Two days after President Trump’s State of the Union address, Vice President JD Vance visited a competitive congressional district in Wisconsin to put his own spin on a midterm election-year strategy centered on deriding Democrats.
Traveling to Plover, part of the state’s Third Congressional District, Mr. Vance was tasked with giving a boost to Representative Derrick Van Orden, a Republican facing a tough re-election fight, and with protecting his party’s narrow majority from slipping away in November.
But Mr. Vance had another point to make during his appearance. Several times, he reminded his audience that Democrats had not stood up at the president’s behest during the State of the Union. They kept their seats when Mr. Trump invited them to stand if they believed their first duty was to protect the lives of U.S. citizens over those of immigrants, or to applaud the inflation rate.
Administration officials have zeroed in on the results of Mr. Trump’s trap, and a conservative group has already cut a campaign ad, Politico reported on Thursday. And since the president has not had any public events on his schedule since the speech, Mr. Vance took the opportunity to put his own spin on the strategy.
“What is it about a political party that can’t stand up and cheer for the fact that we have rising wages and low inflation for the first time in a very long time in the United States of America?” Mr. Vance said.
Mr. Vance, who did not read from a script while he spoke, largely focused on the economy, and later fielded questions. He repeated many of the claims Mr. Trump has made about the economy’s improved performance under his leadership compared with President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s. Although the economy shows signs of health, a majority of Americans say that they do not feel relief — a problem that also bedeviled Mr. Biden.
“When Joe Biden and the Democrats left us the government of this country, we had the highest inflation that we had ever had in 40 years,” Mr. Vance said. “Thanks to Donald Trump and congressional Republicans, we now have inflation at 2.4 percent, the lowest in five years. And it’s coming even lower.”
Inflation had already come down to 3 percent by the time Mr. Biden left office. Prices are still increasing above the target of 2 percent set by the Federal Reserve. But Mr. Vance still assailed Democrats for not standing during the State of the Union address and celebrating the administration’s performance.
When a reporter asked about rural hospital closures, Mr. Vance blamed them on the Biden administration. That claim, too, needs more context: A piece of signature legislation passed last year further accelerated the cuts to suffering rural hospitals, though a $50 billion fund was created to keep them afloat.
Repeatedly, Mr. Vance turned back to Democrats’ refusing to stand during Mr. Trump’s speech. The veteran pollster Frank Luntz said that the president’s sit-and-stand trap had made an impression that would last.
“That was powerful,” Mr. Luntz said. “That was also awful, because that’s the kind of stunt that plays into these divisions and makes people hate each other.”
He noted that Democrats had returned Republican attacks since the speech.
“Everyone is embarrassing to everyone else,” Mr. Luntz said. “And the American people look at this and they wonder, ‘Have we lost our minds?’”
In Wisconsin, Mr. Vance name-checked Democrats who had yelled at Mr. Trump during his speech. And like the president, he accused Democrats of being cheaters. He rehashed a speech, delivered a day earlier in Washington, in which he announced that the federal government would withhold $259 million in Medicaid funds to Minnesota as part of the administration’s effort to root out fraud. On Tuesday, Mr. Trump tasked the vice president with taking on the “war on fraud.”
At the end of his speech on Thursday, Mr. Vance took a question from a reporter who asked if Wisconsin could be targeted if the state’s Democratic governor, Tony Evers, continued to refuse to hand over food stamp data to the federal government, which is seeking personal information about people receiving support to fight hunger.
Mr. Vance did not rule it out.
“We’re going to look at every option that we have,” the vice president said, “because we’ve got to stop this terrible fraud.”
Katie Rogers is a White House correspondent for The Times, reporting on President Trump.
The post Vance Continues to Criticize Democrats’ Attitude During State of the Union appeared first on New York Times.
