The Trump campaign attacked Kamala Harris’ “interns” for spreading “fake news” after the Democratic nominee’s team launched a broadside against JD Vance for lamenting that school shootings are an unfortunate “fact of life” that warrants more robust security in public schools.
At a campaign event in Phoenix Thursday, Vance called this week’s shooting in Georgia “an awful tragedy” that should not have happened and offered his sympathies to affected families at Apalachee High School.
“I don’t like that this is a fact of life,” Vance said, responding to a question from a reporter. “But if you are a psycho and you want to make headlines, you realize that our schools are soft targets. And we have got to bolster security at our schools so if a psycho wants to walk through the front door and kill a bunch of children they’re not able to.”
In response, the Harris campaign tweeted a statement reading “Donald Trump and JD Vance think school shootings are a ‘fact of life’ and ‘we have to get over it’”—the latter quote a reference to remarks Trump made in January following a school shooting in Iowa. “It’s just horrible, so surprising to see it here, but have to get over it, we have to move forward,” the former president said at the time.
Trump’s camp responded with a tweet of their own. “Kamala’s interns just released a statement pushing FAKE NEWS that the Associated Press just retracted,” it reads. “Watch the full video and you’ll clearly see that JD Vance does not say what they claim he said.”
While Vance did indeed call school shootings a “fact of life,” the Harris camp’s statement leaves out that the Republican vice presidential nominee says he would like to see security levels in schools that he says would prevent shootings.
The Trump campaign’s claim that the Associated Press made a retraction appears to refer to a deleted tweet, not a story.
The AP deleted a post on X that said Vance called school shootings a “fact of life” without mentioning that he was lamenting the situation and replaced it with one with greater detail. The news agency did not retract its story about Vance’s remarks, which was linked in both tweets.
