Theresa Opeka
Carolina Journal
Former President Donald Trump and his vice-presidential candidate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, were in Asheboro Wednesday for the Trump campaign’s first outdoor rally since his assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, last month.
The pair’s main focus was on national security.
Vance spoke at the North Carolina Aviation Museum an hour ahead of Trump.
“In seventy-five days, we’re gonna take this country back, we’re gonna elect Donald J Trump, and it’s gonna start right here with the great people of North Carolina,” he told the crowd.
Vance said that Democrats are trying to appeal to rural voters and veterans by giving out camo hats with Vice President and Democratic nominee Kamala Harris’ name on them. He said having a running mate who didn’t lie about his service record, referring to Minn. Gov. Tim Walz, Kamala Harris’ running mate, would really appeal to them.
“Tim Walz says that he served in a war zone, and it turns out the closest he ever got to war is when he let rioters burn down the city of Minneapolis under his watch in the summer of 2020,” Vance said.
He pointed out that Walz dropped out of the military and allowed his National Guard unit to go to Iraq without him, and that he lied about his rank and stood in silence as Rep. Nancy Pelosi and journalists praised him for his service on an imaginary battlefield.
More broadly, Vance said that national security starts with peace in our neighborhoods, cities, and at the southern border. He said Harris let more than 10 million illegal aliens cross into the United States during the time she was put in charge of the border.
“If we give Kamala Harris a promotion and make her the President of the United States, the southern border is going to look like Walmart on Black Friday,” he quipped.
Vance said he visited the border and saw where little girls are trafficked by the drug cartels and met a rancher who endured violent criminals raiding his land. He also mentioned the devastation that fentanyl coming over the border has done to American families and recounted the personal story of his mother, who struggled with addiction.
He said that Trump knows more about diplomacy than any president in the last 40 years, including opening up diplomatic talks with North Korea after 1/2 century of stagnation.
“Let’s be honest folks, mean tweets and World Peace has a pretty nice ring to it,” Vance said.
Trump invited scores of North Carolina sheriffs and other law enforcement officials from across the state to come up on stage with him.
“I want to thank you all very much,” the former president told the group. “You are the reason we’re able to be here and that you have a safe state, and a great state. Thank you all very much.”
Before talking about national security, Trump pointed out a Labor Department report showing monthly payroll statistics overstated new jobs by roughly 818,000 during the 12-month period ending March of this year, a downward revision of nearly 30%. He called it a “massive scandal.”
“It really isn’t a revision — it’s a total lie,” he said. They wanted it to come out after the election, but somehow, it got leaked. The Harris-Biden Administration has been caught fraudulently manipulating job statistics to hide the true extent of the economic ruin that they’ve inflicted on America.”
Trump even coined a new nickname for Harris, “Comrade Kamala,” stating that she is the most “radical left” person to ever run for a high political office in the country. He said that if she gets four more years, millions of jobs will vanish, and inflation will completely destroy the country.
He called the Democratic National Convention, going on this week in Chicago a “charade” and that Democrats have mentioned his name 271 times while only mentioning the economy 12 times and no mention of the border.
“They mentioned me more than any other category,” Trump said. “I’m now a category.”
He said that despite the “charade,” his campaign had good poll numbers this morning. One such poll by Navigator Research shows that Harris is not leading in any battleground state, and is tied with Trump in Michigan, North Carolina, and Wisconsin and behind in Arizona and Pennsylvania.
Trump said that the FBI has also lied about recent crime numbers, leaving out such places as New York City to make the report look better.
He further said under his leadership, the country was respected, and our enemies feared us, and touted his record in putting America first, including rebuilding the military, which he said he would do again if re-elected, creating the US Space Force, making NATO pay its fair share, defeated ISIS, secured the borders, achieved energy independence, stood up to China, protected Israel, made peace in the Middle East with the Abraham Accords, brought most of our troops home, and said the country is in grave danger of a third world war if Harris is elected.
“Everybody said he’s going to start wars with his attitude,” Trump said. “My attitude kept us out of wars. I stopped wars with phone calls. Russia with Ukraine would have never happened if I were president, and Israel and October 7th would have never happened. Iran would have never done what they did because they had very little money at that point, and now, they’re rich as hell.”
He talked at length about the withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021, where thirteen service members were killed in action.
“The weakness and incompetence of Kamala Harris and crooked Joe Biden delivered the most humiliating event in the history of our country and one of the biggest military disasters in the history of the world as far as I’m concerned,” Trump said. “No one will ever forget the horrifying images of their catastrophic retreat from Afghanistan. Desperate Afghans fell to their deaths from the wheels of US cargo planes that were 3000 feet up in the air.
Bloodthirsty terrorists poured out of the prisons after Biden and Harris surrendered Bagram, one of the largest air military bases anywhere in the world that we spent billions and billions of dollars building it many years ago.”
He said that President Biden never held anyone accountable for the disastrous withdrawal, but he would ask for the “resignations of every single senior military official who touched the Afghanistan disaster” soon after taking office.
Trump promised that on day one of being back in office he would take Critical Race Theory and transgender issues out of the military.
“They should focus on defeating America’s enemies, not figuring out their genders,” he said. “Marxist ideologies have no place in combat. We want them to know their gender when they go in.”
Trump said he would also rehire the 8,000 service members purged by the Biden-Harris Administration for refusing their COVID-19 vaccine mandate.
He also mentioned he wants to build a “great iron dome” over the country to protect it, akin to Israel’s rocket defense system.
“Ronald Reagan wanted it many years ago, as you know, but we didn’t really have the technology then,” Trump said.
He also talked about illegal immigration, referring to how the country has been inundated with people coming over the border from prisons and insane asylums in Central and South America and beyond.
Notably, Trump went on to say he would pay down the debt and reduce taxes, adding there may have been a silver lining to him not being re-elected in 2020.
“I wish we didn’t have this break,” Trump said referring to the Biden administration’s time in the White House. “The only thing good about the break is it shows how bad it can get because we’ve never had a country that’s been in the shape like this country is in right now.”
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