Tag Archives: 2024 elections

‘Fatal Mistake’: Democrats Blame Justice Department As Trump Escapes Accountability For Jan. 6

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After a mob of his supporters attacked the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, it looked like Donald Trump’s political career was over.

Democrats and Republicans alike blamed Trump for inciting the attack, and he only escaped conviction at his Senate impeachment trial — which would have barred him from the presidency forever — because Republican senators insisted it was too late to convict a president who had already left office.

Besides, then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell argued at the time, Trump would face another kind of reckoning.

“We have a criminal justice system in this country. We have civil litigation. And former presidents are not immune from being held accountable by either one,” McConnell said.

That never happened, and many Democrats are ready to place the blame on one man: Attorney General Merrick Garland. They argue he waited too long to appoint a special prosecutor, which allowed Trump and his legal team to stall the case long enough for Trump to win the presidency a second time. Garland made the appointment in November 2022, saying he’d done so partly because Trump had just formalised his bid for the presidency.

The announcement also followed a series of high-profile public hearings by a bipartisan House committee airing the evidence against the former president.

“Garland only started the prosecution after he was in effect forced to by the report of the January 6 committee and the criminal referral,” former House Judiciary Committee chair Jerrold Nadler told HuffPost. “The evidence the January 6 committee used was available from the beginning.”

“Had they proceeded with those prosecutions, I think he would have been convicted and we’d have a different president now,” Nadler said. “Merrick Garland wasted a year.”

Nadler is not alone in thinking so. The Washington Post reported last month that President Joe Biden has expressed regret about picking Garland, believing the nation’s top law enforcement officer took too long to pursue Trump after January 6.

Representatives Bennie Thompson and Zoe Lofgren, members of the January 6 committee, also told HuffPost they thought Garland waited too long.

“I didn’t realise that they were not looking at the whole picture,” Lofgren said. “I think they were taking a look at the foot soldiers.”

While the Justice Department indicted Trump for the mob attack on the Capitol and other crimes related to his attempt to overturn the 2020 election, it did not do so until August 2023, long after the Republican Party had purged most members who spoke out against Trump.

A Supreme Court decision relating to presidential immunity created further delays, and ultimately, Trump won the 2024 election before the case could finish up and he could stand trial. Since longstanding Justice Department policy bars prosecuting a sitting president, the Department of Justice dropped the case after Trump’s November victory, allowing him to escape responsibility and walk back into the White House.

Garland reportedly told prosecutors early on in 2021 that they could pursue cases against people involved in the January 6 riot wherever the evidence led, even if it implicated the former president. But it turned out investigators couldn’t pinpoint financial ties between Trump and key players on the ground.

Prosecutors apparently did not initially consider building a case out of Trump’s public election-fraud lies, or his well-publicised efforts to coerce various officials into undoing the 2020 election, including his demand during a phone call that Georgia’s secretary of state fraudulently “find” him 11,000 votes. Details of the call became public within a day. That material became a key component of special counsel Jack Smith’s eventual case.

Still, it was likely inevitable that if the Justice Department prosecuted a former president, the Supreme Court could get involved to settle questions of presidential immunity that Trump would raise in court. It’s possible that even if the Justice Department had acted swiftly, appeals to the Supreme Court could have bogged the case for years.

The Justice Department declined to comment for this story.

Trump is now expected to continue his efforts to rewrite history by following through on pardons for those who participated in the attack ― whom he has hailed as “heroes” and “patriots” ― after his swearing-in on Jan. 20 at the East Front of the Capitol, the very scene of the crime.

Democrat Senator Adam Schiff, who served on the House select committee that investigated the attack, said the Justice Department “moved with expedition when it came to the people who broke into the building, but were those at a higher level, they waited almost a year on.”

“That was a fatal mistake,” he added.

Federal prosecutors have secured more than 1,000 convictions so far relating to the Jan. 6 attack, and more than 600 rioters have been sentenced to prison, with terms ranging from a few days behind bars to 22 years in federal prison for the head of the Proud Boys.

Still, when it comes to the person who spread dangerous lies about the 2020 presidential election, and who urged hundreds of his supporters to march on the Capitol in protest of Biden’s electoral certification, the same cannot be said.

“I think the department was so focused on being kind of by the book, and being so clear that there wasn’t any political interference,” said Democrat Senator Tina Smith. “I really worry that, you know, he’ll become president, and he’s going to pardon a bunch of people and [a] great sort of whitewashing of what happened will continue.”

Other Democrats were more charitable toward the Justice Department, noting that ― unfairly or not ― Trump was reelected with a popular-vote win over Vice President Kamala Harris even in spite of his role in the Jan. 6 attack and his efforts to fraudulently overturn an election.

“This isn’t about the DOJ. This is about Trump being successful in rewriting history,” Senator Peter Welch said. “He’s validated the folks who attacked the Capitol, and I don’t think a month earlier, a month later, six months earlier, that would have made a difference.”

“The reality is the American people reelected him after that. Who would have thought that?” Welch added. “Trump insisted that this was a peaceful demonstration, continued to insist that the election was stolen, he hasn’t backed down from that at all ― and he got reelected.”

Trump’s reelection, however, largely happened despite the American public’s disapproval of his behavior on January 6. Roughly two-thirds of the people who voted in the 2024 election believed Trump had “a lot” or “some” responsibility for violence on January 6, according to exit polls. The problem for Trump’s opponent is that 70% of those who believed he had some responsibility for the violence voted for him anyway.

Similarly, two-thirds of American adults oppose Trump’s plans to pardon people convicted of crimes related to the insurrection, according to a Washington Post-University of Maryland survey last month.

Though the criminal cases against Trump are all but dead, he could be on the hook for damages as a result of a handful of civil lawsuits brought against him relating to the Jan. 6 insurrection, including by law enforcement officers, congressional Democrats and the estate of a police officer who died. Unlike federal suits, civil litigation can proceed against a sitting president.

Moreover, outgoing Republican Senator Mitt Romney, who voted to convict Trump over the January 6 attack, said he believes history will judge Trump’s wrongdoing harshly.

“I think the people who write history are serious people, and they will recognize, as the world does, that it was a terrible assault on the world’s model democracy,” Romney said. “It will be seen as such, and the effort to try and pretend it was something else will fly in the face of reality.”

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You Can Already See Signs Of Trump’s Crony Capitalism In Action

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A hallmark of Donald Trump’s first presidency was the way major policy developments would sometimes get almost no attention, because they were competing with the flurry of higher-profile, mind-blowing controversies swirling around him and his team.

Evidently Trump’s second presidency is going to unfold in the same way.

For the past week, the political world has focused mostly on the controversies over Trump’s planned appointments for top positions in his administration. And that’s understandable, given his plan to put the nation’s health in the hands of a noted vaccine skeptic and to hand the national intelligence apparatus over to someone who likes to repeat talking points from Russian propaganda.

But that conversation has left virtually no space for discussion about policy changes — including one that should raise a lot of questions about exactly whose interests Trump will represent in government and exactly who has influence over him.

The policy in question is a federal tax credit for buyers of new electric vehicles. It exists thanks to the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, President Joe Biden’s signature legislative accomplishment, and is part of that law’s effort to reduce reliance on fossil fuels by promoting EV use.

Last week Reuters reported that Trump’s transition team was recommending he ask Congress to kill the tax credit. And while Trump has not said anything publicly, auto industry leaders and investors saw the report as a trial balloon and indicator of what the president-elect is likely to do.

It was not exactly a shocking development. Trump has been speaking out against Democratic support of EVs ― or what he has called, deceptively, an “electric vehicle mandate” ― for years. Especially when speaking in states like Michigan, cradle of America’s auto industry, he has portrayed the EV effort as elite Democrats imposing a tree-hugging agenda that will ruin the U.S. auto industry and, in the process, wipe out jobs for U.S. workers.

Still, Trump never said explicitly whether he’d actually seek to eliminate the tax credit. And there were reasons to think he might not pursue the idea after the election.

One is that a number of House Republicans support the EV incentives. Many come from places like Georgia, Ohio, Indiana and Nevada ― states that Trump won and where the EV effort has led to a boom in factory construction. The recent EV push has “created good jobs in many parts of the country — including many districts represented by members of our conference,” the House members wrote in a summer letter to House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.)

Then there are the feelings of the auto industry itself. Both Ford and General Motors, the two legacy car companies still based in Detroit, have supported the tax credit because they think a global shift towards EVs is inevitable. The real question now, they argue, is not whether there will be many more EVs in the future, but who will produce and sell them.

The U.S. carmakers are particularly worried about losing ground to Chinese companies. Thanks to two decades of financial support from their own government, Chinese carmakers can now produce EVs more cheaply and, as a result, are poised to dominate the worldwide market. The new federal tax credit, worth up to $7,500 per vehicle but only valid for EVs produced here in the U.S., is giving Ford and GM a chance to compete on a more even playing field among U.S. consumers.

Good jobs in the districts of House Republicans, a chance to help American industry compete with China ― those sure sound like ideas that might resonate with Trump.

But those aren’t the only appeals Trump is hearing. He’s also hearing from some of his biggest, and richest, allies. And they have a very different view.

Hamm, Musk And EVs

One of the co-leaders of the transition team on EV policy, according to Reuters, is Harold Hamm, a billionaire oil tycoon who was a prodigious Trump fundraiser during the campaign (and donated plenty of his own money, too). Hamm opposes support for EVs, whose growth over the long term would reduce demand for gasoline ― i.e., the financial lifeblood of his enterprises.

Elon Musk, another Trump megadonor, also has the president-elect’s ear. And although Musk is the CEO of Tesla, the nation’s top electric carmaker, Musk has said his company doesn’t need the subsidies because it’s not trying to retool from making gas-powered cars and isn’t at the same disadvantage internationally as the legacy Detroit automakers.

“I think it would be devastating for our competitors and for Tesla slightly,” Musk told investors over the summer. But he said that in the “long term, it probably helps” Tesla if Trump does away with the tax credit, since that could allow Tesla to more thoroughly dominate the U.S. market.

Corey Cantor, a senior auto industry analyst at BloombergNEF, told HuffPost he thinks Tesla sales benefit from the tax credits more than Musk lets on. But he agrees Tesla has “far more flexibility” and would suffer less.

One reason for that is that Musk has fought unionisation at his auto plants and, according to outside analysts, pays his workers less than competitors. A major goal of the Biden EV push was to support unionised companies in the U.S. and, in the process, guarantee better pay for manufacturing workers.

It’s impossible to know just how much Trump’s opposition to the EV tax credit reflects the influence of Hamm and Musk, given his own longstanding skepticism of measures to prevent climate change. But Trump has a lengthy, well-chronicled history of heeding or helping donors who want policy favors, or offering them positions in his administration.

And that’s to say of nothing of how Trump and his family profited personally when, for example, lobbyists and foreign dignitaries would stay at Trump’s Washington hotel. One watchdog group determined through public disclosures that his daughter, Ivanka, and her husband, Jared Kushner, made as much as $640 million in outside income during Trump’s first term.

Now Trump is on his way back to the White House, with a transition team led by and stocked with billionaires. Musk, along with fellow billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy, are leading a so-called Department of Government Efficiency (“DOGE”) task force that, though not an official government entity, will identify targets for big cuts in government spending.

The Political Game

Lobbyists and analysts familiar with the transition told The New York Times they thought Ford and GM (and Stellantis, the other Detroit company, which is now part of a foreign conglomerate) still had a chance to save the tax credit, if they’re strategic enough.

As these sources explained it to the Times, part of Trump’s motivation for killing the tax credit was his grudge against the Detroit companies because of their past support for auto emissions policies he opposed. To get on Trump’s good side, the companies needed to make amends ― or, as the Times put it, “bow to Mr. Trump.”

Trump has always been unabashedly transactional. The variable is which kind of currency will get him to respond. Campaign contributions? Family enrichment? Personal abasement? Some combination of the above?

The future of EVs, like so many other issues in policy for the next four years, may depend on who figures out the answer.

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Tony Hinchcliffe Apologises ‘To Absolutely Nobody’ For Trump Rally Puerto Rico Joke

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Comedian Tony Hinchcliffe is apologising “to absolutely nobody” for his controversial joke about Puerto Rico, which he likened last month to “a floating island of garbage” while endorsing Donald Trump for president with a stand-up set at New York City’s Madison Square Garden.

In the latest episode of his Kill Tony podcast, which was recorded the day after the rally but debuted on Monday, Hinchcliffe said the set was “about free speech” and rued being “under attack” by the pundits, celebrities and social media users who deemed the joke racist.

“I referenced Puerto Rico, which currently has a landfill problem in which all of their landfills are filled to the brim,” said Hinchcliffe on the podcast, which was recorded at Joe Rogan’s comedy club in Austin, Texas. “I am the only person who knew about this, unfortunately.”

Environmentalist bloggers and regional outlets have noted that Puerto Rico does have an actual problem regarding its garbage, and that a goal set in 1992 to increase the recycling rate to 35% has reportedly only reached between 9% and 14%.

“With that said, I just want to say that I love Puerto Ricans, they’re very smart people — they’re smart, they’re street smart, they’re smart enough to know when they’re being used as political fodder,” said Hinchcliffe on the podcast. “Right now that is happening.”

Hinchcliffe had set his joke up by welcoming migrants “with open arms,” before laughingly using those arms to wave said migrants away. He then noted “there’s a lot going on,” like “a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean,” and delivered the vexing punchline: “I think it’s called Puerto Rico.”

“I apologise to absolutely nobody,” Hinchcliffe said on the podcast. “Not to the Puerto Ricans, not to the whites, not to the Blacks, not to the Palestinians, not to the Jews, and not to my own mother, who I made fun of during the set. Nobody clipped that.”

“No headlines about me making fun of my own mother,” he continued.

Hinchcliffe said Tuesday that “perhaps that ... wasn’t the best fucking place to do this set at.”
Hinchcliffe said Tuesday that “perhaps that … wasn’t the best fucking place to do this set at.”

Evan Vucci/Associated Press

The backlash was certainly substantial, as a lot of coverage suggested Hinchcliffe had killed any remaining chance Trump had at the presidency, and celebrities like Jennifer Lopez, Aubrey Plaza and Bad Bunny publicly denounced the joke — or Hinchcliffe himself.

Even Rogan, while certainly supportive of his arguable protégé, argued in the aftermath of the outrage that his stand-up should only be performed at comedy venues — and not at political rallies — but that Hinchcliffe merely delivered the crass humor he’s known for.

The native Ohioan is best known for his podcast, which had packed Madison Square Garden for two nights of sold-out shows in a row the month before Trump’s rally, but also broke a Netflix viewing record with “The Roast of Tom Brady” earlier this year.

“Perhaps that venue at that time wasn’t the best fucking place to do this set at,” said Hinchcliffe during the podcast. “But in any matter, to the mainstream media and to anybody trying to slander me online: That’s what I do, and that’s never going to change.”

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Ex-Obama Adviser Snidely Boils Down Harris Defeat To 1 Faction Of Democratic Party

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David Axelrod, a former senior adviser to Barack Obama during his presidency, on Thursday said Democrats have “become a smarty-pants, suburban, college-educated party” ― and that led to Kamala Harris’ defeat in the White House race.

Many pundits have been upping their blame game in the aftermath of the 2024 election. But analysis from Axelrod, a strategist who successfully helped engineer both of Obama’s national campaigns, merits attention.

“I do have concerns about the way the Democratic Party relates to working-class voters in this country,” Axelrod told broadcaster Anderson Cooper on CNN. “The only group that Democrats gained with in the election on Tuesday was white college graduates. And among working-class voters, there was a significant decline.”

He continued to hammer home a point about the more affluent income bracket that Harris appealed to.

“The only group … Democrats won among were people who make more than $100,000 a year,” Axelrod said. “You can’t win national elections that way, and it certainly shouldn’t be that way for a party that fashions itself as the party of working people.”

Axelrod suggested snobbery played a part in Democrats’ failed messaging after President Joe Biden had helped working people.

“You can’t approach working people like missionaries and say, ‘We’re here to help you become more like us.’ There’s a kind of unspoken disdain, unintended disdain in that,” he said.

“I think Biden has done programmatically some good things for working people. But the party itself has increasingly become a smarty-pants, suburban, college-educated party, and it lends itself to the kind of backlash that we’ve seen.”

Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.), a Harris campaign co-chair, somewhat echoed Axelrod’s point in a separate conversation on CNN.

“There’s a lot of work to do to ensure that we communicate to folks that the Democratic Party is the party of working people, is the party that supports immigrants, is the party that supports the social safety net,” Garcia said.

H/T Mediaite

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Madonna Serves Up a ‘F**k Trump’ Cake With A Side Of Scathing Commentary

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Madonna didn’t sugarcoat her feelings as she revealed her utter disgust at President-elect Donald Trump’s looming return to the White House in her Instagram stories.

The pop star on Thursday first shared the picture of a cake with “Fuck Trump” written on top.

Then, the singer shared a picture of herself and said: “Trying to get my head around why a convicted felon, rapist, Bigot was chosen to lead our country because he’s good for the economy.”

Madonna has criticised Trump for years.

During his 2016 campaign, she shared video online of a Trump piñata being battered and criticised his sons (Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump), asking “How Big of. Pussy Do you have to BE to kill this Noble Animal for sport” after images of them posing with a dead leopard resurfaced.

When Trump did win eight years ago, she said it felt “like women betrayed us” with their support for him, and the following year she likened the heartbreak she experienced following Hillary Clinton’s loss to Trump to a breakup.

Midway through Trump’s first term, Madonna revealed how Trump’s presidency (and her son’s fledgling soccer career) prompted her to move to Portugal. “I felt like we needed a change, and I wanted to get out of America for a minute ― as you know, this is not America’s finest hour,” she said.

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Elizabeth Warren Spells Out What Democrats Must Do ‘With Urgency’ Before Trump Takes Power

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Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) on Thursday unveiled her plan for Democrats “to fight back” following Donald Trump’s decisive election win.

In an essay published by Time magazine, Warren detailed how lawmakers must “fight every fight in Congress,” Trump must be taken on “in the courts” and everyone should “focus on what each of us can do.”

Warren concluded, though, by saying that “Democrats currently in office must work with urgency.”

“While still in charge of the Senate and the White House, we must do all we can to safeguard our democracy,” she wrote. Warren urged Pentagon leaders to “issue a directive now reiterating that the military’s oath is to the Constitution.”

And Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) must “use every minute of the end-of-year legislative session to confirm federal judges and key regulators — none of whom can be removed by the next President,” she added.

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6 Historic Victories From The 2024 Election

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The 2024 election brought some historic victories for the country on Tuesday, which will see Congress welcome its first openly trans member and the Senate its first Korean American.

Here are some of the groundbreaking candidates elected on Tuesday:

It’s the first time in history two Black women will serve together in the Senate. It’s also the first time Delaware will have a female senator.

Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-Del.) and Maryland Democrat Angela Alsobrooks are projected to win their Senate races and will become the first two Black women to serve in the chamber simultaneously.

"From the bottom of my heart, I thank each and every Marylander. To serve this state, my home, is the honor of a lifetime," Angela Alsobrooks wrote on social media after her Senate victory.
“From the bottom of my heart, I thank each and every Marylander. To serve this state, my home, is the honor of a lifetime,” Angela Alsobrooks wrote on social media after her Senate victory.

Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

Individually, their victories are historic: Blunt Rochester is the first woman and the first Black person to win a Senate seat in Delaware, and Alsobrooks is the first Black person to win in Maryland.

“From the bottom of my heard, Delaware, thank you,” Blunt Rochester wrote on social media.

Only three other Black women have ever served in the chamber.

Andy Kim is elected as first Korean American in the Senate.

Rep. Andy Kim handily won the Senate race in New Jersey. The son of immigrants will become the first Korean American in the chamber and the third-youngest when he heads to Washington in January.

“I believe that the opposite of democracy is apathy, and, by extension, I hope that you see our campaign as a means of being the opposite of that helplessness,” he told supporters late Tuesday.

“Delaware has sent the message loud and clear," Sarah McBride said after her victory in a U.S. House race.
“Delaware has sent the message loud and clear,” Sarah McBride said after her victory in a U.S. House race.

Hannah Yoon/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Sarah McBride elected as the first openly trans member of Congress.

Sarah McBride, a progressive who ran on issues affecting workers and families, will become the first openly trans member of Congress. Her tenure in Washington comes amid an effort by Republicans to roll back the rights of LGBTQ+ Americans.

“Delaware has sent the message loud and clear that we must be a country that protects reproductive freedom, that guarantees paid leave and affordable child care for all our families, that ensures that housing and health care are available to everyone and that this is a democracy that is big enough for all of us,” she tweeted on X.

Tulsa, Oklahoma, will have its first Black mayor.

Monroe Nichols, a state representative, won his race to become the mayor of Tulsa, Oklahoma, defeating a longtime Tulsa county commissioner.

“If there is anyone out there who still questions if Tulsa is a place where big things are possible, if there is anybody out there who doubts you can make an impact, tonight you got your answer,” Nichols said in a victory speech, according to the Tulsa World.

“It’s been a long time coming, and tonight, we made history.”

Monroe Nichols, seen in 2017, will become the new mayor of Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Monroe Nichols, seen in 2017, will become the new mayor of Tulsa, Oklahoma.

(AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki)

Pamela Goodwine will be the first Black woman on the Kentucky Supreme Court.

Pamela Goodwine made history once again on Tuesday after previously becoming the first Black woman in Lexington, Kentucky, to be a district judge and the first Black woman to become a circuit judge in the state. In 2018, she became the first Black woman to serve on the Kentucky Court of Appeals.

She won her election to the state Supreme Court, a victory she called an “honor,” after running a campaign based on “experience, honesty and a commitment to impartiality and the rule of law to protect and serve every citizen.”

Shomari Figures becomes just the fourth Black member sent to Congress from Alabama since Reconstruction.

Shomari Figures handily won his race for Congress, flipping a seat held previously held by Republicans after it was redrawn by a federal court.

“This journey that we are on now, this is the beginning of the work,” Figures told supporters after his victory, according to AL.com. “Today is great. We are grateful that we have the opportunity to sit here today and be elected and be put into a position to go do the work. But now we got to do the work.”

Alabama House member Shomari Figures speaks with reporters in Mobile on Tuesday before becoming the projected winner of Alabama's 2nd Congressional District.
Alabama House member Shomari Figures speaks with reporters in Mobile on Tuesday before becoming the projected winner of Alabama’s 2nd Congressional District.

Kim Chandler/Associated Press

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JD Vance Declines To Label Russia’s Vladimir Putin An ‘Enemy’ Of The US

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Senator JD Vance (Republican, Ohio) would not concede that Vladimir Putin is an “enemy” of the United States during an interview broadcast on Sunday, claiming that the country needs to be strategic about the way it speaks about the Russian president.

The Republican vice presidential nominee told NBC’s Meet The Press Putin is “clearly an adversary” and a “competitor,” but suggested it would be wrong to antagonise him by using stronger language against him that could hinder diplomacy efforts when it comes to the ongoing war in Ukraine.

“Well, we’re not in a war with him, and I don’t want to be in a war with Vladimir Putin’s Russia. I think that we should try to pursue avenues of peace,” he said.

Vance noted the US “obviously” has “adversarial interests” with Russia.

“We can condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and I have, and of course the president has. But we also need to engage in some smart diplomacy if we’re ever going to get out of the mess that [Vice President] Kamala Harris has left us in and get back to a posture of peace,” he continued.

Former President Donald Trump has blamed both Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and President Joe Biden for the war breaking out. He has also said negotiating a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine would be one of his first orders of business as president-elect if he secures reelection.

Trump has also criticised the Biden administration’s efforts to continue sending assistance to Kyiv, while reportedly maintaining a cozy relationship with Putin, fuelling concern among Democratic lawmakers and US allies about the future of US aid to Ukraine in the event that he wins in November. The two men allegedly spoke on the phone several times since he left office, and Trump reportedly sent Putin Covid tests for his “personal use” in 2020, according to journalist Bob Woodward’s new book War.

While Trump’s campaign has denied the allegations contained in the book, the former president refused to answer whether he has spoken to Putin since January 2021.

“I don’t comment on that,” Trump told Bloomberg’s editor-in-chief John Micklethwait earlier this month. “But I will tell you that if I did, it’s a smart thing. If I’m friendly with people, if I can have a relationship with people, that’s a good thing and not a bad thing in terms of a country.”

Meanwhile, in the NBC interview, Vance insisted that the US would remain in the NATO military alliance under a Trump presidency.

But he also went on to say Americans “can’t be the policemen of the world,” claiming some NATO members, including Germany, need to spend more on defense, echoing Trump’s words.

“I think a very significant difference between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump is Kamala Harris would like to use our tax dollars and our troops to subsidise Europeans not taking care of their own security,” Vance said. “Donald Trump wants Europe to step up big time to become a real ally of the United States and not just a dependent.”

This year, Germany met NATO’s target for members to spend at least 2% of their GDP on defence spending for the first time since the end of the Cold War in response to the Ukraine-Russia conflict, according to Reuters.

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