Vice President JD Vance said in a podcast released Tuesday that if a 2024 assassination attempt had killed Donald Trump, he would have always wondered if it was part of a conspiracy and might not have accepted even another Republican as the next president.

Vance made the statement during a conversation with Christian podcaster Bryce Crawford.

The vice president, who recently released a book detailing his own journey to Catholicism, also defended President Trump for posting an image of himself as Jesus and mused about whether artificial intelligence was a sign of the end times.