Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) said President Joe Biden‘s “garbage” gaffe and other insults made about Trump supporters are about “silencing people.”
“Joe Biden called half of America garbage for wanting to vote for Donald J. Trump,” he said during a town hall stop in High Point, North Carolina. “Kamala Harris and her running mate have been calling people who support Trump Nazis and fascists. What is that ultimately about? It’s about silencing people.”
“It’s about telling the American people they’re not good enough to voice concern over the policies of Kamala Harris’s leadership,” he added. “My job is to listen to people.”
Biden said Tuesday night that “the only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters,” a remark that has consumed a lot of energy for both campaigns in the days since. The White House insists he meant only a single supporter, insult comic Tony Hinchcliffe, but the Trump campaign says Biden’s remark is in line with his true thinking.
Harris’s campaign has compared Trump to Adolf Hitler in the last weeks of the 2024 presidential race, and Vance said she and Biden think of his supporters as people who should not have their voices heard.
“A mother mourning her son who died of a fentanyl overdose is not garbage,” Vance posted on X. “A truck driver who can’t afford rising diesel prices is not garbage. A father who wants to afford groceries is not garbage. Kamala Harris and Joe Biden ought to be ashamed of themselves.”
Trump jumped on the comment by climbing into a Trump-branded garbage truck and donning a reflective vest during his remarks in Wisconsin Wednesday night.
Elsewhere in Vance’s town hall event, which was moderated by Turning Point Action CEO Charlie Kirk, he attacked Harris over inflation and her housing policies.
“The average North Carolina family is about $29,000 poorer because of Kamala Harris’s inflation,” Vance said. “Now, they didn’t see that in an IRS bill, but they saw it in their grocery bill. They saw it in their rental bill, they saw it in their car payments. That inflation is a hidden tax on American citizens.”
He predicted that Harris’s proposed $25,000 housing credit would just make houses cost $25,000 more and said some of the credits would be given to illegal immigrants.
Immigration was a big part of Vance’s remarks to the mostly college-aged audience. He said illegal immigration costs the United States up to $500 billion a year and that migrants put downward pressure on wages and have driven up housing costs as well.
“The second prevailing idea in Washington, D.C., is that we should let in millions upon millions of illegal immigrants who compete against young Americans for important jobs, who undercut the wages of American workers,” he said. “And it’s American workers of every color, every background.”
Vance added later that “when you let in way too many illegal immigrants, the price of housing shoots through the roof.”
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The GOP vice presidential nominee has gone after Harris repeatedly in the closing days, mocking her “very fraudulent” laugh and saying her Liz Cheney endorsement is a testament to her bad instincts on foreign policy.
“If a person with the last name of Cheney is in control of American foreign policy, it is a damn shame,” he said. “And a lot of bad things are going to happen because of it.”
