Vice President JD Vance delivered the keynote address Friday at the National Peace Officers’ Memorial Service, held on the West Front Lawn of the U.S. Capitol to honor law enforcement officers who died in the line of duty. The speech went down like a cement balloon.
“You’re always going to have terrible people who want to do the worst things,” Vance said. “But allowing so many of those people free reign, allowing so many of them to strike at our law enforcement officers, ladies and gentlemen, that was a policy choice, and I make this solemn promise to every single person here, that so long as Donald J. Trump is the president and so long as I am the vice president, we will never again let policymakers in the building behind us allow violent criminals to tee off on our police officers.”
The solemnity of that “promise” might have sounded hollow considering more than a thousand Jan. 6 insurrectionists, many of whom were convicted of assaulting law enforcement, received pardons from Trump.
And it wasn’t just his abject hypocrisy that failed to inspire. Vance’s attempts to peddle clichéd tough-on-crime platitudes landed with all of the energy of a mandatory HR seminar at TGI Friday’s.
By the time he finished speaking and stood behind a wall of bulletproof glass with the rest of Trump’s security team, it sounded as if only six people were left in the audience.
Few people have less charisma than Vance.
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