Vice President JD Vance came out swinging against former President Barack Obama on Fox News, accusing him of making “absolutely disgusting” remarks about the White House and the assassination of right-wing youth activist Charlie Kirk.
Vance sat down with Fox host Jesse Watters, who opened the conversation by pressing him on Obama’s recent comments. “Barack Obama says your White House is dividing the country, and you’re exploiting Charlie Kirk’s death to attack Democrats,” Watters said.
The vice president pushed back hard. “We’re not exploiting Charlie Kirk’s death to do anything except to achieve justice,” Vance said. “And I think if Barack Obama — I haven’t seen that comment, Jesse, but if he said that, that’s absolutely disgusting. What we’re trying to do is understand how young people are being radicalized and who is funding all these efforts of radicalization.”
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He then drew comparisons to the unrest of 2020. “We saw this in the summer of 2020. Now, thank God that wasn’t primarily, actually 20 people, over 20 people died in the riots in the summer of 2020. That is political terrorism. But it’s not just the people who were killing the cops. It’s not just the people who were engaging in throwing the Molotov cocktails in the riots. Where was the money coming from? Who was organizing this violent activity?”
Vance insisted that his words were not an attack on Democrats as a whole. “That is not going after Democrats, unless, by implication, you’re saying every single Democrat is involved in planning political violence. If that’s true … then we’re going to get to the bottom of the truth, and we’re going to stop the political violence. And we’re going to do it however we have to do it, of course, within the constitutional limits that Charlie loved so much.”
Obama’s speech on the assassination painted a very different picture. He criticized President Donald Trump for seizing on Kirk’s death to “identify an enemy,” warning that grief and horror over political violence should not be weaponized to shut down debate.
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“When it happens to some, even if the person is on the other side, it happens to all of us, and we have to be clear and forthright in condemning it,” Obama said. “That doesn’t mean that we can’t have a debate about the ideas that people who were victims of political violence were promoting.”
Kirk, a controversial activist known for pushing far-right ideas such as abolishing the Civil Rights Act, has become a lightning rod in the national conversation since his killing. For Vance and other Trump allies, the case is proof of a broader pattern of radicalization they say must be rooted out. For Obama, the message was about protecting the integrity of public debate while condemning violence on all sides.
The clash between Obama and Vance underscores just how quickly Kirk’s death has escalated into a national political flashpoint, raising questions about whether leaders are honoring his memory or turning it into ammunition for a broader fight.