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Home » Transcript: VP JD Vance Delivers Remarks in La Crosse, WI – 8/28/25

Transcript: VP JD Vance Delivers Remarks in La Crosse, WI – 8/28/25

Read the full transcript of Vice President JD Vance’s remarks at Mid-City Steel in La Crosse, Wisconsin, on Thursday, August 28, 2025.

Welcome to Wisconsin

VP JD Vance: We love you all. Thank you all, Wisconsin. It’s great to be here again. Great looking crowd here. Thank you all. The best looking group of welders and steel men and women I’ve seen in my entire life, I think. This is a sharp crew.

Now, everybody behind me, I was told, volunteered to be there. And so you guys have to clap and cheer at everything that I say. And if not, we’re going to have to kick you the hell out of here. And a couple of people, a couple of them actually, and I’m not going to call them out by name, but they were selected because they’re some of the hardest working and best working people in this facility. And we just want to say we’re proud of you guys, proud of what you do, and proud that the tradition of Wisconsin craftsmanship lives on in this great facility right here today.

Notes of Appreciation

Now, before we get started here and I would talk about the big, beautiful bill, I want to give a few notes of appreciation and gratitude. So, first of all, I think this is probably the third or fourth time I’ve been to La Crosse, Wisconsin. I came here a lot during the campaign. It was always great to be here. And I joked that you all would get sick of me, but I would come back as Vice President of the United States. And I’m proud that I got to keep that promise. Thanks to you.

So I want to thank Paul Bagneski. Paul, thank you so much. I got an A-minus maybe on that pronunciation. He is the President and CEO of this incredible facility. We’re so thankful to be here. I want to thank Jake Kosciel and the rest of the Tough Job team for giving us such a warm welcome here in Wisconsin.

I also want to thank, and you heard Doug Burgum, our great Secretary of the Interior. How good of a job is Doug Burgum doing as Secretary of the Interior? Doug, thank you. Doug is doing a great job. You heard him give a shout-out, and I’m going to give another shout-out to the great Representative Derrick Van Orden. Thank you, Derrick. Please stand up. Give it up for this guy. He works harder. He works harder than anybody in Congress. He works so hard that he lost most of his hair, in fact, over his time in Congress. I’m sorry about that. I had to poke a little fun at my good friend Derrick.

But, you know, there are so many people who just show up in Washington. They go along to get along. They cast a vote or don’t, but don’t really do much else. Derrick is fighting every single day for the people of this district. You should be proud of him because I certainly am. Thank you, Derrick.

And I guess we’ve got the senior class from Luther High School. Where are all the Luther High School students? Where are you all at? Thank you all. Now, have you all started school yet or played hooky today? You have. Okay, good. Well, I’m glad the Vice President coming to town got you guys out of school a little bit. But let’s talk about the future because these kids are the future. We want to make sure that they have a prosperous American future to grow up in.

Growing Up in Factory Towns

And let me take you back a little bit to where I grew up in Middletown, Ohio, southwestern Ohio, where my papaw, and the reason I love the welders in particular, is my papaw for 42 years was a union welder at a place called Armco Steel. And when I was growing up, Armco Steel had shed about 80% of the workforce that it had employed when my papaw was working there during its heyday. And unfortunately, it was one of the lucky ones because a lot of the steel mills lost about 80% of their workforce. A lot of the steel mills didn’t exist at all.

And I think that what happened is that for those of us who grew up in those factory towns, we were so used to seeing those proud, big, beautiful factories, seeing the night sky lit up with that furnace. We were proud of what our parents and our grandparents made every single day. And of course, they were proud to earn the kind of a job that enabled them to provide us a good life. And what happened? Thanks to a generation of failed politicians and stupid decisions, those factories closed down one by one by one. And many of those proud towns that made us who we are, ladies and gentlemen, those proud towns became ghost towns.

Bringing Back American Manufacturing

Well, not anymore. What the President of the United States was elected on a promise to do was to bring back American manufacturing, to bring back American craftsmanship, and that is exactly what President Donald Trump is doing every single day in Washington. How nice is it to have a President who, instead of rewarding companies for shipping your jobs overseas, rewards companies for building factories right here in the United States of America.

How nice is it to have a President of the United States who, instead of raising your taxes, is cutting your taxes by historic margins every single day as we just did. For years, American leaders would ask you to work overtime, would ask you to spend even more time away from your family, and every hour that you spent at the job, they would reach further and further into your pocket. How nice is it to have a President of the United States who cut taxes on overtime, because we believe that if you spend an extra hour at work, the government ought to keep its hands the hell out of your pocket.