Vice President Kamala Harris said former president Donald Trump’s newly selected running mate, Senator J.D. Vance (R., Ohio), will serve as a “rubber stamp” to the Republican presidential nominee’s “extreme agenda” should he return to the White House.
Harris released a 45-second campaign video on her YouTube channel, arguing that Trump prioritized unprincipled loyalty in his search for a running mate. The political attack comes ahead of Vance’s primetime speech at the Republican National Convention Wednesday night, two days after he was announced as Trump’s vice-presidential pick.
“Trump looked for someone he knew would be a rubber stamp for his extreme agenda,” Harris said in the video. “Make no mistake: J.D. Vance will be loyal only to Trump, not to our country.”
After the highly anticipated announcement on Monday, Harris personally called Vance to congratulate him on the nomination and left him a voicemail. Calling back on Tuesday afternoon, Vance had a “brief and respectful” conversation with Harris, a source familiar with the call told Fox News. The pair reportedly said they were looking forward to debating each other, but no specifics about the August 13 debate were discussed.
Harris previously accepted terms for the CBS debate to be held on either July 23 or August 13, while Trump’s campaign wanted Fox News to host the debate instead. The July date appears to be off the table, Reuters reported.
In the brief video, the Democratic vice president said Vance, unlike Trump’s former running mate Mike Pence, “would have carried out Trump’s plan to overturn the 2020 election.” The comment relates to an ABC News interview earlier this year in which the Ohio senator said he would not have certified the 2020 election results until states submitted alternate slates of pro-Trump electors, which would have been available had subsequent investigations uncovered decisive election fraud.
“If I had been vice president, I would have told the states, like Pennsylvania, Georgia and so many others, that we needed to have multiple slates of electors, and I think the U.S. Congress should have fought over it from there,” Vance told ABC.
“Do I think Joe Biden would still be president right now? Yeah, probably,” Vance told the New York Times more recently. “But at least we would have had a debate.”
Harris also called out Vance for openly supporting a national-abortion ban at 15 weeks of pregnancy and voting against protecting in vitro fertilization, pointing to a Democratic-led bill in the Senate that its proponents said would federally protect IVF access. Republican senators blocked the bill last month, arguing Democrats were trying to politicize the issue.
Lastly, Harris referenced Project 2025 in her brief message. Organized by the conservative Heritage Foundation and authored by some former officials in the Trump administration, the 900-page policy roadmap contains guidelines on curbing illegal immigration, abolishing the Department of Education, and cutting funding for Medicaid and Medicare.
“If elected, [Vance] will help implement the extreme Project 2025 plan for a second Trump term, which would target critical programs like Head Start and Medicare,” Harris said. “But we are not going to let that happen.”
While Vance has close ties with the organization behind the policy initiative, Trump has sought to distance himself from Project 2025. In fact, the former president disavowed the project twice recently.
“I know nothing about Project 2025,” he posted on Truth Social earlier this month, saying he disagrees with some of the policy proposals.
“I have not seen it, have no idea who is in charge of it, and, unlike our very well received Republican Platform, had nothing to do with it,” Trump wrote in a follow-up message on his social-media platform. “The Radical Left Democrats are having a field day, however, trying to hook me into whatever policies are stated or said.”
Despite the efforts to distance himself, the Democratic National Committee has launched an extensive billboard campaign covering ten cities in major battleground states highlighting Trump’s previous statement that he would become a dictator on day one of his second term if reelected. Biden likewise tied Trump to Project 2025 last week, claiming both are a “deadly serious” threat to American democracy.