The vice president’s visit came one week after Kirk was killed during an event on the campus of a Utah university.

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — Cheers filled the room as Vice President J.D. Vance walked out to speak in West Michigan on Wednesday.

Vance toured the Howell location for Hatch Stamping, an automotive stamping company. Howell’s Livingston County was one in which he and President Donald Trump secured over 60% of the vote last November.

Now, roughly eight months after their inauguration, Vance and allies aimed to inspire confidence in the administration’s economic direction.

“We have a master negotiator in the Oval Office who is putting American interests first again,” said U.S. Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer. “President Trump has been striking new trade deals to restore our nation as the world’s manufacturing superpower.”

It’s been a direction heralded by some, but criticized by others for aspects including what some see as the administration’s heavy-handed trade policy that had implemented or threatened wide-ranging tariffs on nations across the globe. The impact of the strategy has since contributed to at least one major West Michigan company announcing it would wind down operations.

“One of the things [some Hatch leaders] told me is that business got maybe a little tough, a little uncertain when they had a president of the United States who was obsessed with telling everybody to drive an electric vehicle, because too many of those electric vehicle components were not made in America,” Vance said. “But now that we are leaning in to great American-made automobiles, Hatch is doing better. The American auto worker is doing better.”

As part of that message, Vance also heralded the passage of what was dubbed Washington’s ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’ over the summer that extended 2017 tax reform and implemented changes like new work or community engagement requirements for SNAP and Medicaid.

“These working families tax cuts – they don’t just cut your taxes, though they certainly do,” Vance said. “They reward companies for building and investing in the United States of America.”

But the view of their economic agenda so far has been far from united, as those like the head of one of the state’s most prominent labor groups pushed back.

“Vance and Trump’s agenda is the same as always — gut unions, cut wages, and make their rich friends richer,” Michigan AFL-CIO President Ron Bieber said ahead of Vance’s remarks.

Aside from the economy, Vance also directed some of his comments regarding the administration’s ongoing immigration enforcement efforts at Democratic Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. They came as federal troops have been sent or have been expected in cities like Washington, D.C., and Memphis, Tennessee in what the administration has characterized as a crackdown on crime.

“My one message to Gretchen Whitmer is, look, the city of Detroit we know has got some serious crime problems,” he said. “And we know that it’s the people in Detroit who suffer the most when crime is allowed to run rampant all over city streets. Gretchen, we are happy to send the National Guard to Detroit, Michigan. All you got to do is ask.”

Also laced into Vance’s appearance was a remembrance of conservative activist and Turning Point U.S.A. founder Charlie Kirk, after Kirk was shot and killed last week on the campus of a Utah university.

While the case in Utah remains ongoing to officially confirm a perpetrator and the possible motive behind Kirk’s killing, Vance, who hosted the late activist’s podcast in an episode aired this week, had a message.

“I think I speak for every person in this room, and I think I speak for a majority of our fellow Americans when I say we do not attack or commit violence against people because we disagree with their ideas,” he said. “We debate ideas, and we’re going to keep on debating them, in honor of the great Charlie Kirk, for as long as I have a microphone.”