J.D. Vance flung several weak digs at Kamala Harris Tuesday in Big Rapids, Michigan, during another one of his awkward, hostile speeches.
The Ohio senator opened his remarks by blaming the so-called “Harris administration” for a recent revision from the Labor Department, which found that the U.S. had added 818,000 fewer jobs in the year ending in March than initially reported. Employers had added 2.1 million jobs during the previous 12 months, as opposed to the 2.9 million they’d originally counted.
While the significant reduction hardly put a dent in the 14 million jobs Joe Biden has created over the last three years, especially in comparison to net loss of jobs during Donald Trump’s term, Vance called it “the biggest heist in America’s history.”
“You may not have heard this, because our friends in the back, the media, doesn’t like to talk about it,” Vance griped, another hostile remark toward the press, of which Vance has made many .
But there was “one job that is definitely going to vanish,” Vance said , before weirdly promising to send Kamala Harris back where she came from—San Francisco, of course.
As the crowd began to cheer for Trump, Vance gushed that Harris could never get a crowd this good on her own.
“She needs a rockstar to get a crowd like this—we just come out here because we’re patriots and we wanna save this country,” Vance said . The crowd was moderately sized , a huge step up from the empty parking lots Vance typically circuits.
Vance claimed that Harris’s advisers were considering copying Trump’s platform.
“In fact, I’ve heard that for her debate in just a couple of weeks, she’s going to put on a navy suit, a long red tie, and adopt the slogan ‘Make America Great Again,’” Vance joked awkwardly.
“Now, I will confess that in some ways I have a soft heart … in some ways, I feel bad for Kamala Harris,” Vance said , as the crowd booed.
“I’m not sure that this is a woman who knows what she actually believes,” said Vance, a former Never Trump Republican who once compared his own running mate to the leader of the Nazi Party.
From there, Vance’s speech took on a strange, anachronistic framing, as he vaguely referred to some previous administration’s decision to send away manufacturing jobs, and falsely claimed that Harris had supported the reauthorization of NAFTA—and not for the first time .
The reauthorization of NAFTA took place in 1992, when Harris was a young prosecutor, and Vance was just eight years old. Biden, however, had been a senator at the time and had supported the reauthorization of NAFTA, so it’s possible that Vance is trying to use an old barb on a new candidate. In 2020, Harris actually voted against Trump’s United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, which replaced NAFTA. She was part of a group of Democrats who opposed the new rule because it was too similar to the original—which is supposedly tantamount to supporting it.
Vance also claimed some distant administration had opened the border to immigrants in order to gain “millions of voters for Democrat policies, and millions of cheap laborers,” once again pushing the great replacement theory, a conspiracy theory that insists global elites are attempting to replace the white population. Vance wasn’t specific about which administration he was referring to, but it didn’t matter because his winding remarks were about to get personal.
“Now I have lived, and I know a lot of us in this crowd have lived the consequences of these failures. And I saw it very personally,” Vance said. “My parents divorced, my parents began to struggle.”
Vance lauded his mother’s recovery from drug addiction, and then awkwardly chastised her for spoiling his kids “a little bit too much.”
“Mom, no more Pokemon cards,” Vance joked to a silent crowd. “In front of a thousand people, no more Pokemon cards. Kids have got enough.”
This isn’t the first time Vance has made a strange attempt to complain about his kids loving Pokemon. Vance previously said he told his young son to “shut the hell up for 30 seconds about Pikachu” while he tried to speak on the phone to Trump, another strange misstep.
Vance trotted out his worn-out “stolen valor” jabs at Tim Walz, and accused the Minnesota governor of lying about “how his kids were conceived.” Walz has said his kids were conceived through fertility treatments, and they … were conceived through fertility treatments. Vance then turned his attention back to Harris.
“She said there are going to be ‘extremely serious consequences’ for voting for Donald Trump. Kamala, I’ve got two responses to that. First of all, that’s not a very presidential thing to say. Is she the vice president or the vice principal?” Vance joked to the crowd, again not earning a single laugh. “Warning about ‘very serious consequences,’ whining at people for telling a joke instead of trying to persuade them that she should be their president. I’m sick of people like that!”
Again and again, Vance’s blatant hostility seeped through his badly delivered one-liners. While he tried to rely on his charisma to amp up his crowd, Vance sounded like someone complaining that you’re not allowed to give your female coworkers a compliment anymore.
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