Vice President JD Vance casually slipped Wednesday that the Trump administration is “retraining the entire government” to focus on “left-wing violence.”
Speaking on The Charlie Kirk Show, Vance, 41, made the chilling remark while addressing the late conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s assassination.
“Because we have such a big problem with left-wing political violence, we have to train the investigatory and law enforcement powers of the government to focus on that particular problem,” said Vance. “We really have to retrain the entire government to focus on this left-wing violence problem. We are doing it.”
Though Vance didn’t reveal how the Trump administration was “retraining the entire government,” he repeated conspiracies about “paid protestors” and voiced his desire to look into how those who oppose Trump get paid.
As an example, he asked, “If a brick gets thrown through a wall in a government building, who bought the brick?”
Of note, in January 2025, Vance supported President Trump’s decision to pardon January 6th rioters who smashed windows to break into the Capitol building with the aim of overturning the 2020 election results.
The Daily Beast has reached out to Vance for comment.
Vance’s appearance on The Charlie Kirk Show was filled with false statements and convenient omissions. Earlier in the podcast, Vance said, “Political violence, it’s just a statistical fact that it’s a bigger problem on the left.”
This is not true. Domestic terrorism in the United States is primarily carried out by right-wing groups, as the Department of Justice asserted until mid-September, when it wiped a study saying “the number of far-right attacks continues to outpace all other types of terrorism and domestic violent extremism.” Other studies published after the Department of Justice wiped its own study back up the claims that far-right political violence is more prevalent than left-wing violence.
Vance also claimed, “If you had, god forbid, somebody on the left that was assassinated, I’m sure you could find one person who would maybe celebrate it... but the fact that it became mainstream to celebrate Charlie [Kirk]’s death... it was just really disgusting.”
In recent years, several Republicans in Washington have made offensive remarks about acts of political violence. After the killings of Democratic Minnesota Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, by a Republican gunman, MAGA Sen. Mike Lee of Utah tried to score political points by baselessly claiming the shooter was a Marxist. He also joked “Nightmare on Walz Street,” referring to the state’s governor, Tim Walz.
At a campaign event in 2023, Trump mocked the attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul Pelosi, by a right-wing assailant. “We’ll stand up to crazy Nancy Pelosi, who ruined San Francisco — how’s her husband doing, anybody know?" he quipped.
The vice president’s alarming rhetoric aligns with Republicans’ coordinated messaging against Democratic protestors as “violent” political enemies and “terrorists” ahead of the No Kings protest on October 18.
During the first No Kings protests on June 14, 99.5 percent of reported protests had no injuries or property damage, according to Waging Non-violence. In some locations, such as Nashville, counter-protestors were arrested for brandishing weapons.
