At his campaign rally in the swing state of Michigan on Tuesday, Ohio Senator JD Vance played the role of the Trump campaign’s attack dog, attacking Vice President Kamala Harris and claiming she is helping China “destroy and replace our auto industry from within.”
In his remarks at a horse farm in Big Rapids, Michigan, he blamed Harris for much of the U.S. economic problems. But the Harris team rejected Vance’s arguments, boasting about the Biden administration’s economic record and claiming the Republican vice presidential candidate was misrepresenting Harris’ policies.
“It’s not just causing high prices. It’s undoing the incredible work that Donald Trump has done to rebuild American manufacturing,” Vance said from behind the bulletproof glass that has been used at outdoor campaign events since Trump was shot at a Pennsylvania rally in July. “The message from this crowd and this state of Michigan is: You had your chance, you failed, and we’re not giving you a promotion, and Donald J. Trump is coming back to clean up your mess.”
In a statement before the speech, a Harris campaign spokesman said Vance would “undoubtedly lie, gaslight and try to run away from the truth about what a Trump-Vance administration would do to the middle class.”
Vance blamed Harris for higher food prices, housing prices and rents. Harris’ campaign team responded that “Trump was the worst jobs president in modern American history – he was crippling the labor market even before the pandemic.” Moussa cited an analysis by Moody’s Analytics that Trump’s economic plan would trigger “a recession starting in mid-2025” and create an economy in which households are “financially worse off.”
“Ask yourself, are you better off than you were four years ago? The only person in America who could answer that question with a ‘yes’ is probably Kamala Harris herself. She got no votes for the presidency and had to give up her election, and then she got no votes for the presidency and became the Democratic nominee – all without lifting a finger,” Vance said. “No wonder Kamala is so happy. And now we forget the fact that Americans can’t afford food. Kamala got her promotion.”
Touring swing states this week – with stops in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania planned for Wednesday – Vance is wading into a local issue in Michigan to target the Trump campaign against Chinese companies that he says Harris is “helping” to the detriment of American businesses.
Big Rapids is near a multi-billion dollar electric vehicle battery factory planned by Chinese company Gotion. In recent years, Michigan Republicans have allied themselves with local opposition to the factory, and a legal battle is currently playing out in court. Among the locals opposed to the factory is real estate agent Lori Black, the owner of the horse farm where Vance spoke on Tuesday.
Trump spoke out against the Gotion plant in a social media post last week, writing that he was “100 percent AGAINST” it and that it would “push the people of Michigan under the thumb of the Chinese Communist Party in Beijing.”
“Kamala Harris doesn’t just want to allow the Chinese Communist Party to build factories on American soil. She wants to pay them to do it with our tax dollars,” Vance said Tuesday. “Now Democrats in this state, including Kamala Harris, want to give them hundreds of millions of dollars to the same companies that undercut auto workers in Michigan. What a disaster, right?”
Moussa preempted that point by pointing to tariffs on Chinese-made electric vehicles imposed by the Biden administration and the Treasury Department’s efforts to exclude Chinese companies from major federal spending bills passed under President Joe Biden. Moussa also cited a quote from GM board member and former Tesla executive Jon McNeill, who told CNBC in May that Trump’s alleged plans to eliminate tax breaks for electric vehicles “risk losing auto manufacturing market share to China.”
“This November, voters will face a stark choice between a Park Avenue millionaire who has never done an honest job and a tough, middle-class prosecutor who has spent her career fighting for working people. The contrast couldn’t be clearer,” Harris’ spokeswoman said in a separate statement Tuesday.
Vance’s mother, Beverly Aikins, was also present for his speech. The Ohio senator used Aikins’ story of drug addiction, which played a central role in Vance’s best-selling 2016 memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” to attack Harris. She claimed that “the formula of Kamala Harris and her minions” involves opening “our border to millions of illegal immigrants and into this vacuum, into this vacuum of unemployment, drugs and a lot of cheap labor.” Aikins will be 10 years sober in January 2025, Vance said earlier this year.
“I’ve experienced the consequences of those failures myself, and I know many of us in this group have, and I’ve seen it very personally,” Vance said. “My mother, God bless her, found comfort in the prescription painkillers that many children and many adults became addicted to, and then eventually moved on to harder stuff.”
“I’m very proud of my friends and I can tell you that not only did my mom get a second chance, but she’s here with us today,” he added, then called her “the best grandmother my kids could ask for” and joked that she bought too many Pokemon cards for her grandchildren.
After his speech, Vance visited a nearby A&W restaurant and bought root beer floats for his supporters.
Trump lost Michigan to Biden by about three percentage points in 2020 after a narrow victory there in 2016. Recent polls since Harris entered the race show Harris ahead by about two to three percentage points, according to poll averages from The New York Times and FiveThirtyEight. Trump plans to visit the state on Thursday, and Harris will travel to Detroit next week on Labor Day, her sixth visit to Michigan in 2024.
