Ohio Republican Sen. J.D. Vance took verbal aim at criticism from Vice President Kamala Harris during a raucous rally in trending-purple Minnesota on Saturday. Shortly after Trump’s assassination attempt in Butler, Pa., earlier this month, Harris called Vance’s loyalty to the country into question, claiming he’d be “loyal only to Trump, not to our country,” which did not sit well with the running mate and former Marine.
“In recent days, they’ve been trying to portray themselves as the party of unity,” she said. “If you claim to stand for unity, you need to do more than just use the word. You cannot claim you stand for unity if you are pushing an agenda that deprives whole groups of Americans of basic freedoms, opportunity and dignity.” While addressing the large crowd of Trump supporters in St. Cloud on Saturday, Vance seized the opportunity to reply to the vice president’s remarks.
“I saw the other day Kamala Harris question my loyalty to this country. That’s the word she used, loyalty,” Vance told the crowd. “And it’s an interesting word, Semper-Fi, loyalty, because there is no greater sign of disloyalty to our country than what Kamala Harris has done at our southern border.”
“I served in the United States Marine Corps,” Vance stated, drawing loud cheers from the crowd. He then added: “I went to Iraq for this country. I built a business for this country. And my running mate took a bullet for this country. So my question to Kamala Harris is, what the hell have you done to question our loyalty to the United States of America?”
Trump 2024 senior campaign advisor Chris LaCivita criticized the left’s recent attacks on Vance, stating that critics are being “absolutely absurd” for their interpretation of his comments about “childless cat ladies” in the Democratic Party. On an episode of Fox News host Brian Kilmeade’s daily radio program, “The Brian Kilmeade Show,” LaCivita stated that the uproar over Vance’s comments, which were made during an interview three years ago, was blown out of proportion. He clarified to the radio host that the Trump/Vance campaign is not against “childless women,” as the liberal media is claiming.
“The fact of the matter is, it’s been blatantly taken out of context,” the Trump advisor said during the radio segment that aired on Friday. During the 2021 interview, Vance originally stated, “We are effectively run in this country, via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they wanna make the rest of the country miserable, too.” He specifically named Vice President Harris and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., as part of that group.
This week, the Harris campaign, along with several other well-known liberals, including Hillary Clinton and actress Jennifer Aniston, among others, criticized Vance, accusing him of diminishing the value of women who do not have children or cannot have them under normal circumstances. LaCivita responded to the latest attack on Vance, arguing that his words were being exaggerated and suggesting that they are being misinterpreted maliciously.
The senior Trump adviser also turned the media’s attacks on Vance here against them. “As a matter of fact, there was a discussion today, where the follow-up *– the Democrat follow-up attack — is that JD Vance believes that only people with children should get certain tax breaks. Well, that’s called the childcare tax credit,” he continued, noting, “So now we have the Democrat Party and the Kamala Harris campaign on record as opposing something that has been law for years which is, you know, the childcare tax credit.”
“Look, we expect this kind of thing. You know, they drag out their has-been actresses of Jennifer Aniston to come out and make these attacks,” LaCivita continued. “We’re about fighting for the working women of the United States, the forgotten people of the middle class. JD Vance is the perfect representation of that. They know it. It scares the hell out of them… They’re going to peddle in fiction and we’re going to have to deal with it as we go forward.”