WASHINGTON – A week ago, crack Between former President Donald Trump and Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, Trump’s merciless mockery of the popular Republican battleground state has gone beyond repair, posing a potentially deadly threat to his campaign.
Then Trump’s running mate, Senator JD Vance of OhioHe put Kemp on the line.
Kemp was targeted along with his wife a few hours after the phone call bad Trump attackswas on Fox News He has publicly declared his support for the GOP ticket. Shortly after that, it was Trump thanked the governor for kind words.
In an interview with NBC News on a campaign plane Tuesday night, Vance downplayed any role he might have played in brokering a truce, claiming he was one of many important voices in Kemp’s ear. But Vance also described a strategy Trump has blessed that he can think with or appeal to people in ways Trump can’t.
“There are a lot of similarities, but also a lot of differences,” Vance said, describing the dynamic between him and Trump.
After their first few campaign speeches together, Vance recalled, Trump “basically said, ‘I trust you. Unless there’s a really big event, we should both be in different places…divide and conquer.”
“We’re each trying to talk to different people in different ways and we’re each trying to run the race as best we can,” Vance added. “And he obviously sets the tone and sets the policy, and I’m just trying to help.”
Trump’s feud with Kemp stems from the governor’s refusal to interfere in the 2020 election in Georgia, where Trump narrowly lost to President Joe Biden. Democrats have high hopes for the state again this year; There’s Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Waltz A bus tour starts there on Wednesday.
Vance said his call with Kemp focused on the common ground Kemp and Trump share.
“The way I approached my conversation with him was this: ‘Just as I’m not going to convince you to change your mind about the president, I’m not going to convince the president to change his mind.’ upon you. But you agree with 90%. You can put aside any personal differences,” Vance said. “And I think there were probably 150 people who took that message to both the president and Brian Kemp, and I’m glad about that. [Kemp] I got to a good place, but I don’t take any responsibility or credit for it.”
Kemp’s top adviser, Cody Hall, said in a statement that “the governor delivered the same message to Sen. Vance that he’s been giving for over a year and repeated in an interview last week: that he fully supports the entire Republican ticket, it works. Georgia is hard to win for the former president, and he definitely believes that our country cannot afford a four-year presidency of Kamala Harris.”
In an interview Tuesday, Vance addressed how he reconciles some of his policy positions with Trump’s, particularly on abortion. Vance campaigned against a constitutional amendment passed last year in Ohio that would have codified abortion rights in the state. That too in the past expressed his support for federal abortion restrictions. But after joining the GOP ticket, Vance deferred to Trump, who said he wanted to leave the issue up to the states.
“I don’t think of it as being confident in your values,” Vance said. “I am pro-life and I am interested in this issue. I want to save as many babies as possible. Here, too, I remember that the voters make these decisions, and I advocated very strongly for the voters to vote no. [in Ohio]and gave us our asses. And so I think all of us who are pro-life have to kind of take a step back and say, ‘How can we treat the American people here better?’ we have to say.
Vance added that he sees no “radical disagreement” between him and Trump on any issue.
“But if that’s the case, the voters elected him, and he elected me,” he said. “And my job on the ticket is to pursue the work of the campaign and make him the next president of the United States.”
The interview, aboard the campaign plane known as Trump Force 2, came as Vance returned to Washington after a fundraiser in Nashville and a trip to Big Rapids, Michigan.
Vance has events planned for Wednesday in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, which along with Michigan make up the “blue wall” industrial states that carried Trump to victory in 2016 but went to Biden four years later. Vance, a Midwesterner who talks about his working-class roots and struggles and how they convey his economic populist views, has made a combined 20 stops in those three states since running for vice president.
in Big Rapids, which plans to build an electric car battery plant caused political controversy because of the company’s ties to China, the campaign presented Vance’s case as a smaller-scale “remark” on the economy. But the event had the feel of a larger rally, with hundreds of people gathered in the blazing sun and humid conditions at the horse farm.
There, Vance debuted a new line of attack on Democratic presidential nominee Harris. Harris, he said, pointing Axios header Accusing him of supporting the border wall, he “copies the entire policy of Donald Trump.”
“In fact,” Vance added, “I heard that for his debate in a few weeks, he’s going to wear a navy suit, a long red tie, and adopt the slogan ‘Make America Great Again.'”
Vance then went to a nearby A&W restaurant, where he served root beer floats on a shaded patio, took selfies and held his baby. The scene contrasted with Vance’s visit to a bakery in Valdosta, Georgia, last week. With the media in tow, Vance struggled to make casual conversation while buying donuts, and an employee asked to be held off camera.
A video depicting the difficult moment it went viral on social media.
“I just felt terrible for that woman,” Vance said Tuesday, referring to the bakery worker on the plane. “We went in and there were 20 Secret Service agents and 15 cameras and he was obviously not properly notified and he was terrified, right? I just felt terrible for him.”
Vance said he enjoyed dealing with such retail politics, adding that he made it clear to his employees that such trips should be planned more carefully in the future.
“We shouldn’t have these scripted events — I don’t want to go and buy three Doritos at Sheetz,” Vance said. last Harris stop at a Pennsylvania gas station. “I like to go out there and talk to people, and we want to make sure we do that, but make sure people are at least on camera, or we’re going to go in and you’ll have a person practically having a panic attack because there’s 15 cameras in their face.
Vance’s mother, Beverly Aikins, accompanied him on Tuesday’s visit. Vance wrote about his struggle with drug addiction in his 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, and announced in his acceptance speech at the Republican convention last month that he was approaching 10 years of sobriety. He also shared his story with the crowd in Big Rapids, connecting the challenges faced by his family and others to what he described as the failures of past leaders.
“I just want everybody to know him like I know him,” Aikins told NBC News when his son was involved at A&W. “He’s an amazing person and he really, really thinks he can make a difference.”
Sitting next to Aikins on the plane, Vance said the campaign had not yet decided who would play Walz in preparation for their Oct. 1 debate.
“What I try to do in a rally or a press conference or a policy speech or whatever, I just try to get the details right, because I think if you get the details right, then you can actually form your own opinion,” Vance said. “Such events should happen organically. So I think it would be a big mistake to try to over-script or over-prepare.”