Vice Presidential nominee JD Vance told podcaster Joe Rogan on Thursday that he bugged out from a game of mini-golf after he heard of Donald Trump's assassination attempt.
Vance had not yet been revealed as Trump's running mate, but he had been in talks with the former president about an official announcement. When he heard the news of the failed assassination attempt on Trump at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, he said he ran home to grab his guns.
"At first I was so pissed, but then I go into like fight or flight mode with my kids," he shared on Rogan's popular podcast. "We were at a mini golf place in Cincinnati, Ohio. I grab my kids up, throw them in the car, go home and load all my guns. And basically stand like a sentry in our front door, and that was my reaction to it."
Vance said Trump had weighed announcing Vance as his VP pick at the Butler rally but ultimately decided to hold off.
Elsewhere in the interview with Rogan, which comes a week after a similar sit-down with Trump, Vance smeared transgender people and worried that Muslim immigrants to the U.S. would “outbreed” non-Muslims and install Sharia law.
Vance said Muslims were having children at a “very scary” pace, echoing Rogan’s concern that Muslims would “outbreed everyone who is not Muslim.”
In another segment, Vance shared in Rogan’s concern that “a state [could] adopt Sharia law,” and affirmed the host’s suggestion that Sharia law “has kind of already worked its way into some societies.”
“I know there's, there's a place in Minnesota, I believe, where they have prayer calls as a matter of local government. I do think that's happening,” Vance said, referring to a tweak to Minneapolis noise ordinances last year that allowed mosques mosques to play an adhan, or prayer call, during the month of Ramadan.
Vance also drew a distinction between the Christian far-right and what he called “real religious tyranny” of Muslim immigrants who “don’t necessarily assimilate into Western values.”
“That's what, to me, is so crazy about some of the hyper left-wing reaction to the idea that, like, somehow I want to force every man and woman child to go to my church is ridiculous. I just don't want to do that,” Vance said. “Where you see actual, real religious tyranny is increasingly in Western societies, where you've had a large influx of immigrants who don't necessarily assimilate into Western values.”
The senator, whose running mate has promised to reinstate a controversial Muslim ban, also repeated a xenophobic joke that the UK would become “the first Islamist country with nuclear weapons.” In July, Vance earned earned condemnation from UK Labour Party leaders over similar comments.
