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A dirty secret about Senator JD Vance that probably would not endear him to the MAGA faithful is that on Capitol Hill, Donald Trump’s running mate is friendly to reporters of all stripes.
Indeed, the bestselling author is more than comfortable talking to the press and frequently lets reporters ride the elevator with him on his way to votes. He’s also shown himself willing to go on the Sunday shows — most recently to defend Trump and his lie about pets being eaten by Haitian migrants.
But on the campaign trail as Trump’s top surrogate, the Ohio senator does something different. During his rally at Union Station in Raleigh, North Carolina, a crucial swing state, Vance dinged his boss’s opponent Kamala Harris for only doing two sitdown interviews since she became the Democratic nominee for president.
“After I give you some remarks here today, I'll take as many questions as we have time for because I happen to believe that if you want to be the American people's president, you ought not be afraid of a friendly American media,” he told supporters, to applause.
Typically, when a candidate takes questions, it’s in the form of a gaggle after the rally on the side of the stage or backstage. But instead of holding court with reporters after the rally, Vance makes journalists’ questions part of his events.
The point of this is two-fold: one, it allows for Vance to, as he said, show he is open and willing to talk to the press; and two, it enables him to show Trump supporters that he’s willing to joust with the horde that his boss has called the “fake news” or the “enemy of the people.”
Not surprisingly, Vance mixed it up when talking about immigration on Wednesday, specifically when it came to the lie that he spread about Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio. He pushed back on the idea that Haitian migrants are in the country legally under Temporary Protected Status and humanitarian parole.
“This is a media and Kamala Harris fact-check that I want to clarify and clear up right now,” he said. “Well, if Kamala Harris waves the wand illegally and says these people are now here legally, I’m still going call them an illegal alien. An illegal action from Kamala Harris does not make an alien legal.”
Vance then called accusations of racism levied against him “disgraceful”. In fact, he used the word “disgraceful” five separate times.
“She's going to say, on the one hand, we're going to let in millions of illegal aliens to make your housing costs higher, to make your hospitals overwhelmed, to make your local schools impossible for your children to learn,” he said. “She's going to do that. And on the other hand, if you dare complain about it, you are a racist. Kamala Harris, I think that’s disgraceful.”
This received some of the biggest applause from the audience.
Vance consistently polls lower than Harris. He also polls lower than Trump and lower than Harris’s running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz. But Vance’s campaign event at Union Station had so many people in line that Secret Service had to turn people away for security reasons.
“We know — we kind of follow it, so we know — what his policy positions are. But hearing him challenged, if you will, with the question and being able to answer it with a coherent answer makes a lot of sense,” Eileen McIntyre from Wake Forest told The Independent. McIntyre also noted how the state’s Governor, Mike DeWine, had said that bomb threats in Springfield seemed to have come from overseas.
“When the bomb threats were from overseas, they weren't even American, and then all of the stuff about the immigrants,” she said. “I mean, we're a nation of immigrants — every one of us believes that that doesn't get said enough. We all want legal immigration, not illegal immigration — and they're taking over, running roughshod over people's communities.”
Diane Warner, who lives in Raleigh, said that she loved Vance’s mentioning of migrants, saying she has family in Ohio.
“There has been instances, yes, of what's going on,” she told The Independent, when asked about the pet-eating claims.
Vance also used his gaggle with reporters to push back publicly when Lucille Sherman of Axios’s Raleigh branch asked how Trump’s plan to deport millions of migrants would affect the price of food. Hog-farming, harvesting and construction in the state relies heavily on migrants who came to the United States illegally.
“Certainly I reject the idea that the only way to have a productive farm economy is to allow 25 million illegal aliens into this country,” he said, to applause.
But when Vivian Salama at The Wall Street Journal asked Vance about the Federal Reserve cutting interest rates, the crowd booed.
“My reaction is a half a point is nothing compared to what American families have been dealing with,” Vance said in response, which led to huge applause. “It's better than nothing, but again, the reason why we had sky-high inflation, the reason why we had high interest rates is because Kamala Harris cast a deciding vote on the Inflation Explosion Act [Vance’s play on the Inflation Reduction Act’s name], and then she tried to do everything she could to shut down a government entity.”
Of course, having a back-and-forth with reporters in a friendly audience is vastly different from Vance’s next big challenge: his debate with Walz at the beginning of next month.
But his confrontation with the press shows why Trump picked him. In Vance, the base sees one of their own, and someone willing to do battle for their values.
