Tamara Keith:
Yes. And in that interview, Vance offered no apology and in fact criticized Dana for suggesting that these threats against schools and other public places in the Springfield community might have something to do with statements made by Vance and former President Trump, both of whom continue to amplify this and have never backed down or apologized.
But the Trump campaign’s approach, the Trump political ethos, is to just dig in. And there’s a couple of things they’re doing here. One is, they’re trying to get people to talk about immigration in a way that focuses people’s attention on dogs and cats and immigrants from Haiti and people who are here legally.
So this is kind of an unusual way to get people talking about immigration, but the other thing is, this was a week where former President Trump had a really bad debate, where he got on stage and said he had the idea of a plan, but he didn’t have an actual plan, and a lot of things went wrong for Trump.
And he had been fighting for weeks to get political influence turned towards him on his terms, so this was a way for them to get political influence on their terms.