US Vice-President Mike Pence has given a speech at Ripon College, a small Wisconsin liberal arts institution in a city hailed as the “birthplace of the Republican Party” on Friday. At the event, he warned that a Joe Biden victory in November would put America on a course to socialism, and urged voters to vote for Trump for a second time.
The election is not about “whether America will be more conservative or liberal, more Republican or Democrat, more Red or Blue,” Pence said. “It’s whether America remains America. It’s whether we will leave to our children and grandchildren a country grounded in our highest ideals of freedom, free markets, the inalienable right to life and liberty, or whether we will leave to [them] a country that is fundamentally transformed into something else.”
“President Trump set our nation on a path of freedom and opportunity from the very first day of this administration. But Joe Biden would set America on a path of socialism and decline,” Pence added.
Calling the presumptive Democratic nominee a “Trojan horse for a radical agenda,” Pence suggested that his policies would be “so radical and so all-encompassing that it would transform this country into something utterly unrecognizable.
“It’s no wonder that socialist Bernie Sanders said that if Joe Biden was elected he would, in his words, transform the country, and be and I quote ‘the most progressive president in nearly a century’…I thought Joe Biden won the Democratic primaries, but looking at their unity agenda, it looks to me like Bernie won,” Pence said.
Emphasizing the president’s support for law enforcement amid the recent George Floyd protests, Pence said that “the hard truth is – you won’t be safe in Joe Biden’s America,” adding that “the radical left’s experiment in defunding the police is failing families in cities across this country already.”
Urging voters to make a choice in November, Pence promised that “with President Donald Trump in the White House for four more years, we’ll make America great again. Again.”
Ripon College issued a statement ahead of the event saying that it “hears” the “disappointment expressed by some” ahead of Pence’s visit, and that “colleges are places where good and bad ideas are aired.”
Americans will go to the polls on November 3 to elect the next president. This week, an NBC Wall Street Journal poll found that Biden has an 11-point lead over Trump nationally amid fears that the incumbent president is 'moving the nation in the wrong direction'. However, the poll also found Biden’s overall popularity to be slipping, with 46 percent of those questioned giving a negative assessment of the former vice president, an eight point jump from 38 percent in June.
