J.D. Vance came out swinging against Kamala Harris on Sunday. While speaking with Fox News’ Shannon Bream, the Republican vice presidential candidate insisted, “Giving Kamala Harris control over inflation policy, Shannon, it’s like giving Jeffrey Epstein control over human trafficking policy. The American people are much smarter than that.”
“They don’t buy the idea that Kamala Harris represents a fresh start,” he continued. “She is more of the same. It is doubling down on the failed policies of the Harris administration to give Kamala Harris a promotion rather than to fire her, which is what I think most Americans are going to do in November.”
The Trump-Vance campaign featured scrutiny recently for using Epstein’s former plane, which many used as an occasion to bring up Trump’s own connections with the notorious sex trafficker while Epstein was still alive.
Vance had attempted to blame the vice president for domestic inflation and added that she hasn’t done anything about the problem “for the past 1,300 days.” His reference to “the failed policies of the Harris administration” appeared to be an attempt to implicate her in any perceived failures of the sitting president, Joe Biden, despite the vice president traditionally not being in a position to exert a significant amount of power.
The GOP vice presidential candidate also insisted that the Trump/Vance ticket is “going to be in the right place come November” and that they are unbothered by poll numbers showing Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz surging ahead.
“We can’t worry about polls, we have to run through the finish line and encourage everybody to get out there and vote. But our message is going to be very simple: If you wanna get back to the peace and prosperity, the rising take-home pay, Donald Trump delivered it once and he can do it again,” Vance argued.
Trump inherited a better economy from his predecessor, President Barack Obama, than Biden did from Trump himself. It’s also true that Trump was at the helm of the United States during the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic, causing serious struggles for the U.S. economy.
Trump claimed that following those months, the economic recovery experienced by the U.S. was “the biggest in the history of our country by almost triple…that’s bigger than any nation” — a statement that proved false when the nation’s recovery was compared to that of the Eurozone as a whole, as well as to Italy and Germany’s own recovery efforts.
Vance also accused “the media” of using “fake polls to drive down Republican turnout and to create dissension and conflict with Republican voters.” He added, “I’m telling you, every single person who’s watching this, the Trump campaign is in a very, very good spot.”
It is unclear which if any specific “fake polls” Vance was speaking about, but he seemed to be repeating a claim Trump made repeatedly while running against Hillary Clinton in 2016. In 2018, a study out of Ohio State University stated that “fake news” may have helped Trump win that election.
The study, which was not peer-reviewed, concluded that 4% of Obama’s supporters from the 2012 election did not vote for Clinton due to misinformation they had read. Those voters “were 3.9 times more likely to defect from the Democratic ticket in 2016 than those who believed none of these false claims, after taking into account all of these other factors,” researchers wrote.
You can watch the interview with J.D. Vance in the video above.