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Before Senator JD Vance took the stage at a town hall in Greensboro, North Carolina, attendees said he piqued their interest because of the civility he showed toward his Demoratic opponent for vice president, Governor Tim Walz, during their sole debate.
“I think he was very smooth with everything that he said,” Chase Johnson from Graham, North Carolina, told The Independent. “Actually one of the better debates we've had in the long time, probably the most civil debate since Obama and Romney.”
John Pittman, who is from Greensboro, told The Independent that he especially appreciated how respectful Vance was toward Walz when the governor mentioned how his son was present during a shooting.
Polling showed that Vance’s image — long battered because of his comments about “childless cat ladies” and his flip-flopping on his running mate Donald Trump — improved signficantly after that, and he is now only slightly underwater. But as he took the stage during a town hall at the Koury Convention Center on Thursday night, the image of Vance the civil statesman slowly began to peel off — and he reassumed his image as Trump’s attack dog.
Initially, Vance showed a concilatory side. He took the stage with Danica Patrick, a retired NASCAR driver who was there to moderate the event, and talked about how and Trump would not abandon western North Carolina after the region was battered by Hurricane Helene. That comment received warm applause.
But immediately afterward, he criticized President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee for president, for not dispatching the 82nd Airborne division of the United States Army.
Midway through a follow-up question, a woman nearly fell off a platform behind him. “Kamala Harris built this platform behind me, that’s what happened,” Vance immediately quipped.
Vance’s events are decidedly different from his would-be boss. They often run shorter and the playlist includes bands like The Clash, Led Zeppelin and Guns N’ Roses as well Merle Haggard’s “America First,” his walk-on song. He often takes a pugnacious tone and remains relentlessly on-message, never meandering like the man at the top of his ticket. He focuses almost solely on talking about restricting illegal immigration and enacting Trump’s plans to conduct mass deportations.
Almost all of the solutions he suggests, from fixing Social Security to lowering the cost of housing, can only happen by restricting immigration.
For example, Vance was asked about Trump’s lie that 13,000 murderers crossed the US-Mexico border during the Biden administration. In response, he immediately pivoted to pushing the message that immigrants were negatively affecting people in North Carolina.
“If the message that our country sends after 25 million illegal aliens coming into this country is: ‘You get to stay here, you get to collect housing benefits, you get to collect welfare benefits,’ while folks in western North Carolina are struggling to survive, we will never have a border in this country again,” he said.
The Trump campaign and his allies have repeatedly spread lies that the Federal Emergency Management Agency was assisting immigrants with money meant for disaster relief. It is a claim that has been repeatedly debunked and that President Joe Biden has pushed back on publicly. Yet it remains a popular talking point for Vance.
Indeed, the vice-presidential candidate went on to say there had been an influx of undocumented children in Michigan and North Carolina’s public schools.
“It’s nothing against those kids, it's saying something against Kamala Harris, who let those kids come in and deprive Americans of good education,” he added.
Things took a more obscure turn when host Patrick said “the globalist view of ‘own nothing and be happy’ is not what the American people want.” Vance responded that “they want you to live in a pod, eat bugs and own nothing.”
Returning to policy, the Ohio senator responded to a question from a retired health care worker who was worried that Trump would cut Social Security. Vance refuted that claim and took it right back to immigrants again.
“You know what will bankrupt Social Security in this country? Giving it to illegal aliens,” he said. “And that’s what I think is so sick about what Kamala Harris is going out there doing. She is accusing us of doing the very same thing that she herself is promising to do.”
Toward the end of the event, Patrick asked Vance if he had any special skills. This strange question led to an even stranger moment: Vance did an impersonation of Harris, saying, “Well, I was raised in a middle-class family,” in a mocking tone, before adding: “I forgot the awkward cackle afterwards.”
Needless to say, it seems the civil persona has slipped — and the attack dog is out on the trail for Trump again.
