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Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) forcefully defended Donald Trump’s vow to use the U.S. military against certain Americans, a group Trump has repeatedly labeled “the enemy within.”
Across several television interviews that aired Sunday, Vance also dismissed former Trump White House chief of staff John F. Kelly’s warnings that the former president meets the definition of a fascist. Vance described Kelly, a retired four-star Marine general, as a “disgruntled employee.”
He also disputed former vice president Mike Pence’s contention that Trump forced him to choose between loyalty to the Constitution and loyalty to Trump himself.
With nine days to go before the election, Vance appears to be stepping up his defense of Trump against warnings from Democrats and Republicans alike that Trump would be an authoritarian figure. In recent weeks, numerous former Trump officials have raised alarms that the Republican presidential nominee is unfit to lead the nation.
Interviews with CNN, NBC News and CBS News showed a vice-presidential candidate ready to defend - and frequently reframe - some of Trump’s most controversial comments. Vance on Sunday also repeatedly declined to call Russian President Vladimir Putin an “enemy,” saying he considers Putin a “competitor” and “adversary.”
“Well, we’re not in a war with him, and I don’t want to be in a war with Vladimir Putin’s Russia,” Vance said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “I think that we should try to pursue avenues of peace,” he said, but added that he has condemned Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
In a contentious exchange with CNN’s Jake Tapper, Vance said he would support the deployment of troops against what he and Trump have described as “left-wing lunatics,” which he argued is what Trump meant by “the enemy within.”
He contended that Trump didn’t mean to include Democratic lawmakers such as California Reps. Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff in the group of Americans against whom he would use military force - even though the former president has repeatedly used the phrase “enemy within” to describe both of them. Schiff served on the House select committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, and Pelosi was a longtime House speaker.
Tapper read Vance a quote Trump gave during an interview with podcaster Joe Rogan that aired Friday, during which Trump said “an enemy within” American politics poses a bigger danger to the country than North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
The CNN host then told Vance that many former members of Trump’s administration - including Kelly - are alarmed by the idea that Trump would use the military to go after Americans. Vance repeated his argument that Trump is talking about “far-left people who commit acts of violence.”
“Are they not Americans?” Tapper replied. “You’re doing a very narrow definition of what he said, which is not what he said.”
In a separate interview on “Meet the Press,” Vance said he agreed with Trump’s remark to Rogan that people like Schiff and Pelosi pose a greater threat to the United States than Russia or China do.
“What he said - and I do agree with this - what he said is that the biggest threat we have in our country, it’s not a foreign adversary, because we can handle these guys,” Vance said.
Other allies of the former president have taken a similar line when asked about Trump’s comments, such as House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana). When asked the same question by Tapper last week, Johnson replied that Trump is not talking about Democratic leaders when he speaks about the “enemy within,” but rather “marauding gangs of dangerous, violent people who are destroying public property.”
In the past week, some of Trump’s most senior former advisers have warned Americans to take the former president’s militaristic impulses seriously. Kelly, his longest-serving chief of staff, told the New York Times that Trump expected personal loyalty from military leaders and spoke admiringly of Adolf Hitler.
On Sunday, Vance accused Kelly and the other former top Trump administration officials who have spoken up of being warmongers. Vance claimed in the CNN interview that Kelly is “not an honest arbiter” because he has a worldview that is “oppositional to peace and prosperity.”
In his “Meet the Press” interview, Vance also accused the Republicans who are now critical of Trump of wanting to start wars.
“If Donald Trump wanted to start a nuclear war with Russia, I guarantee you that John Kelly and [former congresswoman] Liz Cheney would be at the front of the line endorsing him,” Vance said.
Appearing on CBS News’s “Face the Nation,” Vance said Cheney’s father, Republican former vice president Dick Cheney, is “responsible for the deaths of millions of innocent Arabs and tens of thousands of innocent American troops.” And he said Liz Cheney, who is supporting Harris on the campaign trail, “loves to talk about how she would like to start wars with effectively every country all over the world.”
Cheney, who was also interviewed on CNN on Sunday morning, said Vance is going through “unbelievable contortions to try to find a way to defend” Trump.
Asked on both NBC and CBS whether he would be loyal to Trump or the Constitution - a choice Pence said he had to make on Jan. 6, 2021 - Vance said he’d be loyal to the Constitution, before quickly changing the topic on both shows.