U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance speaks at a Grand Rapids rally for former President Donald Trump, July 20, 2024 | Lucy Valeski
PITTSBURGH — U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), the GOP vice presidential candidate, said during a mid-day rally in Pittsburgh on Thursday that the Trump administration would not use the military to go after people who oppose them.
Former President Donald Trump said in a Sunday interview on Fox News that “radical left lunatics” could be “very easily handled, if necessary, by the National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military,” and referred to an “enemy from within.”
Trump’s Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, played a video of Trump’s remarks at an Erie rally on Monday, and said a second Trump term would be “dangerous.”
On Thursday, Vance seemed to walk back Trump’s comments or at least, sought to recast them. Asked whether the military would be used, Vance said “Oh of course not,” adding “the media picks up on this question, when he makes this observation that we’ve also got to have law and order in our own country too, because this is an important issue.”
“The media loves to talk about January the sixth, and, of course, January the sixth of 2021, if you will, if you committed acts of violence, then you should be prosecuted for them. Everybody believes that.” A mob of Trump supporters violently breached the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, delaying Congress from certifying the 2020 presidential election results. More than 1,500 defendants have been charged with crimes.
Vance pointed to unrest in U.S. cities during the summer of 2020 after a Minneapolis police officer murdered George Floyd.
“What President Trump has said quite directly is that if that ever happens again, if you ever have people who think that they can not just exercise their First Amendment right, but loot and riot and burn down American cities, we are going to go after them, and we’re going to go after them hard,” Vance added.
Vance repeated some of his previously debunked talking points about undocumented immigrants in Ohio, Charleroi, Pa. and Aurora, Colorado “making it unsafe in American cities.” And he mocked Harris’ appearance on the daytime chat show The View.
He also referenced the recent decisions by major labor unions not to endorse either presidential candidate, widely viewed as a blow to Harris. The International Brotherhood of Teamsters has endorsed a Democrat in every election dating back to 2000. An internal survey found rank-and-file Teamsters preferred Trump over Harris 59.6% to 34%.
Vance said Thursday if his grandparents were alive today “they would be doing what a lot of other union Democrats are doing, which is recognizing that the Democratic Party of Kamala Harris has left them behind and they are welcome in the Republican Party of Donald J. Trump,” he said.
Dozens of Teamsters locals in the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Nevada and Michigan have said they would back Harris, including Teamsters Local 623 in Philadelphia and Teamsters Joint Council 40, which represents locals in western Pennsylvania and northern West Virginia
In response to a question about mail-in voting, Vance said he didn’t “prefer” mail-in voting, something Trump has railed against as “corrupt” until recently, when he’s encouraged people at his rallies to vote by mail if they need to.
“I don’t love that we’ve gotten away from just having an election day where everybody casts the same ballot, everybody casts it on the same day,” Vance said Thursday. “ But again, the people of Pennsylvania, through their elected legislature, through the governor, have changed how this works. And so I’m not saying that I prefer mail in voting. I’m saying that mail in voting is now here, so let’s deal with that reality and make sure our voices count just as much as the other side.”
Pittsburgh Mayor Ed Gainey, a Democrat, offered a rebuttal to Vance’s Thursday rally on a video call with reporters, pointing to Trump’s term as president. “Instead of giving hard working families a leg up, he handed out massive tax cuts to the rich, and he stuck the rest of us with the bill,” Gainey said. “Pittsburgh workers and families know that a Trump-Vance administration would even be worse.”
The Trump and Harris campaigns have ramped up appearances in Pennsylvania as the election heads into the final stretch. Its 19 electoral votes are a must-win for either candidate. The latest polls show the candidates in a virtual tie in the Keystone State.
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