Watch: Cowardly J.D. Vance Calls School Shootings a “Fact of Life”

J.D. Vance completely fumbled his response to Wednesday’s mass shooting at Apalachee High School in Georgia, in which he resigned to school shootings as a bleak “fact of life.”

“Now look, the Kamala Harris answer to this is to take law-abiding citizens’ guns away from them. That is what Kamala Harris wants to do,” Vance said during a rally Thursday in Arizona.

“Look, I don’t like this. I don’t like to admit this. I don’t like that this is a fact of life,” Vance said. “But if you’re—if you are a psycho and you want to make headlines, you’d realize that our schools are soft targets.”

“We’ve got to bolster security so that if a psycho wants to walk through the front door and kill a bunch of children, they’re not able to,” Vance said, sharing his fatalistic view of what are entirely avoidable tragedies. There is just no way to prevent young people from committing gross acts of violence with tools that the government already supposedly regulates. Just no way!

Vance’s limp policy idea imagines public schools as the only venue for a mass shooting—increased security there would not prevent, say, a shooting at a university campus, church, grocery store, mall, or really anywhere else. Plus, even he admitted he didn’t like the idea of beefed up security around his children.

“And again, as a parent, do I want my school to have additional security? No, of course I don’t,” Vance said. Then why did he just pitch it? “I don’t want my kids to go to school in a place where they feel like they’ve got to have additional security. But that is increasingly the reality that we live in.”

Vance’s cynical response to the deadly shooting, which killed four people and injured nine others, is particularly grim in light of Kamala Harris’s response: “It doesn’t have to be this way.”

The fallout from last week’s Arlington National Cemetery fight is still plaguing the Trump campaign.

The Trump staffers reportedly involved in accosting a cemetery official are Justin Caporale, a deputy campaign manager for Donald Trump’s reelection bid, and Michel Picard, a member of Trump’s advance team, NPR reported Thursday evening.

Caporale had previously worked under former First Lady Melania Trump, and served under Florida Governor Ron DeSantis as director of external affairs, according to the Tampa Bay Times. Caporale was also listed as an on-site contact during the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol. He was, at the time, a project manager for the Women for America First rally, before some of the crowd stormed into the halls of Congress.

Trump’s decision to film at the military graveyard—and in Section 60, where recent military casualties are buried—violated federal law, which prohibits politically related activities in the cemetery such as taking photos and videos in support of a political campaign. The criminal behavior sparked a verbal and physical fight between Trump’s surrogates and an Arlington National Cemetery official who attempted to rein in the politico’s videotaping.

The Trump campaign claimed that they had been given permission to videotape by the families of fallen service members, but unfortunately for Trump, that doesn’t change federal law. In a rare statement last week, the Army said that it considered the case closed but sided with the cemetery official, writing that they believed the official had been “abruptly pushed aside” and “unfairly attacked” by Trump staffers.

Trump has even begun this week to insist the fight did not happen at all, making the involvement of a senior campaign staffer all the more damaging. Trump’s campaign has repeatedly promised to release video exonerating both him and his staffers, but no video has appeared.

The Republican presidential nominee’s anti-military rhetoric has been a point of contention with current and former service members in recent weeks. In August, the reputed Vietnam-era draft dodger came under fire for arguing that the Presidential Medal of Freedom he awarded to one of his billionaire donors was “much better” than the nation’s highest military honor, the Medal of Honor. That comment struck a nerve with veterans, who connected Trump’s disrespectful rhetoric to a 2020 Atlantic report that caught the former president repeatedly referring to fallen soldiers as “suckers and losers.”

The Republican Party is in trouble this election, and may lose its majority in the House of Representatives—so says Texas Representative Tony Gonzalez, a Republican himself.

Speaking at the Texas Tribune Festival on Thursday, the congressman said he believed the party would lose in November due its own actions.

“What’s frustrating me is I firmly believe that House Republicans are going to lose the majority—and we’re going to lose it because of ourselves,” Gonzales said.

Gonzalez said that a culture of blame had taken hold of his party, as well as the Democrats, pointing to a cycle of oversight hearings opposed to whichever party was in power.

“It’s not rocket science here. You know the economy, it’s really real. I mean, more and more middle-class Americans are falling further and further behind in access to quality health care,” said Gonzalez. “Are we talking about this? Are we talking about some of these kind of kitchen table issues? No—it’s all about who we’re going to impeach.”

Gonzalez was censured by the Texas state Republican Party earlier this year for voting for gun safety legislation, and increasing same-sex marriage protections. He also directed some of his criticism toward Democrats, who failed to break through for a major victory in the state.

“Texas Democrats are failing to deliver the message. They are stuck in all-or-nothing, and guess what? They’re getting nothing,” Gonzalez said. “That works out well for Republicans.”

Texas Democrats “haven’t evolved into going, ‘How do I win a race? How do I deliver a message for the general population, and not just my base?’” Gonzalez added. “And anytime you get stuck in that, you’re going to lose.”

Gonzalez hasn’t shied away from criticizing his party in the past, attacking Representative Matt Gaetz for “paying minors to have sex with them at drug parties” and Representative Bob Good for endorsing his opponent, “a known neo-Nazi,” in a CNN interview in April.

“These people used to walk around with white hoods at night. Now they’re walking around with white hoods in the daytime,” Gonzalez said at the time.

The Texas congressman isn’t the only member of his party who has been critical of the GOP’s lack of results recently. Last November, Representative Chip Roy yelled at his colleagues for failing to accomplish anything significant, and in January, Representative Andy Biggs complained on Newsmax that his party has accomplished “nothing” since winning control of the House in 2022.

Gonzalez isn’t likely to win over many of his colleagues, though: The National Republican Congressional Committee immediately issued a statement saying that they “disagree” with him.

Hours after the Justice Department announced it is charging a former Trump adviser over his work with Russian media, Donald Trump made a shocking promise: He’ll lift U.S. sanctions on Russia.

The Justice Department on Thursday charged Trump’s 2016 campaign adviser Dimitri Simes, as well as his wife, Anastasia, for working with a sanctioned Russian state television network and laundering the profit. According to the indictment, the couple received over $1 million, a personal car, and a driver for their work with Russia’s Channel One. (Simes, by the way, is mentioned over 100 times in the Mueller report, for his relationship with Trump allies like Jared Kushner.)

Given the news, when Trump took the stage at the Economic Club of New York on Thursday, the first question from the panel of business leaders was about Russian sanctions. H. Rodgin Cohen, senior chair of law firm Sullivan & Cromwell, asked the former president if he “would strengthen or modify any of these economic sanction programs, particularly Russia.”

Trump then went on a rant about the problems of sanctions, stating clearly, “I want to use sanctions as little as possible.”

“You’re losing Iran, you’re losing Russia. China is out there trying to get their currency to be the dominant currency,” he said, explaining that he believes sanctions of countries like Russia weaken the dollar. “There’s so much conflict with all these countries that you’re going to lose” the dominance of the dollar.

During his time in office, Trump imposed new sanctions on Iran and North Korea but was so reluctant to impose sanctions on Russia, despite election interference and its use of chemical weapons, that lawmakers had to force his hand. As he described to Cohen on Thursday, Trump was quick to take the punishment away. “I use sanctions very powerfully against countries who deserve it, then I take them off.”

The sanctions that Dimitri and Anastasia Simes violated were put in place “in response to Russia’s illegal aggression in Ukraine,” U.S. Attorney Matthew M. Graves said in a statement.

Thursday’s indictment comes on the heels of another Justice Department case charging two Russian state media employees in “a scheme to create and distribute content to U.S. audiences with hidden Russian government messaging.” Several prominent pro-Trump influencers were implicated in the case.

Donald Trump couldn’t come up with a meaningful answer when asked about how he would make childcare affordable Thursday.

Speaking at the Economic Club of New York, the Republican presidential nominee gave a long, meandering answer to the question and didn’t even mention children or any possible solutions to the issue, even though he was asked what specific legislation he would pass.

“It’s a very important issue. But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about that, because, look, childcare is childcare. It’s something you know you have to have it, in this country you have to have it,” Trump’s answer began, before he went off on a tangent about economic numbers.

“We’re going to be taking in trillions of dollars, and as much as childcare is talked about as being expensive, it’s, relatively speaking, not very expensive compared to the kind of numbers we’ll be taking in. We’re going to make this into an incredible country that can afford to take care of its people,” Trump added, still failing to actually answer the question.

Trump’s incoherent answer was somehow worse than the one his running mate, J.D. Vance, gave Wednesday at a Turning Point Action event in Arizona when asked a similar question. Vance told conservative pundit Charlie Kirk that he would suggest people turn to their family members to help with childcare, or, if family members were not available, to loosen education requirements for childcare workers.

Aside from the fact that these answers indicate that the ostensibly pro-family Republican Party has poor solutions to making childcare less expensive, they also show Trump’s increasing cognitive decline. He was asked a straightforward question on how he would make childcare less expensive and the specific legislation he would pursue to make that possible. Trump either had no interest in a coherent answer or wasn’t capable of providing one. Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign had a quick response.

“Billionaire-bought Donald Trump’s ‘plan’ for making child care more affordable is to impose a $3,900 tax hike on middle class families,” Harris campaign spokesperson Joseph Costello said in a statement. “The American people deserve a President who will actually cut costs for them, like Vice President Harris’ plan to bring back a $3,600 Child Tax Credit for working families and an expanded $6,000 tax cut for families with newborn children.”

Is Trump capable of presenting, or even understanding, substantive policy ideas? His apparent mental state says he is not, and media coverage seems to gloss over discussions about his condition. Perhaps the upcoming debate with Harris next week will finally expose him in front of a national audience.