WASHINGTON — A week ago, the rift between former President Donald Trump and Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp looked beyond repair, with Trump’s relentless ridicule of a popular battleground-state Republican posing a potential mortal threat to his campaign.
Then Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, got Kemp on the line.
Within hours of their phone call last week, Kemp, who along with his wife had been the target ofvicious Trump attacks, was on Fox News publicly declaring his support for the GOP ticket. Soon after that, Trump was thanking Kemp for the kind words.
Vance, in an interview aboard his campaign plane Tuesday night, downplayed any role he might have had in brokering a truce, wagering that he was one of many important voices in Kemp’s ear. But he also described a strategy, blessed by Trump, that takes advantage of the idea that he can reason with or appeal to people in ways Trump cannot.
“A lot of similarities, but also a lot of differences, too,” Vance said, describing the dynamic between him and Trump.
After their first few joint campaign appearances, Vance recalled, Trump “said, basically: ‘I trust you. We should both be in different places, unless it’s a really big event. ... Divide and conquer.’”
“We’re each trying to talk to different people in different ways, and we’re each trying to try to run the race as best we can,” Vance added. “And he obviously sets the tone and sets the policy, and I just try to help.”
Trump’s feud with Kemp stems from Kemp’s refusal to interfere with the 2020 election results in Georgia, where Trump lost narrowly to Joe Biden. Democrats have high hopes for the state again this year; Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, are launching a bus tour there Wednesday.
Vance said his call with Kemp focused on the common ground Kemp and Trump share.
“The way that I approached my conversation with him was ‘I’m not going to convince you that you should change your mind on the president in the same way that I’m not going to convince the president that he should change his mind on you. But you guys agree on 90% of the things. You can put whatever personal differences aside,’” Vance said. “And I think there were probably 150 people delivering that message to both the president and Brian Kemp, and I’m glad that [Kemp] got to a good place, but I don’t claim any responsibility or credit for it.”
Kemp senior adviser Cody Hall said in a statement that “the governor conveyed to Senator Vance the same message he has been delivering for more than a year, and did again in an interview last week: that he fully supports the entire Republican ticket, is working hard to win Georgia for the former president, and strongly believes that our country can’t afford four years of a Kamala Harris presidency.”
In Tuesday’s interview, Vance also touched on how he has reconciled some of his policy positions with Trump’s, particularly on abortion. Vance campaigned last year against a constitutional amendment that passed overwhelmingly in Ohio codifying abortion rights in the state. He also in the past expressed support for federal abortion restrictions. But since he joined the GOP ticket, Vance has deferred to Trump, who has said he wants to leave the issue to the states.
“I don’t think of it as, like, backburnering your own values,” Vance said. “I am pro-life, and I do care about the issue. I do want to save as many babies as possible. I also remember here that voters get to make these decisions, and I advocated very strongly for voters to vote no [in Ohio], and we got our asses handed to us. And so I think all of us who are pro-life have to kind of step back and say, ‘How can we better make a case to the American people here?’”
Vance added that he didn’t see any “radical misalignment” between him and Trump on any issues.
“But even if there was, the voters chose him, and he chose me," he said. "And my job on the ticket is to prosecute the campaign’s case and to make him the next president of the United States.”
Vance was interviewed on the campaign plane known as Trump Force 2 as he returned to Washington following a fundraiser in Nashville, Tennessee, and a visit to Big Rapids, Michigan.
Vance has events scheduled Wednesday in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, which, along with Michigan, make up the “blue wall” industrial states that carried Trump to victory in 2016 but four years later flipped to Biden. Vance, a Midwesterner who talks about his working-class roots and struggles and how they inform his economic populist views, has made a combined 20 stops in those three states since he became the vice presidential nominee.
In Big Rapids, where plans to build an electric vehicle battery plant have stirred political controversy because of the company’s ties to China, the campaign had billed Vance’s event as smaller-scale “remarks” about the economy. But the event had the feel of a larger rally, with hundreds of people gathered under a blazing sun and humid conditions on a horse farm.
There, Vance debuted a new line of attack on Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee. Harris, he said, alluding to an Axios headline that accused her of flip-flopping on support for a border wall, is “copying all of Donald Trump’s policies.”
“In fact,” Vance added, “I’ve heard that for her debate in just a couple of weeks, she’s going to put on a navy suit, a long red tie and adopt the slogan ‘Make America Great Again.’”
Vance then headed to a nearby A&W restaurant, where he served a round of root beer floats on a shaded patio, posed for selfies and held a baby. The scene offered a contrast to his visit to a bakery last week in Valdosta, Georgia. With media in tow, Vance struggled to make casual chitchat while buying donuts, and an employee asked to be kept off camera.
Video chronicling the awkward moment went viral on social media.
“I just felt terrible for that woman,” Vance said Tuesday on the plane, referring to the bakery worker. “We walked in, and there’s 20 Secret Service agents, and there’s 15 cameras, and she clearly had not been properly warned, and she was terrified, right? I just felt awful for her.”
Vance said he enjoys engaging in that kind of retail politicking and added that he has made it clear to his staff that such visits must be planned more carefully in the future.
“We don’t want to have these scripted events — I don’t want to go and do three takes of buying Doritos at a Sheetz,” Vance said, referring to a recent Harris stop at a Pennsylvania gas station. “I like to get out there and talk to people, and we want to make sure we’re doing it but definitely make sure that people are at least OK with being on camera, or we’re going to walk in and you’re going to have a person who has, practically, a panic attack because she’s got 15 cameras in her face.”
Vance’s mother, Beverly Aikins, accompanied him on Tuesday’s trip. Vance wrote about her struggle with drug addiction in his 2016 memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” and announced in his acceptance speech at last month’s Republican convention that she was approaching 10 years of sobriety. He also shared her story with the crowd in Big Rapids, connecting the challenges his family and others have faced with what he described as the failures of past leaders.
“I just want everybody to know him like I know him,” Aikins told NBC News as her son mingled at the A&W. “He’s an amazing human being, and he really, truly thinks he can make a difference.”
On his plane, with Aikins seated beside him, Vance said he has yet to decide whom the campaign will bring in to play Walz in preparations for their Oct. 1 debate.
“The thing that I try to do, whether it’s at a rally or a press conference or a policy speech or whatever, is I just try to understand the details pretty well, because I think if you understand the details pretty well, then you actually can form your own views,” Vance said. “This sort of stuff has to happen organically. So I think it would be a huge mistake to try to over-script or overprepare.”
