Sen. J.D. Vance is getting the new guy treatment.

His first two weeks as Republicans’ vice presidential nominee have been filled with negative news coverage and sometimes outright false headlines as he faces the full onslaught of the national political spotlight.

His past withering criticism of former President Donald Trump has been stacked up against his more recent fawning views. His comments on abortion and families have gotten renewed attention. And he’s had to fend off phony rumors he wrote about having sex with a sofa — all part of an effort by Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign to label him “weird.”

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At a campaign stop Tuesday in Nevada, Mr. Vance hit back at the media, accusing the nation’s fourth estate of covering up President Biden’s “mental incapacity and incompetence” and “gaslighting us on Kamala Harris’s record and achievement.”

“The same media that told us for three and a half years that told us Joe Biden was Albert Einstein is trying to tell us Kamala Harris is Abramah Lincoln,” Mr. Vance said, before deriding her as a dangerous San Francisco liberal who owns Mr. Biden’s failures.  “We are not going to listen to the media’s lies any longer.”

The thrashing of Mr. Vance would look all too familiar to the likes of then-Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin in 2008, or then-Sen. Dan Quayle in 1988, as they quickly became fodder for jokes and insults seemingly stemming from their lack of D.C. chops.

Larry Sabato, head of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, contrasted it with the way more seasoned hands — such as Joe Biden, Paul Ryan and Dick Cheney — get a “shrug of the shoulders” when they are picked as vice presidential nominees.

“The assumption, often incorrect, is that we already know what we need to know about a prominent D.C. personage,” Mr. Sabato said.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said Republican picks suffer more than Democratic ones.

“The difference is parties,” Mr. Gingrich told The Washington Times. “If you are Dan Quayle, you get one kind of treatment, and if you are a Democrat, you get a different treatment. It is that simple.”

Mr. Vance, 39, has less than two years of D.C. experience but is proving to be particularly fertile ground for the press and Democratic opposition researchers.

Much of what the powerbrokers in Washington and the media knew about him before he ran for office was built off the fiery criticism he aimed at Mr. Trump before the 2016 election while on tour for his best-selling memoir “Hillbilly Elegy” in which he criticized Mr. Trump ahead of the 2016 election.

“So it is an astounding irony that Trump picked Vance to be his running mate,” Mr. Sabato said. “The fact that the two impressions of Vance were so contradictory prompted journalists to dig deeper, producing much of the material we’ve seen in the past week or ten days.”

It doesn’t help Mr. Vance that he’s been so prolific a writer and commenter and, as a Millennial in the internet age, it’s all easy to find.

Democrats honed in on remarks he made in 2021 about the Democratic Party being taken over by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”

Mr. Trump picked Mr. Vance after a lengthy process that saw the former president revel in the public attention, even as he kept everyone — including his aides — in the dark about which direction he was going.

He named Mr. Vance the day the Republican National Convention convened and delegates approved the nomination hours after the announcement.

Stuart Stevens, a top advisor to Mitt Romney’s 2012 GOP presidential campaign, said the Trump world invited the mess it’s now facing.

“I don’t think it has anything to do with inside or outside D.C.,” he said. “Dan Quayle was a well-known Congressman and senator. He was savaged from the launch. Sarah Palin was a wildly successful launch, soared to a 20-plus positive rating, and then collapsed because she was who she was.”

Mr. Stevens said Mr. Vance does not seem to understand that “his unlikeable rhetoric and positions are why he is so unlikable.”

Mr. Gingrich disagreed, saying Mr. Vance’s “astonishing” biography “bears no resemblance to the caricature the news media would like to create.”

“He did not graduate summa cum laude in two years [at Ohio State University] and then go to Yale Law School because he is stupid, and he didn’t marry a woman who is as complex and interesting as Usha because he is stupid,” Mr. Gingrich said. “So you can’t attack him for being racist. He is married to an Indian American, and they can’t attack him as stupid because he’s brilliant.”

“You probably have the dumbest presidential candidate we have ever had in Kamala, pretending that J.D. Vance is dumb,” he said.