Republican vice-presidential nominee Sen. JD Vance (Ohio) leaned into recent attacks by former President Trump on Vice President Harris’s background during a rally in Georgia Saturday, while calling her campaign tactics “pretty weird.”
Using the “weird” rhetoric Harris’s campaign has levied at the Trump-Vance ticket, he took a swing at her recent rally at the same venue in Atlanta.
“I think it’s especially weird when Kamala Harris comes to Atlanta, I believe came here to this… arena,” Vance told the crowd at Georgia State University. “Kamala Harris comes to Atlanta and talks with a fake Southern accent, even though she grew up in Canada, you can’t make it up, that’s pretty weird.”
“Go watch the clip, she sounded like a Southern belle,” he continued “Even though she grew up in Vancouver, doesn’t make any sense.”
While Harris spent some of her youth in Montreal, she also lived in Wisconsin growing up.
“Let’s talk about some things that are weird,” Vance continued. “We think it’s weird that Democrats wanna put sexually explicit books in toddlers’ libraries. We think it’s weird that the far left wants to allow biological males to beat the livin’ crap outta women in boxing.”
“We think it’s weird for a presidential candidate to bail convicted rapists and murderers out of prison, and that’s what Kamala Harris did,” he claimed, looking back at the vice president’s time as a federal prosecutor in California.
Harris, who was officially nominated Friday to be the Democratic presidential nominee, has faced a slew of criticism over her background in recent days. She rose to the top of the ticket after President Biden stepped aside from the race and endorsed her to take on Trump in the fall.
Earlier this week, Trump even questioned her heritage and racial identity during an interview with Black journalists.
“She was always of Indian heritage. And she was only promoting Indian heritage,” Trump said during a combative interview at the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) convention Wednesday in Chicago. “I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black. And now she wants to be known as Black.”
His remarks were in response to a question ABC News political correspondent Rachel Scott, who asked about Republicans’ claims that Harris — the first Black and South Asian woman to be elected as vice president — was just a “DEI” hire, referencing diversity, equity and inclusion.
Trump received heavy blowback for his comments, including from the White House.
“As a person of color, as a Black woman … what he just said, what you just read out to me, is repulsive, it’s insulting and no one has any right to tell someone who they are, how they identify,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, the first Black person to have her role, said of his comments on Harris’ race and ethnicity.
During a campaign stop earlier this week in Arizona, Vance defended the former president’s comments, calling the reaction “hysterical” and comparing Harris to a “chameleon.”
The Hill has reached out to the Harris campaign for comment.