Vice President JD Vance appeared at a Turning Point USA town hall-style event at the University of Georgia in Athens on April 14, 2026, delivering a wide-ranging conversation that touched on grief and loyalty inside the conservative movement, an ongoing nuclear deal negotiation with Iran, a government fraud crackdown led by Dr. Mehmet Oz, legal immigration reform, and the 2026 midterms. The event was hosted by Andrew Kolvet, filling in for Erika Kirk — widow of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, who was assassinated in September 2025 — after she received serious threats that nearly caused the event to be cancelled. Vance used profanity on-stage to defend Erika Kirk against critics he said were attacking her grieving process, called the Iran ceasefire “holding” after an unprecedented high-level meeting in Pakistan, described arresting Medicare fraudsters in Los Angeles and cutting off Minnesota over a Somali fraud scheme, announced that new H-1B visa issuances are down roughly 90%, and previewed a forthcoming memoir about his faith journey titled Communion, due in June 2026. Assistance from Claude AI.
Participants
| Name | Role |
|---|---|
| JD Vance | Vice President of the United States |
| Andrew Kolvet | Co-host, Turning Point USA podcast; event moderator |
| Erika Kirk | Widow of Charlie Kirk; absent due to security threats |
| Audience questioners | University of Georgia students (Hope, Jacob, Dane Hoff, Esther, and others) |
Referenced but not present: Kash Patel (FBI Director), Dr. Mehmet Oz (Administrator, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services), Charlie Kirk (Turning Point USA founder, deceased), Savannah Hernandez (conservative activist), Tim Walz (referenced from 2024 VP debate)
Erika Kirk, Threats, and the Defense of a Grieving Widow
The event almost didn’t happen. Kolvet opened by explaining that Erika Kirk, who normally co-hosts these events, had received “very serious threats” and was not present. Vance said he had been worried just two hours earlier that the event might need to be cancelled.
“Let’s let Erika do what she needs to do for herself and her family. I’m sure Andrew will fill in and let’s go and make this an amazing event.”
Vance then offered an extended, emotional defense of Erika Kirk, who has faced public criticism — from some corners of the conservative media world — over how she has handled her grief since Charlie Kirk was shot and killed on September 10, 2025.
“I was there with her, I was holding her hand, my wife was hugging her while we loaded Charlie’s body onto Air Force Two and said the Lord’s prayer. The people telling you that Erika wasn’t grieving her husband are full of shit.”
He immediately apologized for the language, adding that his wife had been trying to get him to clean it up for twelve years without success, then returned to the substance: “To say that Erika Kirk was somehow complicit in it is so preposterous and so disgusting.”
Vance described picking up Charlie Kirk’s body in Utah alongside Andrew Kolvet, meeting Erika and the Kirk family there, and a private moment in which Erika told him she wished she and Charlie had been able to have more children. He connected that to his own wife Usha’s pregnancy — the couple is expecting their fourth child — and said grief involves a constant flood of contradictory emotions, including laughter and sobbing in the same hour.
“If your instinct is to go after not the left wing radicals who are assaulting Savannah or not the people who shot Charlie Kirk, but if your instinct is to go after a young mother because she’s grieving in a way that you find wrong — well, why don’t you stay in your lane and mind your own business?”
Kolvet noted that Erika’s children are “one parent away from being orphans,” underscoring why the family takes the threats seriously.
On left-wing violence: Vance said he had spoken by phone with FBI Director Kash Patel on the drive to Athens about the recent assault on conservative activist Savannah Hernandez in Minnesota. He said Patel confirmed that “multiple agents” were already on the ground, had spoken to Hernandez, and were working to use video footage to identify and prosecute the attackers — and to cut off funding networks that he said support “radicals.”
“The response to Charlie Kirk getting assassinated by a left wing furry lover is — the response should have been, ‘Let’s go after left wing violence and terrorism.’”
Faith, the Pope, and a Forthcoming Memoir
Kolvet noted that Vance is a practicing Catholic and asked how it felt to be caught between the Vatican and the Trump administration on immigration policy.
Vance said he has “a lot of respect for the Pope” and does not object in principle to religious leaders speaking on political matters — “part of preaching the gospel is talking about how the gospel applies to the issues of the day.” But he pushed back on a specific papal statement about the U.S. strikes on Iran.
“The Pope said something where he said, ‘God is never on the side of those who wield the sword.’ Now, on the one hand, I like that the Pope is an advocate for peace. On the other hand — was God on the side of the Americans who liberated France from the Nazis?”
An audience member shouted an accusation of genocide. Vance said he agreed that “Jesus Christ certainly does not support genocide” but argued that the Pope’s blanket statement fails to account for the Catholic Church’s own longstanding just war theory — more than a thousand years of doctrine that establishes conditions under which military force can be morally justified.
He also said that Catholic clergy criticism of the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement “has frustrated me” — specifically the repeated claim that everything the administration does on the border is “inhumane.”
“How is it humane to allow drug traffickers and sex traffickers to bring little kids across the southern border?”
On his book: Vance announced he is publishing a memoir about his faith journey titled Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, due out in June 2026. He said he began writing it in 2017 after the birth of his first son, and has worked on it intermittently for a decade.
He described going from a “Pentecostal household” to calling himself an “angry atheist” after leaving the Marine Corps, then gradually returning to faith as he entered law school, fell in love with Usha, and came to see that secular achievement — credentials, money, prestige — “left me feeling empty.”
“It was this faith that I had discarded as a kid, which actually provided a real sense of meaning and purpose.”
He credited a priest who posed the question: if Christianity is consistently right about morality and virtue, perhaps it is also right about the deeper things — the resurrection, the divinity of Christ.
“That kind of got me down a pathway of where eventually I was baptized and became a very devout Christian.”
Government Fraud Crackdown: Arrests in LA, Cut-Off in Minnesota
Kolvet introduced Vance as the administration’s informal “fraud tsar.” Vance said the crackdown is producing real arrests and described several specific cases.
Medicare fraud in Southern California: Vance said a weekly fraud check-in call with CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz was interrupted when Oz said he had to leave — to board a bus and participate in a law enforcement operation arresting Medicare fraudsters in Los Angeles.
“I was like, ‘That’s exactly what I want you to do. By all means, get off the phone.’”
Phantom medical device companies in South Florida: Vance said investigators have identified over a hundred companies in South Florida that have collected “hundreds of millions, some of them billions of dollars” in government funds for prosthetic knees and hips — without shipping a single product.
Somali fraud scheme in Minneapolis: Vance described a program meant to fund transportation and support services for autistic children whose funding was allegedly defrauded by individuals — he identified them specifically as “Somali fraudsters” — who falsely claimed multiple children were autistic with no state verification. He said the administration has cut off funding to that program entirely and told Minnesota it would receive no more federal money until it takes fraud verification seriously.
New enforcement standard: Vance said the Biden administration had an informal policy of ignoring fraud cases under roughly $1–1.5 million, which he called possibly intentional. The current administration’s standard:
“No amount of fraud is too big or too small. If you’re defrauding the taxpayer, you ought to go to prison — and anybody who’s helping you ought to go to prison too.”
Housing, the Economy, and a Message to Young People
Kolvet asked Vance what he would say to young people in the room who are asking whether they can afford a home, a family, or a career.
Vance said housing costs doubled during the Biden years, and that when combined with higher interest rates, the result was a market that “nobody can afford.” He attributed much of the increase to illegal immigration driving up housing demand.
He listed several actions the administration has taken:
- Shutting the southern border and deporting people here illegally
- Banning institutional investors (including private equity funds backed by foreign money) from purchasing American homes
- The administration claims rents and home prices have come down over the last eight months — a statistic Vance called the one he is “proudest of in the entire Trump administration”
“The American dream should not be sold to the highest foreign bidder. It belongs to you.”
He urged the audience to hold politicians accountable: “When a politician comes to you and tells you, ‘I’ve done all these things,’ you should be asking, ‘Good. Now go and do more.’”
Iran: Ceasefire Holding, Nuclear Deal Being Negotiated
Vance confirmed he had just returned from Pakistan, where he participated in the first-ever direct high-level talks between U.S. and Iranian officials — the first such meeting in 49 years, he said. He described the atmosphere as one of mutual mistrust but said the Iranian negotiators “wanted to make a deal.”
The core framework as Vance described it:
- Trump’s non-negotiable: Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon
- Trump’s offer: If Iran agrees to give up nuclear weapons, end state-sponsored terrorism, and rejoin the global economy, the United States will treat Iran “economically like a normal country”
- Current status: A ceasefire is in place and “holding” at approximately six or seven days old
“What the President wants to make — he doesn’t want to make a small deal. He wants to make the grand bargain.”
Vance said the deal isn’t done yet precisely because Trump is holding out for a comprehensive agreement — not just a weapons freeze but a full normalization of Iran’s economic status and its role in the world.
“He’s saying, ‘If you guys commit to not having a nuclear weapon, we are going to make Iran thrive. We’re going to make it economically prosperous, and we’re going to invite the Iranian people into the world economy in a way they haven’t been in my entire life.’”
On the Iranian negotiators themselves, Vance was careful but positive: “I think the people we’re sitting across from wanted to make a deal.”
Legal Immigration: H-1B Visas Down 90%, Asylum Claims Down 95%+
Kolvet raised legal immigration reform, noting that the audience includes American students worried about competing for jobs.
Vance said that new H-1B visa issuances are down approximately 90% — achieved entirely through administrative action, without legislation. He said he had tried to eliminate the H-1B program legislatively when he was a senator, calling it a program that “big tech companies take advantage of” to pay lower wages to foreign workers rather than hiring Americans at market rates.
He also said fraudulent asylum claims are down more than 95%, noting that millions of people were entering the U.S. annually on what he called false asylum claims during the Biden years.
“If you came in on a fraudulent asylum claim, you are an illegal immigrant, whatever the hell somebody from CBS says that you are.”
He referenced a moment from his 2024 debate against Tim Walz in which a moderator attempted to fact-check him on the legal status of an individual Vance called an illegal immigrant.
On the Green Card backlog: A student named Esther, whose parents immigrated from India on H-1B visas more than 20 years ago, asked about the Green Card quota system and the multi-decade waits faced by Indian nationals. Vance acknowledged the problem but pivoted to a broader argument: that immigrants who become citizens must think of themselves as Americans first.
He told a story about a Ukrainian American in Cleveland who confronted him during a Senate campaign event demanding he support Ukraine aid, to which Vance responded: “Sir, with all due respect, if you’re an American, your country is the United States of America.” He contrasted that with his father-in-law, who immigrated from India and has never, in Vance’s telling, asked him to prioritize India’s interests.
“To be an American means to look out for Americans first — and that’s the perspective we have to take to our immigration policy.”
He did not provide a specific remedy for the Green Card backlog.
The 2026 Midterms: “Don’t Give Up”
Multiple audience members raised questions about the midterms. Vance pushed back hard on pessimism within the conservative movement.
On polling: He said the worst current polls show Republicans down by five or six points generically — worse than that in 2018, when they ended up outperforming expectations despite polling that showed a ten-to-twelve-point deficit.
On the map: He acknowledged that gerrymandering has narrowed the genuine battleground to roughly 20 to 30 House districts. The strategy: flood those districts with resources, knock on doors, and turn out “marginal Trump voters” who historically skip midterm elections.
“The people telling you to give up on the midterms are the people who want us to lose the midterms. Don’t listen to them.”
On Virginia: Both Vance and Kolvet urged viewers in Virginia to vote against what Vance called the “Obama/Spanberger redistricting plan,” saying polls are moving in Republicans’ direction.
On the SAVE Act: Vance expressed frustration that only 45 or 46 Senate Republicans are willing to fight for the SAVE Act (legislation requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote), but noted that 10 years ago that number was 35. His message: “The answer to frustration is engagement.”
Congressional Reform: Stock Trading, Term Limits, Corruption
An audience member asked about structural reforms to Congress, citing ideas like term limits, balanced budget amendments, and banning stock trading by members.
Vance said he supported banning members of Congress from trading stocks and recalled watching Nancy Pelosi’s face during the State of the Union when Trump raised the topic.
“I looked over at Nancy Pelosi and she was sitting in her chair like — and if you watch the State of the Union, I start laughing hysterically.”
He went further, calling for term limits for bureaucrats, not just elected officials: “Nobody in Washington DC should be able to sit in a chair for 30 years.”
He gave an example of the kind of corruption he had in mind: members of Congress receiving a classified briefing about a coming pandemic and then trading pharmaceutical or airline stocks before the information was public.
“That stuff should be illegal and you should go to prison for it. And if you just cut out the basic corruption, you’d solve a lot of the problem.”
Charlie Kirk’s Legacy and Conservative Unity
A student from Cincinnati named Jacob asked who could replace Charlie Kirk as the “glue” holding the conservative movement together, noting that divisions have increased since Kirk’s death.
Vance said Kirk had a specific behind-the-scenes role — brokering conversations between factions within the movement that disagreed on issues like Iran policy — and that his absence left a real void.
“Who replaces Charlie Kirk? I think it’s going to be a combination of people. I think Andrew’s got a role. I’ve got a role. You guys have got a role.”
He argued the most important thing is keeping focus on the right enemy.
“The real problem is not a person who disagrees with you about this or that foreign policy or domestic policy issue. The real problem is the person who killed our friend.”
He also expressed optimism that the approach of an election cycle — with primaries beginning and seats up for grabs — will naturally force unity within the movement.
Audience Q&A Highlights
On conservative influencers (Hope): Vance named James Dobson of Focus on the Family as his formative influence growing up, saying Dobson spoke to the reality of broken homes without being judgmental. For the current generation, he recommended the Turning Point podcast (Andrew Kolvet and Blake), comedian Theo Von (“30% of the time it goes completely over my head, 70% of the time he’s the funniest person imaginable”), and — with a straight face — “the vice president of these United States.”
On a free day with anonymity (Hope): Vance said he would take Usha and his kids, walk to a local café, eat pancakes, and take the kids to the zoo “without anybody knowing who the hell I am.”
On succeeding without generational wealth (unnamed student): Vance, who grew up in a working-class, broken household in Appalachian Ohio, said success without privilege is possible but requires a specific mindset: “No matter what hand you were dealt, you have the responsibility to play it as well as you can.” He cited Justice Clarence Thomas as an example of someone who overcame humble beginnings.
On Jeffrey Epstein (unnamed student): The final audience question asked how the public could trust the administration to investigate Epstein if the DOJ is blocking it. Vance said he was not familiar with the specific quote attributed to the Associate Attorney General but offered a detailed personal position:
- Epstein was “clearly a scumbag” with unusual connections to intelligence services and powerful people
- He described reading an email involving Epstein that used language reminiscent of coded references to minors, and said the administration “should absolutely investigate that person”
- When Trump said the Epstein matter is a “hoax,” Vance said Trump was referring specifically to the claim that he was Epstein’s close associate — not to Epstein’s crimes
“What you see in those emails is that Jeffrey Epstein hated Donald Trump and Donald Trump hated Jeffrey Epstein. In fact, one of the emails is about Donald Trump narcing on Jeffrey Epstein to the local sheriff saying, ‘This guy’s a scumbag. You should go and pick him up.’”
Kolvet added at the close that, just before the event began, the DOJ had unredacted and released six million Epstein-related documents to Congress.
Kolvet, Andrew, moderator. “Remarks: JD Vance Joins a Town Hall-Style Turning Point Event in Athens, Georgia.” Factbase / Roll Call, 14 Apr. 2026, factba.se.