As part of a series of an effort to provide counterprogramming to a swing state tour by Vice President Kamala Harris and her new running mate Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Ohio Sen. JD Vance followed the pair to Eau Claire, Wis., on Wednesday to lay out his critiques of the Democratic ticket and sell himself and former President Donald Trump to voters.
His plane, dubbed "Trump Force Two," landed at the same airstrip as Harris’ Air Force Two on Wednesday afternoon, taxiing as Harris and Walz met with a group of Girl Scouts. Vance approached the vice president’s plane, but she and Walz had already departed for a rally with Bon Iver and an estimated 12,000 supporters.
"Hopefully it's going to be my plane in a few months,” Vance remarked to the press, before needling Harris for infrequently taking press questions and for having not yet sat down for interviews since President Joe Biden ended his presidential campaign and she started her own. “It’d be good for the American people and I think it’d be good for you all if she ran a real campaign instead of one from a basement with a teleprompter.”
Vance took plenty of press questions on Wednesday, first in Michigan in the morning — Harris and Walz headed to the state for another rally on Wednesday night — and again in Wisconsin in the afternoon. He also held a press conference in Philadelphia ahead of Harris and Walz’s first rally as a ticket on Tuesday night and had planned remarks on Thursday in North Carolina, where Harris and Walz also had a campaign event scheduled for that day. But both campaigns’ North Carolina events were canceled due to the arrival of Tropical Storm Debby. Harris will return to Michigan and then travel to Arizona, instead.
Speaking in Wisconsin at a facility for aviation parts supplier Wollard International, Vance was asked by a local reporter “why would people in Wisconsin want to have a beer with you?”
“Well, I guess… they'd want to have a beer with me because I actually do like to drink beer and I probably like to drink beer a little bit too much, but that's okay. I'm sure the media won't give me too much crap over that,” Vance said. “The reason I'm doing this, and the reason I think Donald Trump is doing this, and I think the media often slanders him, but I've never met a guy who likes normal people more than Donald Trump.”
Vance then recounted a meeting with Trump two days before he was officially announced as the former president’s running mate. Trump was working on his decision and he told Vance he was talking to everyone in his life, including the gardener at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.
“I said, ‘well, sir, what did the Mar-a-Lago gardener say?’ Right? ‘This bears directly on my life. I’m very curious here,’” Vance joked, though he never said if Trump told him what the gardener had said.
Instead, he continued to answer the question by saying “I like the people of this country,” including people like those who work in the factory he was speaking from.
“I think that to lead this country, you should feel some gratitude for it, and you should feel some admiration for the people who actually make the country run,” Vance said. “And I will say sometimes I hear Kamala Harris, and she talks about the history of this country, and she likes to put it down a little bit. I don't know that she actually admires the people who work in this factory. I hope that she does, but I don't really see that gratitude. I don't really hear that gratitude when she speaks.”
A few miles away, Harris spoke to the crowd in Eau Claire about patriotism.
“So basically, I think it all comes down to this. We're all here because we love our country, we love our country, we love our country. And I do believe it is the highest form of patriotism to fight for the ideals of our country. And that's how we preserve the promise of America,” Harris said. “Because after all, the promise of America is what makes it possible, by the way, for Gov. Walz and me to stand on this stage today. Just think about it. Two middle class kids. One, a daughter of Oakland, Calif., who was raised by a working mother and had a summer job at Mcdonald's, the other, a son of the Nebraska plains who grew up working on a farm. Think about that. Only in America is it possible for them together to make it all the way together to the White House.”
Earlier in Michigan, Vance leveled attacks on Harris for the Biden administration’s border policies, falsely claiming the Democratic administration has opened up the U.S.-Mexico border and suspended deportations of violent criminals.
“I cannot imagine having a government that cares so little about you that they're letting people who come into our communities get deported and come back in and then they rape our children,” Vance said in Shelby Township, Mich., just outside of Detroit. “That is a policy choice of Kamala Harris to suspend deportations and let somebody like that into our community.”
“Kamala Harris is making it easier for people to get out of jail after they commit heinous crimes with children. It's despicable,” Vance claimed, citing Prop 57, a law approved by California voters in 2016, when Harris was the state’s attorney general. It gave the state’s parole board the power to review the prison sentences of nonviolent offenders.
Due to California’s narrow definition of violent crime, the proposition caused outcry over concerns it would allow leniency for prisoners convicted of sex crimes. But, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, it does not apply to inmates “convicted of a sexual offense that currently requires or will require registration as a sex offender under the Sex Offender Registration Act.”
Vance and Trump’s proposals to reduce crime by migrants, who commit crimes at lower levels than U.S. citizens, is to deport millions of undocumented people from the country in what would be the largest deportation operation in American history.
While in Michigan, a local TV news reporter asked Vance about criticisms that he can be “too serious, too angry, sometimes” and what makes the Ohio senator smile.
“Well, I smile at a lot of things, including bogus questions from the media, man,” Vance said, laughing. “I think if you watch, if you watch a full speech that I give, I actually, I’m having a good time out here and I'm enjoying this.”
“But look, sometimes you got to take the good with the bad. And right now, I am angry about what Kamala Harris has done to this country and done to the American southern border,” he continued. “I think most Americans can joke around, but also be pissed off about the direction of this country.”