JD Vance Says Kamala Harris Is No Martin Luther King

Republican vice-presidential candidate JD Vance has taken aim at the media and Vice President Kamala Harris, telling supporters that “she’s not MLK.”

At a Saturday night campaign rally in St. Cloud, Minnesota, Vance said the media had misled people about Harris and President Joe Biden.

“We’ve got some of our friends in the media back there,” he said, gesturing to the back of the venue while the crowd loudly booed. “They deserve it,” he said.

“For three and a half years, my friends, they told us that Joe Biden was Abraham Lincoln. And now the media tells us that Kamala Harris is Martin Luther King Jr. Can you believe it?” Vance said.

Harris’ campaign will be seeking to capitalize on her status as the first Black woman and person of south Asian descent to be a major party presidential nominee. In a poll last week in Michigan, no Black voters supported Trump, while 82.1 percent supported Harris.

On July 21, Biden announced he would not seek reelection and endorsed Harris, who has since become the presumptive nominee to replace him at the top of the Democratic ticket; all her most likely rivals have endorsed her.

“But we all know she’s not MLK, just as Joe Biden was not Abraham Lincoln,” Vance said.

“We know that she is a card-carrying member of the San Francisco Lunatic Fringe.” Harris was born in Oakland, California, and was a senator representing the state from 2017 to 2021.

Trump, who appeared with Vance at the rally, has positioned himself against the media since his 2016 presidential campaign, when he started using the term “fake news” to describe not just misleading journalism, but as a general term to describe negative press coverage of himself.

After Biden’s widely criticized debate in Atlanta, many leading Republicans accused the president of being cognitively unfit for office and the media and Harris of covering up his decline.

Vance and Trump have been ramping up attacks on Harris since Biden stood down, especially characterizing her as extremely left-wing, and out of touch with moderate voters, as well as holding her responsible for the ongoing border crisis.

“The chief of border patrol was appointed over a year ago, but border czar Kamala Harris hasn’t spoken a word to him. This administration handed 3 million work permits to illegal immigrants, destroying American jobs and wages,” Vance said.

“If Kamala wins, she’ll give jobs to illegal aliens and provide them with free healthcare and tuition, all at your expense.”

The name “border czar” has been widely used by the media to describe Harris since March 2021, when Biden assigned her the task of overseeing diplomatic efforts with the governments of Mexico and other Central American countries to deal with the “root cause” of the influx of migrants across the southern border.

Customs and Border Protection data shows that a higher number of unauthorized migrants have crossed into the U.S. each month under the Biden administration than under the previous Trump administration.

Newsweek has contacted the Trump/Vance campaign and the Harris campaign via email outside of business hours for comment.