After his plane landed at Chippewa Valley Regional Airport in Wisconsin, Donald Trump’s running mate JD Vance walked across the tarmac to get a closer look at Kamala Harris’s Air Force Two.
But she wasn’t there. After her plane landed on Wednesday afternoon, Harris met a group of Girl Scouts before she joined her motorcade to drive to a packed rally with her running mate Tim Walz in Eau Claire, where Bon Iver was performing for thousands of supporters.
Vance, after getting close to Air Force Two, turned around and walked over to a group of reporters instead.
“Hopefully it’s gonna be my plane in a few months,” he told reporters assembled on the tarmac.
“I also thought you guys might be lonely because the vice president doesn’t answer questions from reporters,” Vance said.
“I hope that she has changed her mind because it would be good for the American people and I think it would be good for you all if she actually ran a real campaign instead of one from a basement with a teleprompter,” he said.
Harris and Walz are in fact touring several battleground states this week, starting from a barnstorming debut rally in Pennsylvania on Tuesday night with stops in Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona and Nevada over the next several days.
Vance, meanwhile, is trailing his Democratic rivals with much smaller campaign events. On Wednesday, he spoke to a crowd assembled in a parking lot outside a police station in Shelby Township, Michigan, followed by a stop inside an aviation ground equipment manufacturer in Eau Claire.
Trump and Vance have repeatedly accused the vice president of being absent on the campaign trail and dodging reporters despite a public schedule taking her across the country. Trump, meanwhile, has only been speaking with sympathetic media outlets, after he caved under scrutiny from a panel of Black journalists in Chicago last week.
An all-caps campaign fundraising message on Tuesday claimed that “the world has gone to s*** and Kamala is nowhere to be found.” She was on her way to Wisconsin at the time.
“It’s been over two weeks since Kamala was installed as the Democrat nominee, and since then, THE WORLD IS ON FIRE!” according to the message from Trump’s joint fundraising committee.