Vance remarks on Harris are dangerous, White House says

By Jeff Mason

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The White House said on Tuesday that Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance's comments about Vice President Kamala Harris not having faced an assassination attempt were dangerous.

Vance's Republican running mate, former President Donald Trump, is seeking to best Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, in the Nov. 5 race for the White House.

Trump and Vance have escalated their attacks on Harris and Democrats since the Secret Service foiled what the FBI called an apparent assassination attempt against Trump on Sunday while the former president was golfing in West Palm Beach, Florida.

"The big difference between conservatives and liberals is that ... no one has tried to kill Kamala Harris in the last couple of months and two people now have tried to kill Donald Trump in the last couple of months," Vance, a U.S. senator from Ohio, said. He suggested Democrats "tone down" their criticism.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre suggested Vance's language could put Harris in danger.

"When you make comments like that, all it does is ... opens an opportunity for people to listen to you and potentially take you very seriously, and so it's dangerous to have that type of rhetoric out there," she told reporters on Tuesday.

So-called stochastic terrorism, in which sometimes unstable individuals are inspired to violence by hate speech, online extremism and public figures, played a role in the violent attack on Paul Pelosi, husband of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, terror experts believe.

Jean-Pierre noted that President Joe Biden has called for political rhetoric in the United States to cool down.

"We should not be speaking that way. We should not be saying those things," she said. "We gotta tone it down."

Harris and Biden have argued that Trump poses a threat to U.S. democracy, citing his refusal to accept the results of the 2020 election and his role in urging supporters to go to the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Vance's comment echoes one made by billionaire Elon Musk, who mused in a post on the X social media platform about a lack of assassination attempts against Biden and Harris.

Musk, who supports Trump and owns the platform, formerly known as Twitter, later took the post down. The Secret Service, which is charged with protecting presidents and other U.S. officials, said it was aware that he had written it.

(Reporting by Jeff Mason in Washington; Additional reporting by Brendan O'Brien in Chicago; Editing by Mark Porter, Heather Timmons and Deepa Babington)