Republican vice-presidential nominee JD Vance held a campaign rally in the Kalamazoo area on Friday.
Vance criticized the Biden-Harris administration’s record on the economy and immigration to about 600 volunteers and supporters. They came out to hear him speak in an airplane hangar at RAI Jets, a private aviation company in Portage.
“Over the last month, our country lost 28,000 private sector jobs. And it actually gets even worse than that. We lost 46,000 manufacturing jobs.”
Vance was citing the October jobs report that says 12,000 jobs were added last month. What Vance did not mention is that a strike at Boeing has idled more than 40,000 manufacturing workers, accounting for most of the "lost" jobs in that category.
Economists say the jobs numbers were also affected by October's two hurricanes.
Pointing to a white garbage truck with a Trump-Vance poster on it that was parked in the hangar near the stage where Vance was speaking, the Ohio senator made a dig at a comment President Joe Biden made earlier in the week in which Biden seemed to cast Trump supporters as "garbage," though the president later claimed his remark was misunderstood.
“We are not garbage for being pissed off that the country just lost 46,000 manufacturing jobs in a month. We are not bad people for thinking that Kamala Harris ought to do her job and close down the damn border.”
Biden was responding to a comment by a comedian at a Trump rally, who referred to Puerto Rico as an “island of garbage.”
Vance referred back to Biden’s comment at the end of his remarks.
“And I frankly would love if the Democratic Party got such an ass-kicking in four days, excuse my language, that they nominated politicians that while we may disagree with them on policy, they never again tried to call their fellow citizens garbage for disagreeing with their broken leadership. Let's go make Donald J. Trump the next President of the United States, my friends. We got four days to do it,” Vance said.
Vice President Kamala Harris is scheduled to hold a rally at Michigan State University on Sunday; vice presidential candidate Tim Walz was also in Michigan Friday, campaigning in Flint. Former president Donald Trump is campaigning in the Detroit area this evening and is expected to hold his last campaign rally in Grand Rapids on Monday.
