JD Vance hit back at those who say Donald Trump is a fascist, accusing Kamala Harris and her allies of disrespecting second world war veterans as he campaigned on Tuesday in one of the most hotly contested regions of battleground Michigan.
A week before the election that will decide the next occupant of the White House and control of Congress and state legislatures nationwide, Democrats have increasingly argued that Trump – who has baselessly insisted that his 2020 election loss was fraudulent and recently proposed unleashing the military against his political opponents – is a follower of the far-right philosophy associated with Adolf Hitler.
They have been aided in making their case by Trump’s former White House chief of staff John Kelly, who last week said his former boss fitted the definition of a fascist, and by Trump’s Sunday evening rally in New York’s Madison Square Garden, where Trump spent considerable time unleashing vitriol against immigrants and “the enemy from within”, as he describes his political opponents.
Speaking at a recreational center in Saginaw, the seat of a central Michigan county of the same name that narrowly voted for Trump when he won the state in 2016, and then broke for Biden when he reclaimed it four years later, Vance sought to turn the tables on Democrats.
“Look, politics is politics. I volunteered for this job – criticize me, attack me, insult me, it’s what I signed up for. But don’t you dare insult the brave Americans who are fighting for this movement. Don’t attack the voters of the United States of America. That’s what Kamala Harris is doing,” he said.
Vance turned to the Madison Square Garden rally, avoiding mention of warm-up act Tony Hinchcliffe describing Puerto Rico as an “island of garbage”, comments that have sparked fury among Latinos, a key voter group. Instead, he called the event “an incredible thing”, then decried how Democrats have compared it to a gathering of Nazis, such as the one held by American Hitler supporters in 1939.
“I think it’s disgusting … and a person who would close out her campaign by running and attacking her fellow Americans has no business leading the greatest nation on Earth,” Vance said. Noting the presence of a war veteran who had led the pledge of allegiance at his event in Saginaw, Vance said: “It occurs to me that when they attack us as Nazis, it’s so disgraceful, because there are people in this room right now who have grandparents, who have parents, or who they themselves fought in world war two.”
Last week, Harris said she agreed that Trump is a “fascist” and accused him of seeking “unchecked power”. The vice-president is searching for an edge in a race for president that, by all accounts, appears tied, with polls of Michigan and other swing states showing her neck-in-neck with the former president.
Later on Tuesday, Harris is set to make what her campaign has billed as her closing argument to the American people from a park near the White House where Trump addressed his supporters before they attacked the US Capitol on January 6.
Harris’s pitch to voters has centered on warnings that Trump is unfit for the presidency, and on promises to build an “opportunity economy” that would see the US government promote cutting-edge technologies and help Americans afford down-payments on their homes and care for their children and elders.
Trump, by contrast, has described America as a country “destroyed” by foreign influence, from the undocumented migrants who have entered from Mexico to the manufacturers have have moved jobs overseas. Speaking in Saginaw, a medium-sized city that, like so many in Michigan and across the upper midwest, saw its manufacturing-centered economy collapse decades ago, Vance likened the struggles of American soldiers against Nazis to Trump’s own quest to win the presidency.
“[Do] you think that the men who stormed the beaches at Normandy did it to give taxpayer-funded sex changes to illegal aliens? Do you think that the men who stormed the beaches at Normandy did it to ship all of our good manufacturing jobs off to China? Do you think the men who stormed the beaches at Normandy did it for a president who wants to open the American southern border?” Vance asked. “I don’t think so.”
