“That’s a threat to democracy,” Vance said to the cheers of hundreds of supporters gathered at his alma mater high school. His audience nodded along with his attacks, applauding when he called the vice president unpatriotic because she hadn’t expressed enough gratitude for the country.
“She talks about the history of this country, not with appreciation but with condemnation,” he said.
The Harris team quickly retorted by pointing to the Trump campaign’s billionaire donors and hinting at Vance’s connections to Silicon Valley as a former venture capitalist.
“That’s rich coming from extremist JD Vance, who is bought and paid for by Elon Musk and Silicon Valley and has promised to raise taxes on working families and give handouts to corporations and billionaires,” said Harris campaign spokesman Joseph Costello.
Vance’s approach was striking because detractors have warned that he and Trump present threats to democracy. It mirrored the former president’s past attempts to deflect such criticism by comparing Biden to a fascist tyrant.
The attacks offered the first glimpse of Vance workshopping his role on the ticket, to be deployed by the GOP to appeal to Republican voters and disparage the Democratic Party given its weeks of hand-wringing and rancor after Biden’s disastrous performance in the first presidential debate.
Vance, a freshman senator, would be the least experienced vice president in decades if elected. But voters in attendance here were unconcerned about his ability to take on whomever the Democrats choose as their vice-presidential candidate. Die-hard Trump fans in attendance said they were confident now more than ever, a week after Trump was wounded at a rally in Butler, Pa., that the electorate would overwhelmingly choose the Republican ticket.
“It doesn’t matter,” retired social worker Leona Rader, 71, of New Carlisle, Ohio, said of Democrats’ unknown vice-presidential candidate. “Trump and Vance are going to win. Vance is a check mark for Trump.”
Rader and others remarked on the senator’s eloquence and predicted he could face off against any potential challenge in a debate. In his deliberations for his running mate, Trump considered Vance’s ability to defend him in TV interviews a major plus.
Yet outside Middletown High School, local Democrats were abuzz with excitement for Harris as their likely presidential candidate. Cleveland Canova, the Democratic candidate for a nearby statehouse seat, stood with a sign reading “TRUMP KILLED ROE V WADE” and said Biden’s decision to step aside will likely help the party and other down-ballot Democrats like him.
“It was a big energy boost for the whole party,” he said.
Before Vance took the stage, state Sen. George Lang riled up the audience with talk of an impending “civil war” should Trump lose in November.
“I believe wholeheartedly Donald Trump and Butler County’s J.D. Vance are the last chance to save our country,” he said. “Politically, I’m afraid if we lose this one, it’s going to take a civil war to save the country — and it will be saved.”
Lang later issued a statement walking back his comments: “I regret the divisive remarks I made in the excitement of the moment on stage.” The Harris campaign, however, tied them to remarks Trump has made, including his promise of retribution if reelected.
“Donald Trump and JD Vance are running a campaign openly sowing hatred and promising revenge against their political opponents,” campaign spokesperson Ammar Moussa said in a statement. “It’s a feature, not a bug, of their campaign and message to the American people.”
Vance is expected to travel extensively, speaking in battleground states about his hardscrabble background growing up in Ohio with family members who suffered from poverty and drug addiction, as he documented in his bestseller “Hillbilly Elegy.” Within hours of his homecoming appearance, Vance was in Radford, Va., for an evening rally before several hundred attendees.
In the lead-up to his remarks, speakers repeatedly mentioned Harris by name — prompting loud boos. Several blasted her on immigration, inaccurately calling her Biden’s “border czar,” a title Republicans bestowed after the president tasked her with tackling the root causes of migration early in his administration. The role has long been conflated with dealing with the country’s southern border amid a historic number of migrant crossings there under the Biden administration.
Vance repeated the criticism to loud cheers and applause. “The border crisis is a Kamala Harris crisis,” he said.
He also re-upped and expanded his threat-to-democracy line of attack.
“Democrats are the ones who have dropped 14 million ballots and not elect Kamala Harris but select Kamala Harris with a bunch of billionaires and Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi making the decision,” he said. “It’s disgraceful, and that’s the threat to American democracy. They don’t give a damn about you because they don’t give a damn about who you voted for.”
Several attendees at the evening rally, held at Radford University, said they came to see Vance because they didn’t know much about him.
“But I absolutely love Trump, so I trust him and now I’m watching Vance,” said health care worker Jennifer Robinson, 42, of Dublin, Va.
Taryn Bishop, sporting a pink Make America Great Again hat, drove almost two hours from her home in Lynchburg because she wanted a firsthand look at the Republicans’ nominee for vice president.
“I know that he wasn’t initially a Trump supporter. But I am a Christian, I believe people can change,” said Bishop, 24, a Navy veteran who works with children with special needs. “Everyone has the ability to change their mindset and realize they may have been wrong before.”
After Vance was tapped as Trump’s running mate last week, Harris called the Ohio lawmaker and encouraged him to pick a date for their debate. The Trump campaign responded that it couldn’t lock in a date until the Democratic ticket is set.
“To do so would be unfair to Gavin Newsom, J.B. Pritzker, Gretchen Whitmer, or whoever Kamala Harris picks as her running mate,” Trump campaign senior adviser Brian Hughes said in a statement.
Vance told the crowd at his afternoon rally Monday that he was excited to take on Democrats, though “pissed off” that he now couldn’t face off against Harris. “I was told I was going to get to debate Kamala Harris,” he said, prompting laughter, and now President Trump’s going to get to debate her.”
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