Republican vice presidential candidate and Indiana Gov. Mike Pence was challenged at a town hall in North Carolina Thursday by a Donald Trump supporter who isn’t even old enough to vote.
11-year-old Matthew Schricker questioned Pence on the part that he plays in Trump’s campaign.
“I’ve been watching the news lately and I’ve been noticing that you’ve been kind of softening up on Mr. Trump’s policies and words,” Schricker said. “Is this going to be your role in the administration?”
Pence laughed, as did the crowd, before responding, “I couldn’t be more proud to stand with Donald Trump, and we are shoulder-to-shoulder in this campaign.”
“What I’ve learned Matthew, and what you’ll learn when you’re governor of North Carolina, is that sometimes things don’t always come out like you mean,” Pence continued. “We have different styles; you might have noticed that.”
Following the event, Schricker told CNN “I just wanted to see if [he] was actually with Trump or if he was just like, or if he was just sort of doing it for himself. My concern was he wasn’t going full-on on Trump’s views, and I was a little worried that he was softening up a little bit.”
Schricker was most recently upset by Pence’s statements concerning Trump’s proposed Muslim ban and controversial comments about the Khan family.
In a later appearance on CNN’s “New Day,” Schricker said he thinks Pence “balances the ticket out a little bit.”
On Friday, Schricker appeared on MSNBC and told Chris Jansing he didn’t intend to be “hostile” to the vice presidential hopeful.
“I was not meaning for it to be hostile; as you said before, I was challenging him? No I was not,” he said.
As noted by Politico, the 11-year-old has a strikingly similar rhetoric to Trump himself.
“I really think that listening to a few bad words coming out of Donald Trump is a lot better than people getting blown up by terrorists, people getting burned alive, people [getting their] heads chopped off and people getting drowned,” Schricker said.
Editor’s note: Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims ― 1.6 billion members of an entire religion ― from entering the U.S.
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