JD Vance says open borders created millions of orphans during appearance in Ohio hometown

WASHINGTON — Vice President JD Vance accused Democrats of causing “millions of orphans” and suicides during a Friday stump speech in his Ohio hometown — invoking the late Democratic populist Huey Long as he described the Trump administration’s agenda.Vance, the odds-on favorite for the Republican nomination in 2028, theorized how to consolidate the GOP’s gains among working class voters while talking up gubernatorial nominee Vivek Ramaswamy and Sen.Jon Husted (R-Ohio) in Middletown.“It’s not my job to tell you who to fall in love with, how to worship, or even whether to root for the Bengals or the Browns,” the VP said at a local steel factory.“My job … is to fight for you.

It’s to fight for your blessings of liberty, for a neighborhood that’s safe, a job that’s dignified, a church that’s protected.”Vance, 42, said prior administrations had unleashed a wave of carnage by allowing the outsourcing of US jobs and the importation of fentanyl, which has killed about 400,000 Americans across the past seven years.He told the story of California computer programmer Kevin Flanagan, who shot himself in 2003 when Bank of America laid him off after requiring him to train his outsourced Indian replacments.“It’s not just Kevin, as you all know.Economists have measured the ways in which the opioid crisis exploded in the very locations where jobs were shipped overseas,” Vance said.“The open borders demanded by those same people brought some innocent people, of course it did.

But we also know that it brought a lot of cartels.It brought the fentanyl trade, and it left us with millions of orphaned children being raised by aggrieved grandparents.”“The blood of those people, in my view, it pools at the feet of those who would sell out their country for a cheap bottom line,” the VP added.“If you were unlucky, as I know many people in this room were, you were left raising a grandchild while you were mourning the child killed by the very po...