WEST PITTSTON, Pa. — Vice President JD Vance gave an early preview of the Republican message ahead of next year’s midterm elections Wednesday, saying at a machine shop in northeast Pennsylvania that the newly-enacted One Big Beautiful Bill Act will bring “American manufacturing roaring back to life.”
“This facility employs people who are participating in the proud tradition of manufacturing, of making great, big and beautiful things with American workers and with American hands,” Vance told his audience at Don’s Machine Shop, many of whom were decked out in “Make America Great Again” gear.
Vance, 40, recalled that his late father, also named Don, owned a similar business that fell on hard times because “what the Chinese and other Asian, primarily, [and] Mexican manufacturing economies were doing is they were stealing American jobs.
“They were making it easier to undercut the wages of American workers and the United States lost a lot of great big beautiful factories during that period, thanks in large part because of bad decisions made by American leadership.”
Addressing Don’s management, the veep predicted “while you guys thrived with bad policy coming from Washington DC, I think that you’re going to take off into a rocket ship with good policy coming from Washington DC under Donald J. Trump’s leadership.”
Vance launched his sales pitch for the massive Trump agenda bill on the same day new polling from CNN and SSRS showed 61% of respondents opposed the bill — and more than half (51%) said they expected it to hurt the economy more than help it.
“For decades in this country, the story was that blue collar workers in particular, they might get a little pay raise or they might not get any pay raise at all, but it was never enough to keep pace with inflation,” Vance told his audience. “No matter how hard you worked, no matter how hard you came to work every single day, no matter how hard, how many overtime hours, for example, you put in, you were falling behind. Way too many good Pennsylvania families were falling behind.
“And under just six months of the president’s leadership, we’ve got — inflation is coming under control, and blue collar wages are rising faster than they have risen in 60 years. That is a testament to great presidential leadership and the great American people.”
West Pittston is part of Luzerne County, whose residents — many of them working-class voters with Polish or Italian ancestry — have voted for President Trump in each of his three runs for the White House after backing Democratic candidates since Bill Clinton in 1992.
The VP made a point of noting that no Democrats had supported the Big Beautiful Bill Act, which narrowly passed the House and Senate earlier this month, and mocked their opposition to Trump’s proposed tariff regime.
“Democrats seem to like everything that increases taxes,” Vance said. “If you’ve got a health care problem, they’ll say, we’ll just raise taxes, right? Health care costs in this country, we’re working on it, they’re way too expensive. Democrats say, we’ll just raise taxes. We’ve got not enough people working. Democrats will say just raise taxes. That’s their solution to every single problem. But you know, the one group of people in the entire world that they don’t seem interested in penalizing is foreign countries that take advantage of this country, and that’s got to stop.
“Part of the big beautiful agenda is saying that if you’re going to build something in the United States of America, we’re going to reward you and we’re going to fight for you. But if you want to build something overseas, you’re going to pay a big fat tariff before you bring it back into the United States of America, and that’s exactly how it should be.”
Vance’s Wednesday remarks followed Trump’s trip to Pittsburgh Tuesday to unveil a $90 billion AI and energy investment package that he said will boost jobs in the Steel City area.
The president claimed his tariffs would lead foreigners to set up factories in the US to build the AI and robot technology that may be needed to fill future jobs.
