“This is a threat to democracy,” Vance said to hundreds of cheering supporters at his high school alma mater, who nodded at his attacks and applauded when the vice president called him an unpatriot for not showing enough gratitude to his country.
“She speaks of the history of this country not with gratitude but with condemnation,” he said.
The Harris campaign quickly fired back, pointing to the Trump campaign’s billionaire donors and alluding to Vance’s Silicon Valley ties as a former venture capitalist.
“Such comments are far-fetched coming from J.D. Vance, a radical who has been bought off by Elon Musk and Silicon Valley and who promises to raise taxes on working families and bailouts for corporations and billionaires,” said Joseph Costello, a spokesman for the Harris campaign.
Vance’s approach was striking because critics had warned that he and Trump were a threat to democracy – and it echoed the former president’s past attempts to deflect such criticism by likening Biden to a fascist tyrant.
The attack offered the first glimpse of how Vance is plotting his role in the nomination contest, and Republicans are seeking to use it to drum up support among Republicans and undermine Democrats after weeks of growing anxiety and resentment following Biden’s disastrous performance in the first presidential debate.
Vance, a freshman senator, would be the most inexperienced vice president in decades. But the voters here aren’t worried about whether he can stand up to whoever Democrats choose as their running mate. The enthusiastic Trump supporters said they were more confident than ever that voters would overwhelmingly choose the Republican candidate, a week after Trump was injured at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.
“It doesn’t matter,” Leona Lehder, 71, a retired social worker from New Carlisle, Ohio, said of the unnamed Democratic vice presidential candidate. “Trump and Vance are going to win. Vance is a checkmark for Trump.”
Rader and others praised the senator’s eloquence and predicted he could stand up to any challenger in a debate, and Trump saw Vance’s ability to defend himself in television interviews as a big plus when choosing his running mate.
But outside Middletown High School, local Democrats were buzzing with excitement at the possibility of Harris becoming the presidential nominee. Cleveland Canova, a Democratic candidate in a nearby state congressional district, stood holding a sign that read “Trump Blocks Roe v. Wade” and said Biden’s decision to step down would be an advantage for the party and lower-ranking Democrats like him.
“It was a great source of energy for the whole party,” he said.
Before Vance took the stage, state Sen. George Lang fired up the crowd by saying a “civil war” was on the horizon if Trump loses in November.
“I truly believe that Donald Trump and Butler County’s J.D. Vance are our last chance to save our country,” he said. “Politically, if we lose this, it will take a civil war to save the country, but the country will be saved.”
Lang later released a statement backing away from his comments, saying he “regrets the divisive comments I made during the heat of the moment onstage,” but Harris’ campaign linked them to Trump’s comments and his promises of retaliation if he is re-elected.
“Donald Trump and J.D. Vance have run a campaign that openly sows hatred and promises revenge against their political opponents,” campaign spokesman Amar Moosa said in a statement. “This is a feature, not a flaw, of their campaign and their message to the American people.”
Vance plans to travel extensively and speak in battleground states about his difficult upbringing, growing up in Ohio with a family struggling with poverty and drug addiction, as chronicled in his best-selling book, “Hillbilly Elegy.” Hours after his homecoming speech, Vance was in Radford, Virginia, for an evening rally before several hundred people.
Ahead of the speech, speakers repeatedly mentioned Harris’ name, drawing loud boos. Some criticized her on immigration, inaccurately calling her Biden’s “border czar,” a title Republicans bestowed on her early in Biden’s administration after the president tasked her with addressing the root causes of migration. Harris’ role has long been conflated with her response to the crisis on the southern border, where record numbers of migrants have been crossing the border under Biden.
Vance repeated his criticism to loud cheers and applause. “The border crisis is Kamala Harris’ crisis,” he said.
He also resumed and expanded his line of attack: threats to democracy.
“Democrats cast 14 million votes and instead of electing Kamala Harris, they elected Kamala Harris at the mercy of billionaires, Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi. This is a disgrace and a threat to American democracy. They don’t care about you, because they don’t care who you voted for,” he said.
Several people at the evening gathering at Radford University said they came to see Vance because they didn’t know much about him.
“But I love Trump, I trust him, and now I’m turning my attention to Vance,” said Jennifer Robinson, 42, a health care worker from Dublin, Virginia.
Taryn Bishop, wearing a pink “Make America Great Again” hat, drove nearly two hours from her home in Lynchburg to see the Republican vice presidential nominee in person.
“I know he wasn’t a Trump supporter at first, but I’m a Christian and I believe people can change,” said Bishop, 24, a Navy veteran who works with children with disabilities. “Everyone has the ability to change their way of thinking and realize they might have been wrong before.”
After Vance was named Trump’s running mate last week, Harris called the Ohio senator to urge him to set a date for the debate, to which the Trump campaign responded that a date couldn’t be confirmed until the Democratic nominee was chosen.
“Doing so would be unfair to Gavin Newsom, JB Pritzker, Gretchen Whitmer or whoever Kamala Harris chooses as her running mate,” Brian Hughes, a senior adviser to the Trump campaign, said in a statement.
Vance told the crowd at a rally Monday afternoon that he was excited to take on Democrats but “pissed” that he would no longer be facing Harris. “We were told we were going to get to debate Kamala Harris, and now President Trump is going to get to debate her,” he said, drawing laughter.
