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Vice President JD Vance slammed socialist New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani during a speech over the Fourth of July holiday weekend for what he called insulting the U.S. on its "most sacred day."
"Today is July 5th, 2025, which means, as all of you know, that yesterday we celebrated the 249th anniversary of the birth of our nation," Vance said Saturday in an address before the conservative think tank Claremont Institute’s Statesmanship Award Dinner in San Diego. "Now, the person who wishes to lead our largest city had, according to multiple media reports, never once publicly mentioned America's Independence Day in earnest. But when he did so this year, this is what he said, and this is an actual quote."
Vance then continued to read Mamdani's Independence Day social media post, which read in part: "America is beautiful, contradictory, unfinished. I am proud of our country, even as we constantly strive to make it better."
The vice president, who has not shied away from calling on political leaders across the world to show gratitude to the U.S. since Inauguration Day, remarked that there was "no gratitude in those words" and "no sense of owing something to this land and the people who turned its wilderness into the most powerful nation on earth."
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Zohran Mamdani is under fire for his Fourth of July post calling America "beautiful, contradictory, unfinished." (Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)
"I wonder, has he ever read the letters from boy soldiers in the Union Army to parents and sweethearts that they'd never see again?" Vance continued. "Has he ever visited the grave site of a loved one who gave their life to build the kind of society where his family could escape racial theft and racial violence? Has he ever looked in the mirror and recognized that he might not be alive were it not for the generosity of a country he dares to insult on its most sacred day?"
"Who the hell does he think that he is?" Vance said.
Vice President JD Vance slammed NYC mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani in a patriotic speech over the Fourth of July weekend. (Fox News/Special Report)
Democratic socialist Mamdani trounced his top competitor, former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, at the polls in the Democratic primary in June, becoming the party's nominee for mayor. Mamdani's victory is viewed as the Democratic Party moving further to the left in New York City after national voters sounded off in the 2024 election that the party's embrace of some left-wing policies alienated Americans.
Vance added in his San Diego speech that Mamdani, who was born in Uganda, and his family had experienced firsthand fleeing a foreign nation's dictatorship before finding refuge in the U.S., and yet the mayoral candidate still described America as incomplete and a contradiction.
Vice President JD Vance called on Mamdani to show gratitude toward the U.S. for its long history of sacrifices. (Fox News/Special Report)
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"Zohran Mamdani’s father fled Uganda when the tyrant Idi Amin decided to ethnically cleanse his nation's Indian population," Vance said. "Mamdani's family fled violent racial hatred, only for him to come to this country – a country built by people he never knew, overflowing with generosity to his family, offering a haven from the kind of violent ethnic conflict that is commonplace in world history, but it is not commonplace here – and he dares on our 249th anniversary to congratulate it by paying homage to its ‘incompleteness,’ and to its, as he calls it, ‘contradiction.'"
Mamdani's campaign did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital's request for comment on Vance's remarks.
