The California Post obtained surveillance footage of the Aug. 15 encounter.
Page A2From§Eachthe breakfast edition — 1 September 2026
Vance calls Michigan rival evil, FBI surrounds another Democrat at the airport, Pentagon denies troops at polls.
As it ran on the front
Here's the timeline, and I want you to sit with the order because the order is the whole joke. JD Vance stands up in front of a crowd and calls a Michigan Senate candidate — a doctor, a former state health director — evil. Not wrong, not misguided. Evil. Around the same stretch of days, Eric Swalwell, a sitting member of Congress, gets surrounded by FBI agents at San Francisco International, the kind of scene that used to be reserved for guys who owed somebody money on the docks. And then, because somebody in Michigan had the nerve to ask, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has to go on the record telling a United States Senator that no, there are currently no plans to send the military to polling places in November.
Sit with that last one. Nobody asked General Caine whether the weather would be nice on Election Day. Somebody asked him whether troops were coming to the polls, and he had to answer, on the record, currently no. Currently. That word is doing a lot of work. Currently is not never. Currently is a word you use about a plan that's on a shelf, not a plan that doesn't exist.…
…(cont) This is the oldest trick in the book and it only works because each piece looks small by itself. A speech is just a speech. An airport is just an airport. A reassurance from a four-star general is just a reassurance. But you don't call the opposition evil in a vacuum, you don't surround one of their sitting members of Congress in public in a vacuum, and you sure as hell don't need to promise no troops at the polls unless troops at the polls became a sentence someone could finish.
The con here isn't any one of these stories. The con is that by the time all three run separately, in separate sections, on separate days, nobody's supposed to notice they rhyme. But they rhyme. They rhyme like a threat rhymes with a rehearsal. Keep your eye on the word evil, keep your eye on the airport, and keep your eye on the word currently, because that's the word that tells you what they're actually planning, which is to leave themselves room.
“One guy calls his opponent evil, the feds surround another one at baggage claim, and the general running the whole military has to tell a senator, relax, no plans for troops at the polls. Nobody said troops. That's the tell — when the guy holding the gun is the one telling you not to worry about the gun.”
“The Vance comment was rhetorical, the Swalwell matter is a routine law enforcement action completely unrelated to politics, and the polls remark was proactive reassurance, not an admission anything was ever on the table. There's no pattern here, there's just three unrelated Tuesdays. I don't — that's not what I meant to say.”
The receipts
Vice President JD Vance also told Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, Michigan’s Democratic Senate nominee, to “keep my wife’s name the hell out of your mouth.”
Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Gen. Dan Caine told Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) in a letter that there are no plans to send the military to the polls in November’s midterm elections. “Election administration and security remain the…
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.