JD Vance Takes Not-So-Subtle Shot at Zohran Mamdani in America 250 Speech

Vice President JD Vance seemed to take a not-so-subtle shot at New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D) for branding America a place where the “powerful” believe “only a select few are allowed freedom” during a speech honoring America’s 250th birthday on Saturday.

Vance delivered the speech in NYC with the Statue of Liberty behind him. At one point, the vice president took a moment to bash pessimistic critics of the USA who would rather complain about the country than celebrate it.

“You’ll hear a couple small but loud voices today speak obsessively not of our national greatness, but of our national imperfections,” Vance said. “They will speak of the powerless and the disposed. They will tell you America is just another country, where the weak struggle against the strong.”

Vance then asked the crowd to “reject the two-dimensional view of your fellow citizens, and reject the two-dimensional view of your country.”

It doesn’t seem like much of a stretch to believe Vance had Mamdani in mind. The democratic socialist mayor delivered a speech from behind George Washington’s desk a day earlier that many blasted for being way too critical of America — especially on the eve of the Fourth of July.

“The powerful have always known their answer. America, in their view, is an arena of supremacy, where only a select few are allowed freedom, where not all are created equal,” Mamdani said in his video speech. “America, if you ask them, becomes less the more people it welcomes. America, they will tell you, belongs only to those with the right accent or the right shade of skin. The rest of us, they insist, should be grateful for merely being allowed to visit.”

Mamdani continued,  “How small they are, how weak, how unoriginal. At every moment in our past, those who led through exclusion and isolation have tried to win power and enrich themselves by turning us against one another. Division is the oldest trick in politics, and the cheapest.”

Vance wasn’t the only one seemingly bothered by Mamdani’s remarks.

It was easy to find pundits and social media users complaining about it on X — including X/SpaceX/Tesla boss Elon Musk, who said he was in favor of denaturalizing and deporting Mamdani; the mayor became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2018.

Here are some of those posts:

You get the idea.

Watch Vance above, via MS NOW.

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