Vice President Mike Pence blasted Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) and former Vice President Joe Biden on Wednesday for attacking President Trump’s record on China.
Pence and Harris, Biden’s vice presidential pick, met on a stage in Salt Lake City, Utah, on Wednesday night for the only vice presidential debate of the 2020 presidential campaign. When the debate turned to the competing visions of the next administration’s agenda on China, Harris accused Pence and Trump of losing the trade war with China.
“The vice president earlier referred to, what he thinks is an accomplishment, the president’s trade war with China. You lost that trade war. You lost it,” Harris said. “What ended up happening is because of a so-called trade war with China, America lost 300,000 manufacturing jobs. Farmers have experienced bankruptcy because of it. We are in a manufacturing recession because of it. And when we look at where this administration has been, there are estimates that by the end of the term of this administration, they will have lost more jobs than almost any other presidential administration.”
Kamala Harris is destroying Pence by telling him that Trump lost the trade war with China, and the Trump administration will have lost the most jobs of any president in history. #VPDebate pic.twitter.com/EnbjU5Pa2a
— Sarah Reese Jones (@PoliticusSarah) October 8, 2020
Pence responded by pointing out that the previous administration under former President Barack Obama and Biden oversaw a much less aggressive stance toward the Chinese Communist Party that runs the Chinese government.
“I’d love to respond. Look, ‘lost the trade war with China’? Joe Biden never fought it. Joe Biden has been a cheerleader for Communist China over the last several decades,” Pence said. “And again, Senator Harris, you are entitled to your opinion; you’re not entitled to your own facts. When Joe Biden was vice president, we lost 200,000 manufacturing jobs and President Obama said they were never coming back. He said we needed a ‘magic wand’ to bring them back.”
“In our first three years after we cut taxes, rolled back regulation, unleashed American energy, this administration saw 500,000 manufacturing jobs created. And that’s exactly the kind of growth we are going to continue to see as we bring our nation through this pandemic,” Pence said.
#VPDebate "Lost the trade war with China? Joe Biden never fought it. Joe Biden has been a cheerleader for communist China for the last several decades." — ouch, that's gonna XI a mark. pic.twitter.com/0LqIKG4M4W
— ForAmerica (@ForAmerica) October 8, 2020
Earlier in the debate, Pence accused Biden of ripping off the Trump administration’s pandemic response plan and adopting it into the Democratic agenda under a potential Biden administration.
“The reality is when you look at the Biden plan, it reads and awful lot like what President Trump and I and our task force have been doing every step of the way. Quite frankly, when I look at their plan, which talks about advancing testing, creating new PPE, developing a vaccine, it looks a little bit like plagiarism, which is something Joe Biden knows a little bit about,” Pence said, referencing Biden’s history of plagiarism accusations dating back decades.
“I think the American people know that this is a president who has put the health of American people first. And the American people, I believe in my heart, can be proud of the sacrifices they have made. It saved countless American lives,” Pence said.