Vice President JD Vance roasted New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani for trashing the United States on Independence Day, asking, “Who the hell does he think that he is?”
Mamdani, the Ugandan-born Democrat nominee to lead the nation’s most populous city, said the U.S. is “beautiful,” yet “contradictory” and “unfinished” in his one post on the July 4 holiday:
He concluded his message with “No Kings in America,” a reference to the leftist “No Kings” protests that took place across the country in June.
Speaking at the Claremont Institute’s Statesmanship Award dinner in Rancho Santa Fe, California, on Saturday, Vance called out Mamdani’s hypocrisy coming from an immigrant family who fled to the U.S. for a better life:
“Today is July 5, 2025, which means, as all of you know, that yesterday we celebrated the 249th anniversary of the birth of our nation,” the vice president told attendees. “You know, 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.”
Mamdani’s exact words were, “America is beautiful, contradictory, unfinished. I am proud of our country even as we constantly strive to make it better, to protect and deepen our democracy, to fulfill its promise for each and every person who calls it home. Happy Independence Day. No Kings in America.”
After reading Mamdani’s post, Vance said, “There is no gratitude in those words, no sense of owing something to this land and the people who turned its wilderness into the most powerful nation on Earth.”
Vance went on to point out the ethnic conflict Mamdani’s family, of Indian heritage, was forced to flee under the former president of Uganda, Idi Amin, to get to freedom in the U.S.:
Zohran Mamdani’s father fled Uganda when the tyrant Idi Amin decided to ethnically cleanse his nation’s Indian population. 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.”
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? Has he ever visited the gravesite 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 asked, before applause erupted from the audience.
