Republican vice presidential nominee Ohio Senator J.D. Vance continues to shine on the campaign trail. In an appearance Tuesday night at a Moms for America town hall at the Union League Liberty Hill in Montgomery County in the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania suburbs.
Sharing the stage with moms, Vance took questions for almost forty-five minutes.
Vance was given a rock star reception–a striking testament to how he has overcome the vicious media attacks when he was named by President Trump as his running mate in July. The 40-year-old married father of three was eminently relatable to the moms gathered for the town hall.
The Trump campaign posted a couple highlight clips from the Q & A:
“J.D. Vance: “We grew up in a country where we were taught to think of people as people — We have to do is defund CRT and the radical curriculum going into our schools — What real leadership requires is emphasizes our commonality as Americans.”
.@JDVance: “We grew up in a country where we were taught to think of people as people — We have to do is defund CRT and the radical curriculum going into our schools — What real leadership requires is emphasizes our commonality as Americans.” pic.twitter.com/t9sK6VS0nj
— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) October 16, 2024
“J.D. Vance’s final message to all the moms: “Get out there and get involved… If you want to take your country back, if you want to teach your kids your own values, if you want to save your children from unsafe neighborhoods… we have to get out there and we have to elect Donald Trump.”
.@JDVance‘s final message to all the moms: “Get out there and get involved… If you want to take your country back, if you want to teach your kids your own values, if you want to save your children from unsafe neighborhoods… we have to get out there and we have to elect Donald… pic.twitter.com/0jsQCJKa7T
— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) October 16, 2024
Video of the complete town hall cued to the introduction of Vance. Scroll back for more of the Moms for America program.
Paul Villarreal posted a summary of the questions:
- What are the biggest differences for you in the three months since you were named the VP nominee by President Trump?; How have things been for your wife since you were picked?;
- What changed for you in your opinion of Trump? (Vance was initially not a fan);
- What will Trump do to restructure FEMA and rebuild western North Carolina?;
- What will Trump do to protect the rights of families of homicide victims?;
- How fast can we reduce prices and have a normal economy again?;
- What will Trump do to uphold my parental rights?;
- How can we improve the process to legally immigrate to the USA?;
- How can we improve education for children to help prevent drug problems?;
- How would Trump work on the issue of medical resources being strained because of the influx of illegal immigrants?;
- How would Trump handle the matters of CRT, DEI and etc., that are taught to kids?
FULL EVENT
Senator JD Vance town hall with Moms for America tonight in Lafayette Hill, Pennsylvania.
Questions asked:
* What are the biggest differences for you in the three months since you were named the VP nominee by President Trump?
* How have things been for your wife… pic.twitter.com/o6mOhJEGUE
— Paul Villarreal (AKA Vince Manfeld) (@AureliusStoic1) October 16, 2024
One answer stood out, though they were all outstanding. A mother who lost her son to fentanyl asked Vance about how to reach and educate children to protect them from the deadly plague of drugs.
(Lightly edited transcript via YouTube.)
Emcee: “Stefanie Turner has a question for you to Stefanie is from Texas.”
Turner: “Hello, hi Senator Vance, um as a mother who has lost a son to fentanyl poisoning I deeply understand the border crisis and the human impact that it is having.
My question to you is how do we cut through the red tape and move faster to reach every child across the US with education-based prevention programs? We can’t afford to sit idle while more lives are lost, to innocent children who have no knowledge of this.
Vance: “Yes ma’am and uh how old was your your son?”
Turner: “He was nineteen, (he died) in 2021.”
Vance: “I’m very sorry to hear it. What was his name?”
Turner: “Tucker.”
Vance: “Okay, I’ll say I’ll say a prayer for him tonight.”
Turner: “Thank you ”
Vance: “And um you know, not nearly in the way that you do but we’ve of course experienced the problems of addiction in my own family. And you one of the ways that I think about this is we want people to have second chances because you know when, when, when you, when you’re caught in the throws of addiction it’s so hard to get out of it but a lot of people do get out of it but if they get out of it and then they relapse and they relapse into fit and all sometimes there’s not another second chance and that’s really what we have to change.
That’s why this poison is so dangerous and so deadly is it takes away those second chances from our families, from our moms, from our dads, from our kids. It’s got to stop and it’s, it’s disgraceful that we frankly have a government right now that’s facilitating it instead of stopping it.
“And you talked about cutting through the red tape and. and, and you know what we can do on prevention and education, I think one of
these things is you know you can only do so much with so many dollars.And so let’s say you have curriculum money that’s going into radical gender ideas instead of teaching kids how to say no to drugs, how to resist peer pressure, the warning signs for addiction because look, I mean you probably appreciate this ma’am, having seen it, but you know some people get addicted the minute they take an opioid and some people could take Percocet for 3 years and never get addicted.
I mean, I, you know, I, I’ve seen this even with my own friends who had a minor surgery who take one Percocet and they’re like I’m never taking it again because I liked it way too much, it did something to me. We got to teach kids to recognize right when they’re going down that, that very dark pathway.
“You know, the second thing is and I, I, I know friends from back home, family from back home who were involved in, in detox and if you think about recovery as being a very long road the very first step is very often detox and there are not enough detox facilities in the United States of America right now.
We should empower our churches and our local community organizations to provide those detoxes because you can’t get into recovery if you don’t do the detox first.
And it’s very very hard to take that first step, so why don’t we make it easier to take that first step in the first place. Shut down the poison coming into our country in the first place and teach our children the red flags and the warning signs about addiction. I think if we do that we’ll we’ll start getting down the road to solving this.
“I mean look, I, I, it is an unspeakable human tragedy what’s going on in this country. A hundred thousand people, many of them in the prime of their lives, I mean, I, I, I, I, I’ve known so many people who have lost their lives this and I’m sure ma’am you you’re asking yourself the same questions, like you know who who would he have fallen in love with, right?
What, what, what would the kids have looked like? The human tragedy that we’re allowing to happen to this country, it has got to stop. President Trump and I will fight to stop it. I promise you.”
