Recent reporting by The Onion and several lesser media outlets finds growing tensions between President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, continuing a historical trend of the nation’s leader often being at odds with their second-in-command. The Onion looks at the most contentious relationships between a president and vice president in U.S. history.
John F. Kennedy / Lyndon B. Johnson: Though publicly cordial, Johnson was humiliated by JFK’s frequent taunts that he didn’t have the guts to arrange the assassination of a president in his home state and be sworn into office by a family friend in a hurried transfer of power.
Ronald Reagan / George H.W. Bush: Frequently got into heated debates over who harbored more contempt for the nation’s poor.
Bill Clinton / Al Gore: A simple disagreement about the function of White House interns got between these once close friends.
Dwight D. Eisenhower / Richard M. Nixon: The relationship was strained from the beginning when Nixon began talking about all the crimes he’d accomplish if he were president.
Dick Cheney / George W. Bush: It was an open secret that President Cheney had little respect for his running mate.
Millard Fillmore: The thirteenth president didn’t have a VP but makes the list because he was racked with self-hatred.
James Polk / George Dallas: Polk was the messy one and Dallas was the neat freak.
George H.W. Bush / Dan Quayle: Disastrous wife-swapping experiment.
John Adams / Thomas Jefferson: One of them shot the other, or was that, maybe that was, no, yeah, one of them shot the other one.