Vance claims ‘Democrats are helping China’ in pitch to autoworkers at Big Rapids campaign event

Republican vice presidential candidate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, speaking near the site of a major electric vehicle battery factory project, charged that Democratic presidential candidate Vice President Kamala Harris and the current Democratic administration ‘are helping China destroy and replace our auto industry from the inside out.’

Vance held a campaign event Tuesday in Big Rapids, Michigan near where Gotion Inc., a company that, according to FARA filings, was quietly registered as a Chinese foreign principal in 2023, is planning to build a $2.4 billion electric vehicle battery plant.

Vance said that Harris’ ‘tie-breaking vote that she cast to send inflation through the roof,’ referring to the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, made ‘Chinese companies like Gotion eligible for millions of your taxpayer dollars.’

‘Even some of the folks in Obama’s administration said that the Gotion factory plant is a threat to America’s national security,’ Vance told the audience. ‘But Kamala Harris not only wants to allow the Chinese Communist Party to build factories on American soil, she wants to pay them to do it with our tax money.’

‘Democrats in this state, and including Kamala Harris, want to give hundreds of millions of dollars to those same companies that have been undercutting Michigan autoworkers. What a disaster, isn’t it?’ he added. ‘Donald Trump has a different idea. He is going to drill, baby, drill. We’re going to unleash American workers and bring back those great factories.’

The senator also touched on the drama surrounding former President Trump’s scheduled debate with Vice President Harris after reports that the presidential nominees were clashing over debate rules ahead of the live Sep. 10 event.

‘He thinks it’s important that the American people see him debate and especially see Kamala Harris, because she’s run from the media for pretty much the entire campaign,’ Vance said in an exclusive interview with Fox News’ Aishah Hasnie at the Michigan event. ‘He also doesn’t like that they’re trying to change the rules at the very last minute, because they figured out that Kamala Harris, she’s just not that great at this.’

Vance also addressed the letter that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg sent to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan on Monday, revealing that he faced pressure from the Biden-Harris administration to censor Americans, particularly regarding COVID-19 content.

‘This should be bombshell news,’ Vance told Fox of the letter. ‘The leader of one of the most important social networks in the world just came out and said, I censored Donald Trump in the run-up to the election because there were certain elements within the Biden administration and the Biden campaign that encouraged me to do that. That is crazy. That is the revelation of censorship in a way that affected an American election.’

Fox News’ Aishah Hasnie contributed to this report.