Vice President Mike Pence told Breitbart News in an exclusive interview Friday that President Donald Trump’s America First agenda “literally transformed” the Minnesota Iron Range.

Breitbart News traveled with Pence to Duluth, Minnesota, during which the vice president charged that the president’s policies had reinvigorated the region after it was losing jobs to China.

Breitbart News’s interview with the vice president follows as six Democrat Minnesota mayors from the Iron Range region endorsed Trump over former Vice President Joe Biden. In their letter to the American people, the Democrat mayors charged that Biden did “nothing” for the working class.

The mayors wrote:

Like many in our region, we have voted for Democrats over many decades. We have watched as our constituents’ jobs left not only the Iron Range, but our country. By putting tariffs on our products and supporting bad trade deals, politicians like Joe Biden did nothing to help the working class. We lost thousands of jobs, and generations of young people have left the Iron Range in order to provide for their families with good paying jobs elsewhere. Today, we don’t recognize the Democratic Party. It has been moved so far to the left it can no longer claim to be advocates of the working class. The hard-working Minnesotans that built their lives and supported their families here on the Range have been abandoned by radical Democrats. We didn’t choose to leave the Democratic Party, the party left us.

The vice president noted during his interview with Breitbart News that Trump implemented Section 232 tariffs to help revive the Minnesota Iron Range.

“We had the mayor, former Democrat mayor of Duluth, out there with his family, but to have six Democrat mayors across the range across northern Minnesota, I was struck by when they stood up, and the crowd went wild,” Pence said.
During the campaign event in Minnesota on Friday, Rep. Pete Stauber (R-MN) said Trump “brought mining and manufacturing back to the shores of the United States.”

Pence said during the campaign event that a Biden administration would return “back to economic surrender with China.” He emphasized that Trump’s tariffs leveled the “playing field” for American workers.

Pence added during his campaign event in Duluth, Minnesota, that when mining was shut down in the Iron Range, Biden told miners to “learn to code.”

He added during the event, “Pence always stands up for the Iron Range.”

“I think it’s really emblematic. I mean China was engaged in massive dumping and wiping out the Iron Range, and the president comes and puts in 232 tariffs, digs in and says we’re going to end it, before the pandemic it literally transformed the Iron Range,” Pence told Breitbart News.

Sean Moran is a congressional reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter @SeanMoran3.