Last week, JD Vance took a break from his childless rants to visit a doughnut shop in Valdosta, Georgia. Presumably the Trump campaign wanted to show how well the vice presidential candidate gets along with normal people, but instead released a viral video that has been compared unfavorably to a notoriously embarrassing episode of . The office.

So what happened? Vance spoke about the incredibly embarrassing visit to the doughnut shop in an interview with NBC News published Wednesday, explaining that his coworkers were to blame:

“I just felt terrible for the woman,” Vance said on the plane Tuesday, referring to the bakery worker. “We went in and there were 20 Secret Service agents and 15 cameras, and she obviously hadn’t been properly warned and she was terrified, right? I just felt terrible for her.”

Vance said he enjoys this type of petty crime, adding that he has made it clear to his staff that such visits will need to be planned more carefully in the future.

“We don’t want scripted events — I don’t want to do three takes to buy Doritos at Sheetz,” Vance said, referring to a recent stop by Harris at a gas station in Pennsylvania. “I like to go out and talk to people, and we want to make sure we do that, but we definitely have to make sure that people are at least OK with being on camera, otherwise we come in and have one person who’s basically having a panic attack because there are 15 cameras pointed in their face.”

On one hand, Vance’s team is certainly partly to blame. They brought him into an empty store where he couldn’t mingle with other customers, apparently didn’t tell the staff they were coming, and didn’t tell their candidate what to order.

Then again, it’s not the employees’ fault that every sentence that came out of Vance’s mouth was bizarre and awkward. He started off with a confusing joke by saying, “The zoo has come to town” (he probably meant “circus”). He then chatted up employees by asking them how long they’d worked at the store and replied, “Okay, fine,” without elaborating. And Vance acted like he’d never ordered a doughnut in his life, asking for “some sprinkles, some of those cinnamon rolls. Just whatever makes sense.”

Vance did manages to express compassion for another human being with his comments to NBC about the bakery worker. Now all he needs is someone to explain to him that people don’t usually like it when leaders blame their mistakes on their subordinates. And it’s an especially dumb move when those employees are the only thing standing between you and another embarrassing viral video.