DALLAS — Vice President JD Vance reignited his spat with Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed and disparaged the Democratic Party’s distancing from bedrock American values — before having his primetime address at the Republican midterm convention interrupted by a heckler bearing a “symbol of the far left.”
“To the radicals who wish to abolish my family and the thousands and millions of other families all across our country, we have a simple message for them: Stay the hell away from our kids,” the vice president said at the novel midterm event in Dallas.
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Moments later, a protester waving a “Mexican” flag tried to shout down the vice president, causing him to quip: “Well, my friend, if you love Mexico so much, get your ass over there. I’ll buy you the plane ticket.”
Republicans at the American Airlines Center erupted in cheers and applause.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I had a whole speech written, but I think I got to change it because we just discovered the symbol of the far left,” Vance added, dismissing the disruption as “an idiot waving … a Mexican flag at a protest when he should be waving the flag of the United States of America.”
He also took aim at El-Sayed as the latest example of what is wrong with the Democratic Party, while taking issue with the candidate’s comments last month about his own wife.
“He asked, mockingly, whether I’d bring Usha with me ‘back in time to meet Papaw,’” Vance recounted, according to prepared remarks. “That is what he thinks of my grandfather — a man I loved, and who loved his family unconditionally.
“Abdul looks at him, sees the color of his skin, and decides that he could never have loved my wife.”
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The vice president noted that the Senate Democratic hopeful was raised “by his own white step-grandparents” and “knows exactly what that kind of bond looks like” — but attacked his family regardless.
“And he chose, anyway, to say that a man like my grandfather couldn’t have loved from the bottom of his heart someone who looks like Usha,” Vance continued.
“This is who the Democrats are now. They aren’t the party of higher taxes and a little more regulation. They aren’t the party of FDR, or JFK, or even Bill Clinton. No—the Democrats are the party of hatred,” he said.
“The party that despises America, and the people who built it. The party that can find sympathy for the terrorists who perpetrated 9/11, but says people with names like James Vance are incapable of loving people with names like Usha.”
In an August trip to Detroit, Vance had told El-Sayed to “keep my wife’s name the hell out of your mouth” after the Michigan Democrat suggested his late grandfather might have disapproved of his marriage to second lady Usha Vance, an Indian-American Hindu.
Vance, 42, made his pitch to prospective voters less than two years before he’s expected to compete for the 2028 Republican presidential nomination.
