Vice President Mike Pence is scheduled to speak at the Virginia Military Institute on Thursday, drawing a warm welcome from Republicans while prompting criticism from Democrats who say his speech will inflame already tense relations between the Oval Office and the military.

“It’s great that he’s coming down here to Virginia. We’re happy to have him,” says John March, communications director for the Republican Party of Virginia.

Del. Jennifer Carroll Foy (D-Prince William), a VMI graduate and Democratic candidate for governor, called the visit a “mockery.”

“It’s an attempt to rehabilitate President Trump’s failure to acknowledge and respect the patriotism of the men and women in uniform who have made the ultimate sacrifice for our country,” Carroll Foy told WAMU/DCist. “I don’t think it’s appropriate whatsoever.”

The visit comes days after an article in The Atlantic cited anonymous senior aides saying President Donald Trump called American service members who died in uniform “losers” and “suckers.” The president denied the report, but few senior military figures came to his defense. A recent Military Times poll shows declining support for Trump among active-duty service members.

The Lexington-based VMI was founded in 1839 and is the oldest state-funded military college in the country. All students, known as cadets, must participate in a Reserve Officers Training Corps unit in order to graduate, although they are not obligated to serve in the military.

VMI says Pence will appear at “a special guest speaker event” alongside Secretary of the Army Ryan McCarthy, who graduated from the institute in 1996. VMI spokesperson Bill Wyatt says Pence’s visit was planned “for the better part of the year.”

“These are important opportunities for our cadets and their leadership development,” Wyatt told WAMU/DCist.

Wyatt says about 1,700 cadets, along with 200 faculty and staff, are expected to attend the indoor event. He says attendees will stand at a distance and wear face coverings to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.

Pence will arrive at a school that pledged to address racial inequality following the killing of George Floyd. In a July 2020 open letter, VMI Superintendent J. H. Binford Peay III wrote, “I believe we all agree we want to erase any hint of racism at VMI, in our communities, and in our country.” He pledged to recruit more diverse students and faculty, and said the school would emphasize American history within the context of world events, the Constitution and slavery, with a new course on American civics to debut this fall.

By contrast, the Trump administration last week directed federal agencies to end racial sensitivity trainings that address issues like white privilege.

In other aspects, VMI’s positions on race are more in line with the administration. Trump has resisted changing the names of military bases named after Confederate leaders. Pence has opposed the toppling of Confederate monuments, saying in June, “We’ve seen statues of some of our nation’s greatest heroes being torn down,” according to WFAA.

A statue of Stonewall Jackson stands at VMI, where the Confederate general worked as a professor. Even as Confederate monuments came down in Richmond, Alexandria and Loudoun County, VMI’s Peay said the school does not “currently intend” to remove any statues.

Political scientist Stephen Farnsworth at the University of Mary Washington says Pence’s visit “makes a lot of sense” given the recent controversy.

“Vice President Pence’s visit to VMI offers up an opportunity for the administration to appear before people in uniform and be well received,” Farnsworth told WAMU/DCist.

At the same time, Farnsworth cautioned that Pence’s visit was unlikely to yield gains at the ballot box. In 2019, Pence campaigned for Republican candidates for the General Assembly, but Democrats swept both houses of the legislature.

“Polls suggest that Virginia would not be the best place for Republicans to spend their time in 2020,” Farnsworth says.

The speech will begin at 2 p.m. and is closed to the public due to the coronavirus. However, Wyatt said the remarks would be streamed on the White House’s website.