Vice President JD Vance on Thursday took the White House’s fiery crime crackdown on the road, casting another Black-led city in apocalyptic terms on a trip that was designed to tout tax cuts and other administration policies.
Vance was in Peachtree City, Georgia, a purple Atlanta suburb, to sell the White House’s One Big Beautiful Bill — since rebranded the Working Families Tax Cut — as a win for the working-class. Speaking from a refrigeration equipment manufacturer whose products end up in Chick-fil-A restaurants, the vice president extolled the GOP’s marquee legislation for slashing taxes on tips and overtime and bolstering American manufacturing — the same messaging he’s used during similar events this summer at a machine shop in Pennsylvania and a steel facility in Ohio, but now with a new name.
But in the firehose of President Donald Trump’s Washington, the megalaw — which Trump signed on July 4 — was no longer the story of the summer. Attention has since shifted to Trump’s takeover of Washington, which the president celebrated by visiting National Guard troops and federal officers the same day his vice president was in Georgia.
Vance decided to lean in.
“I want you to be able to go shopping, or go and get a nice meal with your family, without the fear that you’re going to get mugged or even worse because you had the audacity to take your family out for a day in one of our great American cities,” Vance said.
Trump and Vance have long described the country’s urban centers — which tend to be deeply Democratic and ethnically diverse — as sites of danger, deviance and decay. Trump has referred to New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago — America’s three most populous cities — as “warzones.” And last week, when the president announced his crackdown on Washington, he put Baltimore, Maryland, and Oakland, California, on notice, saying “they’re so far gone.”
“We’re not going to lose our cities over this,” Trump said. “And this will go further. We’re starting very strongly with D.C.”
On Thursday, in Peachtree City, about 30 miles outside Atlanta, Vance painted the southern city as a place where families cower in fear of criminals and “cross the street” to “avoid a crazy person yelling.”
“Those are your streets, paid for with your tax dollars, and you ought to be able to use them like any other citizen of this country,” Vance said.
The vice president acknowledged that the administration has focused on Washington because of Trump’s unique power over it as a federal city, but said, “We certainly hope, whether it’s Atlanta or anywhere else, people are gonna look around and say, ‘We don’t have to live like this.’”
Critics say Trump and Vance’s rhetoric about urban crime has racial undertones, and the six cities he named explicitly in his news conference last week are led by Black mayors. But the White House is attempting to defend its position by slamming detractors for being white.
When Vance, alongside Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and top White House aide Stephen Miller, were heckled by protesters Wednesday in Union Station, the vice president said they were “old, primarily white people” who have “never felt danger in their entire lives.”
Vance continued that tactic Thursday. Bashing the racial justice protests in 2020, which led to major anti-police sentiment in the Democratic Party, Vance said it was “disproportionately Black Atlantans who suffer the most from high violent crime.”
Asked about the historical pain associated with homeless people who were swept off Atlanta’s streets in preparation for the 1996 Summer Olympics, Vance first reminded the local reporter that he had been 12 years old at the time. “I was worried about football and fishing,” he said.
But, the vice president added, “the question betrays the question of what we’re trying to do, and what is the nature of true compassion.”
“Why have we convinced ourselves that it’s compassionate to allow a person who’s obviously a schizophrenic or suffering from some other mental illness, why is it compassionate to let that person fester in the streets?” he said.
The “compassionate thing to do,” Vance continued, was to “get them in treatment, not to let them sit on the streets and yell at our people while they’re walking by.”
The vice president has spoken before about compassion in policy. He argued in January that “your compassion belongs first to your fellow citizens,” citing an ancient Catholic concept called ordo amoris. The late Pope Francis later took issue with Vance’s understanding of the concept in an unusual public rebuke of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.
Vance on Thursday appeared to blend his conception of compassion, passion for nativism and suggestion that people with generational roots in the country have a greater claim over its privileges of citizenship to sell a greater crime crackdown.
“This country was built by your grandparents, by your parents, by your forebearers — you ought to have the right to live a good life in this country,” he said.
He added: “The people who built Atlanta did not build it so that you would not be able to walk down the streets of Atlanta safely at night. They built it so you could enjoy it.”
