Donald Trump’s campaign launched a “don’t believe your lying ears” defense of his running mate JD Vance for calling school shootings “a fact of life.”
The vice-presidential candidate offered the staggering description the day after a 14-year-old given an AR rifle by his father allegedly murdered two teachers and two students and wounded dozens more at his high school.
“I don’t like that this is a fact of life,” Vance said at a campaign event in Phoenix Thursday. “But if you are a psycho and you want to make headlines, you realize that our schools are soft targets. And we have got to bolster security at our schools so if a psycho wants to walk through the front door and kill a bunch of children they’re not able to.”
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But the Trump campaign, apparently sensing another gaffe by the accident prone Vance responded by calling Kamala Harris’ campaign “morons” and “interns” for highlighting what he said.
The defense campaign came in response to a Harris campaign statement about what Vance had said. “Donald Trump and JD Vance think school shootings are a ‘fact of life’ and ‘we have to get over it,’” Harris’ team wrote—the latter quote a reference to remarks Trump made in January following a school shooting in Iowa. “It’s just horrible, so surprising to see it here, but have to get over it, we have to move forward,” the former president said at the time.
“Kamala’s interns just released a statement pushing FAKE NEWS that the Associated Press just retracted,” Trump’s campaign wrote in a post replying to the Harris camp’s statement. “Watch the full video and you’ll clearly see that JD Vance does not say what they claim he said.”
Vance did call school shootings a “fact of life,” though the Harris camp’s statement leaves out that the Republican vice presidential nominee says he would like to see security levels in schools that he says would prevent shootings.
The Trump campaign’s claim that the Associated Press made a retraction appears to refer to a deleted tweet, not a story.
The AP deleted a post on X which also said Vance called school shootings a “fact of life,” later replacing it with another adding more detail of what Trump’s VP pick had said.
The news agency did not retract its story about Vance’s remarks, which was linked in both tweets. It also explained in a follow-up post that the original was replaced “to add context to the partial quote from Vance.”
It’s not the first time the AP has drawn the ire of Vance supporters this election cycle, with the agency previously publishing and then quickly killing off an eyebrow-raising “fact-check” piece with the headline: “No, JD Vance did not have sex with a couch.”
Vance’s comments about the Apalachee High School shooting in Georgia come as polls show likely voters in the state almost evenly split between Trump and Harris as both campaigns focus in on key battlegrounds in the home stretch of the election.
