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Vice President JD Vance Delivers Remarks at Mid-City Steel, Aug. 28, 2025

August 28, 2025 · The White House · 1:17:10

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What happened

Vice President JD Vance delivered an extended address at Mid-City Steel in La Crosse, Wisconsin, on August 28, 2025, with Congressman Derrick Van Orden hosting and a Luther High School senior class in the audience. He opened with his grandfather’s 42 years as a union welder at Armco Steel in Middletown, Ohio, and the mill’s loss of about 80 percent of its workforce: “those proud towns became ghost towns. Well, not anymore.”

The speech walked through the Working Families Tax Cuts as, in his telling, a manufacturing law: “It let you keep more money in your pocket. It rewarded you for building a business or working at a business right here in the United States of America.” He highlighted the end of taxes on overtime and on tips — noting, as he stated it, that about 1 in 20 Wisconsin workers rely on tips — and the tariff “stick” for companies that build overseas. He said the same law “gives our incredible law enforcement over $100 billion to get those drug cartels the hell out of our country once and for all,” invests “tens of billions of dollars in our rural health care infrastructure,” and protects Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid by restricting federal health benefits to people legally in the country, as he described the law. He noted that the tax provisions passed without, as he put it, “a single Democrat vote for cutting taxes on tips, cutting taxes on overtime, or increasing the child tax credit,” and warned the La Crosse audience that Democrats would campaign against the law on health-care grounds.

Why it matters

At over an hour, the Mid-City Steel address is the Vice President’s longest single-venue economic speech of the summer tour — the fullest version of his argument that the tax law, the tariff policy, the cartel fight and the health-benefit restrictions are one connected program for the factory towns he grew up in.

Scoreboard watch

Scoreboard candidates: the figures Vance stated at La Crosse on August 28, 2025 — over $100 billion in the law for law enforcement and the cartel fight, and tens of billions for rural health care infrastructure — to be checked against the enacted law’s appropriations. Flagged for the scoreboard editor; no entry is published from this page.

Sources: The White House, “Vice President JD Vance Delivers Remarks at Mid-City Steel” (official upload, embedded above; La Crosse, WI). Remarks and figures as delivered at the event.