, using the example of an acquaintance who uses AI as a marriage counselor, which he described as “kind of satanic”. He said: “When you completely divorce the human from the social element that God made us for … that’s very bad.”

In response to a question about whether he had ever been in a room that was “spiritually dark”, Vance said he had “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’ll feel some darkness about it”.

“It sets off every spiritual alarm bell in my body,” he added.

Vance also defended Donald Trump’s controversial depiction of himself as Jesus in an AI-generated photo, subsequently deleted, that the president posted earlier this year, which Crawford said “made me upset”.

“The president didn’t mean any offense. Obviously, he loves Christians … Did Donald Trump mean to post a meme of himself as God? No. The president has a good sense of humor. He did not mean to mock or mimic God. That’s just not who he is,” Vance said, adding that Trump is “a backslapper” and “a bit of a ball buster”.

Following outrage from Christian supporters, Trump deleted the photo and insisted that the photo was “supposed to be me as a doctor making people feel better”.