From the moment JD Vance came onto the national stage, he was inextricably linked to Donald Trump. As the author of the best-selling book “Hillbilly Elegy,” Vance was initially the Trump whisperer, explaining the Trump phenomenon and 2016 win to shocked liberals. Back then, Vance didn’t like Trump. He called him an “idiot,” condemned what he saw as Trump’s dangerous rhetoric and wondered in a private message whether Trump could become “America’s Hitler.”
Then Vance went through a political conversion, transforming from skeptical Trump explainer to full-throated Trump supporter. In 2021, he began his campaign for Senate in Ohio. He courted, and received, Trump’s endorsement and won that race. Two years later, here we are: Vance is not only Trump’s vice-presidential running mate but also considered by many to be the heir apparent to MAGA because of his deft defense of Trumpism.
Vance has always been comfortable in the public eye, starting with his job dealing with the media as a public-affairs officer in the Marines. As an author, commentator and candidate, he has left a long record — in blog posts, opinion columns and podcast appearances — of his evolving views, not just on Trump but also on issues like immigration and his vision for the country. In a 2021 podcast, for example, he said that Trump, if elected again, should “seize the institutions of the left,” “fire every single midlevel bureaucrat” in the U.S. government, “replace them with our people” and defy the Supreme Court if it tried to stop him.
That is what Vance sounds like when he’s talking to his base. But a very different Vance appeared recently on the debate stage, where, when speaking to a national audience, he was much less divisive and much more willing to engage in a civil discussion with a political opponent — in this case, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, the Democratic nominee for vice president.
With the election a few weeks away, and the race so tight, Vance may very well be the next vice president of the United States, and the second in command to someone who could be the oldest-ever commander in chief. So, which Vance can Americans expect if he’s elected? I asked him.
One of the things that many people said to me in advance of this interview is “Which JD Vance is going to show up?” And I think that speaks to this persistent question that people have about you, which is they saw you on the debate stage, and you seemed more empathetic, more moderate. And then there’s the JD Vance we’ve seen on the campaign trail, the JD Vance we’ve heard on right-wing podcasts, who can sound more aggrieved, more angry. How would you explain that contrast? Well, isn’t that how most people are? Sometimes they’re frustrated with what’s going on in the country, sometimes a little bit more optimistic. Sometimes it’s both, right? You’re maybe optimistic about the country, about its people, about its resources, about its beauty, but also frustrated by its leadership. And I think the nature of being an American in 2024, at least in my political persuasion, is that you have some deep and abiding love for this nation. At least I have a certain optimism and hope rooted in my trust and faith in its people, but I’m very frustrated by what’s going on with our leadership and some of our public policies. All these things are true at once. And I think that’s sort of how most people are.
So you weren’t frustrated at the debate? Well, sometimes I got frustrated, right? I criticized Kamala Harris’s immigration policies. I got a little frustrated at what I thought was the artificial fact-check there. But again, that frustration coexists with a lot of other feelings too, and I try to show that to everybody. I think that if you watched a 45-minute JD Vance rally, you would not have been surprised by the debate performance. I think what happens is that, if you take a clip out of context from four years, and that’s the only way you’ve ever been introduced to me, then sure, the debate performance might’ve been surprising, but I don’t think most people were surprised by it.
Your own campaign, though, said that you were doing “Minnesota nice” to throw off Tim Walz, who was expecting perhaps a more combative version of you. So it was a tactic. Well, I mean, look: That’s a distinction to me without a difference. Again, sometimes you’re going to try to discuss the issues of the day. Sometimes you’re going to be pushing back a little bit more aggressively. I think what was interesting about how we did the debate is I tried to be conversational with Tim Walz because, I mean, to be honest, I don’t know Tim Walz that well. I don’t have a strong view of him. I mean, there’s a lot of disagreements I have policywise, but my real disagreement is with Kamala Harris, with the way that she’s led the country, with some of her views and some of her opinions. And so in some ways I was — I don’t know that combative is the right word, but I was certainly disagreeable vis-à-vis Kamala Harris’s policies. But I didn’t feel this need to go in and light into Tim Walz — that’s just not how I feel about him.
Why do you think so many people have that thought about you, that they don’t know which version of you they’re going to get? There have been think pieces about this, podcasts about this — people who are trying to understand who you are. I mean, who knows? But my best guess on this is that if you’re a New York Times reader or you’re broadly center left, most of what you’ve read about me has come from some version of something that was planted by a political opponent. Let’s say I do a two-hour podcast interview, and you see the 45 seconds where I say the most contentious thing. But I think if you watch the entire two-hour interview, you wouldn’t be surprised with what I’ve said on the debate stage, with what I’ve said at my rallies, with what I’ve said during my press conferences and so forth. The nature of political media in 2024 is, because you can sort of take a clip and make it go viral on social media, you can write a news story about that viral clip, we’re just not digesting the long-form conversation that I think most people, again, if you were to ask the normal middle-class American whether they agree with me or disagree with me, a two-hour conversation about politics, and you went through a dozen different issues, I think that you’d see, well, sometimes they’d be pissed off about something. Sometimes they’d be pleased with something. Sometimes they’d agree or they’d disagree. But I just think that the way that we do political media is really built around sound bites. Maybe that’s always been true, but it’s certainly true in 2024.
Yeah. I mean, I do think that there’s something else going on though, which is: You have obviously shifted some of your viewpoints. You’ve acknowledged that. Look, there’s certainly the — I was anti-Trump and now obviously I’m running as Donald Trump’s running mate. But it’s something that, again, if you watch the two-hour podcast interview, you wouldn’t be surprised about, because I talk about it. And I know that’s part of what we’re doing today.
It is. Just to remind people, you called Trump “America’s Hitler.” I’m sure you possibly don’t like that quoted back at you at every single moment. And I read a really fascinating interview that you gave to The American Conservative in 2016 where you said: Donald Trump, “he has dragged down our entire political conversation,” he “spent way too much time appealing to people’s fears.” Why do you feel more comfortable with his approach today? Well, I think there are a few reasons. One is, I was pretty optimistic right after Trump’s election. To sort of go back a little bit, the book really took off right before he was elected.
“Hillbilly Elegy.” Yeah, “Hillbilly Elegy.” And it had this second wind that was somehow even bigger than the first wind. And I remember I was doing all of these interviews the night of the election. I think it was ABC where I spent most of that night. I was talking to people privately, but then of course I was going on TV. The biggest takeaway that I had from that moment is that it was genuinely a shock to the senses for most of America’s political and media class. They really were certain that he was going to lose. To be fair, I didn’t think he was going to win. I thought he had a better chance than most people. But in the immediate aftermath, there was this sort of sense of: OK, well, we misunderstood something. We got something wrong. Maybe we should try to understand where this underlying frustration and sense of grievance is in the population writ large. And that lasted for all of about a month. And then very quickly, it was the academic studies, that [expletive] that said, well, Donald Trump’s voters were not motivated by any sort of legitimate concern, they were only motivated by racism. And then of course the media kind of laundered that into the mainstream discourse. And then there was the Russia, Russia, Russia cycle where it was, well, the only reason Donald Trump won is because he was collaborating with Vladimir Putin, which, even when I was anti-Trump, I thought that narrative was absurd. And I guess that what I slowly learned is that if you believe the American political culture is fundamentally healthy but maybe biased toward the left, then Donald Trump is not the right solution to that problem. If, as I slowly developed a viewpoint that the American political culture was deeply diseased and the American media conversation had become so deranged that it couldn’t even process the frustrations of a large share, maybe even close to a majority of the country — then when you say, well, I don’t like Donald Trump’s language? Well, Donald Trump’s language actually maybe makes a whole lot more sense if you assume that the institutions are much more corrupt than they were before. So the point that I got to was if Donald Trump didn’t talk like this, and if Donald Trump wasn’t going directly at the institutions, then he wouldn’t be able to get anything done. And most importantly, he wouldn’t be able to illustrate how broken the American political and media culture is right now. And so what I saw in 2016 as a fault of Donald Trump’s, by 2018, 2019, I very much saw as an advantage.
That’s interesting. So what I’m hearing you say is that in 2016, you felt that the divisiveness and the language was a symptom of perhaps a problem with Donald Trump, and by 2018, you saw it as the solution to the problem? I’d put it slightly differently. I think that in 2016, I saw the divisiveness in American politics as at least partly Donald Trump’s fault. And by 2018, 2019, I saw that divisiveness as the fault of an American political and media culture that couldn’t even pay attention to its own citizens. And Donald Trump was not driving the divisiveness, he was merely responding to it and giving voice to a group of people who had been completely ignored. And he was doing it in a way that really did poke his eye at that diseased media culture. I’ll put it this way: I don’t know that anybody else in 2016 possibly could have done what Trump did. And I think his rhetoric actually was a necessary part of it.
One of the reasons I am focusing on this initially — which sort of JD Vance comes out — is because earlier this year, The Times published a series of email and text exchanges from 2014 to 2017 between you and your Yale Law School friend, Sofia Nelson, who is transgender. And that friendship eventually ended, in her telling, because of your support for a ban on gender-affirming care for minors in Arkansas. Yep.
The tone of that early correspondence was respectful, it was affectionate, even though you didn’t always agree with her. Were you more open to differences at that time in your life? No, I don’t think so. I’d like to think we’re having a respectful conversation. But you know, when I disagree with people, sometimes I’m a little sarcastic, but that was true 10 years ago, right? Sometimes I like to make fun of the political and media environment that we’re in. But that was true 10 years ago, too. Again, all of these things exist at the same time. Most people are complicated. They’re not just like happy-go-lucky or really engaged in dialogue, right? Sometimes they’re making jokes. Sometimes they’re more serious. I just think that’s how I am. I think it’s how most people are too. But look, I’m not going to sit here and criticize Sofia. I love Sofia. I am very sad about what happened between me and Sofia. Going back to 2013, 2014, she’s my friend, she’s transgender. I didn’t fully understand it, I just thought: I love this person, and I care about her, and I don’t have to sort of agree with every medical decision that she makes or even understand it to say, well, I love you, I care about you. I’m still going to hang out with you, we’re still going to talk about football and be friends. And we had this conversation — can’t remember when it was, maybe around the time of my Senate campaign, maybe before. But I had children at that point, and we were talking about gender-affirming care for minors. I think a more honest way to say it is not “gender-affirming care” but “chemical experimentation on minors.” And my affection for her didn’t mean that I thought this was a reasonable thing to do to 11-year-old children who are confused. Sometimes confused by social media, sometimes confused because it’s really hard to be an 11-year-old, certainly in today’s media environment. And yeah, we had a very strong disagreement about whether the proper response to that was humility. I would say it’s humility. Don’t give life-altering care to these kids, potentially life-destroying care to these kids. And she disagreed with me. She thought it was sort of an affront to transgender rights. Now, what I would have done normally in that situation is to say, you know, we can agree to disagree. I mean, Sofie and I disagreed about a whole host of issues over our long friendship, and sometimes we would do it aggressively, but ultimately, we’re going to be friends, despite that. To be clear, I mean, yeah, she leaked my emails, and I think that’s a violation of trust, and I’m frustrated by that, but I would still be Sofia’s friend today even though I feel very strongly that she’s not just wrong, but very dangerously wrong about chemical experimentation on minors.
I guess what I’m asking is: You came to see Donald Trump’s approach as a necessary means to an end. Did you come to see that as a necessary approach for yourself? I mean, you talked about “Hillbilly Elegy” and the power of persuasion through empathy, but you also bring a much different approach to many of the things that you do now. Again, I think it was very jarring for people to see those emails and see a JD Vance that, frankly, hasn’t been on display. Well, they say it’s jarring to see the emails, but they say it’s jarring to see some of my rally performances and then it’s jarring to see my debate. Maybe the problem isn’t that I’m, you know —
But do you see it as necessary now to be more abrasive? So, I’m going to answer that question, but maybe the thing that they’re actually noticing is that if you see somebody in all their complexity, they don’t fit the caricature. But it’s not some big change that I’ve made. And yes, I’ve changed my views. I’ll be honest about that on certain things, but there’s not some, like, major change. It’s just that they’re forced to see the noncaricature version of me. But no. I mean, President Trump’s approach is President Trump’s approach. His style is his style. Do I think that his style and his approach is a necessary corrective to what’s broken about American society? Yes, I do. That doesn’t mean I’m going to try to be Donald Trump because one, nobody can be Donald Trump. I think he’s a uniquely interesting and charismatic figure, but it’s just not who I am. Fundamentally, he and I are going to have different styles, but I think if you were to, say, take Donald Trump’s style and the way that he criticizes the media and the way that I’m criticizing the media to you right now, I think those criticisms are actually pointing at the exact same direction. We’re just putting it in slightly different ways in our own sort of distinctive perspectives. But I’ve never felt like I need to somehow copy somebody else’s style.
It wasn’t just the tone of those exchanges, though. You did express some beliefs that are different than the ones you hold today. Like, what do you mean?
“I hate the police.” Well, OK.
Why did you write that? What had happened to make you feel that way? First of all, have you ever said something in a private conversation that out of context wouldn’t necessarily translate to a public conversation? I think 100 percent of people would say yes. I don’t exactly remember when I sent that email, but I strongly suspect that what happened is, Usha and I lived in San Francisco for a couple of years, and when we first moved — I get frustrated even thinking about it right now — there was a break-in, in the car that I had. And it was stupid. I shouldn’t have left her suitcase in the car to begin with, but I did. And it had a ton of like completely priceless things. I’m not talking about priceless, as in we paid a lot of money, but the necklace her grandmother gave her that she bought in India that she gave her on the morning of our wedding — things like that were stolen. And I went to the police in San Francisco, and — have you ever seen the movie “The Big Lebowski”?
Of course. So I love “The Big Lebowski,” and the Dude has his car stolen. He says, Hey, are you like investigating it? And the cop kind of chuckles and says, Yeah, we got a couple detectives down at the crime lab. That was kind of the response that I got to, are you guys gonna try to recover this stuff? I was frustrated at the police, I fired off a frustrated email to a friend and, again, this is why I think it’s a violation of trust. Do I think it was representative of my views of the police writ large in 2016 or 2014 or whenever I sent that email? No, of course not. You send something to a friend: Hey, I’m pissed off about this. I think it’s very ridiculous for the media to say, well, JD used to be a “defund the police” guy because in a private email, I expressed some frustration about a distinctive police officer. Come on. [When Vance wrote “I hate the police” to Sofia in 2014, they were having a conversation about police body cameras in the wake of the killing of Michael Brown by a police officer.]
So, just to be clear, Senator Vance, the reason we ask about this is because it is a window into your evolving views, and that is important for people to know whom they’re going to be voting for. Oh, I think it’s totally reasonable for you to ask about it. I’m saying certain political members who have said, oh, this reveals like somehow JD didn’t support police officers 10 years ago. I just think it’s a preposterous argument.
After you left Yale, you went to Silicon Valley, the world of venture capital, you worked for and became close with Peter Thiel in 2016, 2017. He had an enormous influence on you. Yeah. A dear friend.
By 2021, you were running for Senate as a supporter of Trump. And right in between that, in 2019, you converted to Catholicism. I’m a fellow Catholic. I find this very interesting, and I would love for you to describe what appealed to you about the Catholic faith. So, before I answer that question, I just offer a caveat out there: What I really hate, and I’ve seen this with some converts, is they come to the faith, they act like they know everything. They speak for all Catholics. I’m never going to do that. I never want to do that. Look, I think there were a couple of things that really appealed about it to me. First of all, generally Christianity. I was thinking about the big questions. 2017 to 2019, when I was thinking about re-engaging with my faith, I became a father during that period. I was very successful professionally. So, thinking about the working-class family that I’d grown up in, I had a lot more money than I ever thought I would have. I had my own venture-capital firm, and there was this weird way where I felt like I had succeeded at climbing the ladder of meritocracy, but I had also found the values of the meritocracy, frankly, deeply wanting and deeply lacking. And when I started to think about the big things, like, what do I actually care about in my life? I really want to be a good husband. I really want to be a good father. I really want to be a good member of the community. I wanted to be a virtuous human being, in other words. That was sort of the thing that I kept on coming back to was how to be virtuous. And I thought the Christianity that I had discarded as a young man answered the questions about being a virtuous person better than the logic of the American meritocracy. And then that sort of led me on a journey of, OK, well, I’m gonna be a Christian again. What church do I actually want to raise my children in? What church do I want to be a participant of? And I just kept coming back for very personal reasons — friends of mine who I thought were just good people, a lot of them were Catholics, and I talked to them about their faith and about what appealed to them about their faith. And that eventually led me to getting baptized in 2019. And the other thing I’ll say about it is, Usha was raised in a Hindu household, but not an especially religious household. And she was, like, really into it. Meaning, she thought that thinking about the question of converting and getting baptized and becoming a Christian, she thought that they were good for me, in sort of a good-for-your-soul kind of way. And I don’t think I would have ever done it without her support, because I felt kind of bad about it, right? Like, you didn’t sign up for a weekly churchgoer. I feel terrible for my wife because we go to church almost every Sunday, unless we’re on the road.
Does she go with you? She does.
Has she converted? No she hasn’t. That’s why I feel bad about it. She’s got three kids. Obviously I help with the kids, but because I’m kind of the one going to church, she feels more responsibility to keep the kids quiet in the church. And I just felt kind of bad. Like, oh, you didn’t sign up to marry a weekly churchgoer. Are you OK with this? And she was more than OK with it, and that was a big part of the confirmation that this was the right thing for me.
You wrote a lot in “Hillbilly Elegy” about the chaos of your family life as a child. Your mother was an alcoholic and a drug addict. She’s been sober for nearly 10 years now. You talk about being raised by your grandmother and your older sister and having a rotating cast of untrustworthy parental figures, specifically men in your life. How much of your draw to Catholicism do you think is related to the appeal of the strong family values, of the focus on the nuclear family? That’s a big part of it, especially the stability of it. I’m not just talking about the stability of the nuclear family, but the stability of an institution that has endured over 2,000 years, right? I mean, I’m like most people: very aware of my mortality. And I kind of like the idea of being part of something that’s existed over many generations and hopefully will endure for many, many generations to come. But yeah, when I talk about being a good husband, being a good father, the way I’ve often put it is the American dream to me was never making a lot of money, buying a big house, driving a fast car. It was having what me and Usha have right now, right?
It’s strange that you went into venture capital, then, but go on. No, sure. I mean, look, I wanted to make money — I’m not saying I’m anti-making money. But when I thought about what I really wanted out of my life, what I really wanted was what Usha and I have right now. And I wanted to raise our kids in stability. Something that really bothered me when I was a kid was: People would ask me my address, and I would give them my address, not knowing if they wrote me a letter a month from then whether I would still have that same address. I hated the fact that I had these different addresses — it was just something that really bothered me as a kid. And I think it was sort of reflective of the broader instability in my life. Our kids have had — my son Ewan I guess has had a couple, but the other two have only had their Cincinnati address their entire lives. And that’s, like, a very, very important and good thing for me. And yeah, that’s certainly part of the appeal of the Catholic faith.
Your position on those family values have gotten a lot of scrutiny lately. You’ve talked about childless cat ladies. You’ve called childless people sociopathic, psychotic, deranged. And I know that you’ve said that those comments were sarcastic. But it’s hard to hear those words entirely as a joke. What do you actually think of childless women in society? Well, as I said when I made those comments — and look, they were dumb comments. I think most people probably have said something dumb, have said something that they wish they had put differently.
You said it in several different venues. In a very, very short period of time. It was sort of a thing that I picked up on. I said it a couple of times in a couple of interviews, and look, I certainly wish that I had said it differently. What I was trying to get at is that — I’m not talking about people who it just didn’t work out for, for medical reasons, for social reasons, like set that to the side, we’re not talking about folks like that. What I was definitely trying to illustrate ultimately in a very inarticulate way is that I do think that our country has become almost pathologically anti-child. I put this in a couple of different ways, right? So, there’s one, it was actually when I was in law school — I was on a train between New York and New Haven, I think I was doing, like, law-firm interviews or something. And obviously I didn’t have kids then. And there’s this young girl who gets on the train. She’s probably 21 or 22. She’s a young Black female. I could tell by the way she was dressed, she didn’t have a whole lot of money; she had a couple of kids with her, and I remember just watching her and thinking, This is a really unbelievably patient mother. The reason I noticed her is because her kids, like a lot of kids that age, are complete disasters, especially on public transportation, they turn it up to 11. But she was being so patient. But then everybody around her was also noticing the kids being misbehaved, and they were so angry, and they were sighing and staring every time her 2-year-old made a noise. And that was a moment that stuck with me, and of course I’ve had similar experiences riding with my own kids on various modes of public transportation, and again it just sort of hit me like, OK, this is really, really bad. I do think that there’s this pathological frustration with children that just is a new thing in American society. I think it’s very dark. I think you see it sometimes in the political conversation, people saying, well, maybe we shouldn’t have kids because of climate change. You know, when I’ve used this word sociopathic? Like, that, I think, is a very deranged idea: the idea that you shouldn’t have a family because of concerns over climate change. Doesn’t mean you can’t worry about climate change, but in the focus on childless cat ladies, we missed the substance of what I said.
Sorry, I just want to clarify something. So women who don’t have children because they’re worried about climate change, that’s sociopathic? I think that is a bizarre way of thinking about the future. Not to have kids because of concerns over climate change? I think the more bizarre thing is our leadership, who encourages young women, and frankly young men, to think about it that way. Bringing life into the world has totally transformed the way that I think about myself, the way that I think about my wife. I mean, watch your grandparents interact with grandchildren — it is, like, a transformatively positive and good thing for there to be children in the world. And if your political philosophy is saying, don’t do that because of concerns over climate change? Yeah, I think that’s a really, really crazy way to think about the world.
We don’t know why Kamala Harris did not have children, but do you include Kamala Harris in the category of women that you’re talking about? No. Everything that I know about Kamala Harris, that I’ve learned about Kamala Harris, is that she’s got a stepfamily, she’s got an extended family, she’s a very good stepmother to her stepchildren. I would never accuse Kamala Harris along these lines. What I would say is that sometimes Kamala Harris, she hasn’t quite jumped over the “You shouldn’t have kids because of climate change.” But I think in some of her interviews, she’s suggested there’s a reasonableness to that perspective. But again, I don’t think that’s a reasonable perspective. I think that if your political ideas motivate you to not have children, then that is a bizarre way of looking at the world. Now, again, sometimes it doesn’t work out. Sometimes people choose not to have children. I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about the political sensibility that’s very anti-child. And again, what really bothers me about the childless-cat-lady comment, aside from the fact that of course it offended a lot of people, and I understand that, but it actually distracted — my wife made this point — distracted from the core point of what I was making, which is that there is something very anti-family and very anti-child that has crept into American society. And you see it, I think, if you take your kid on an airplane. You see it if you take your kid to a restaurant and people huff and puff at you. You see it in some of our political policies. I mean, go back to 2020. And I don’t talk about this much, because most Americans don’t care about it, but when those of us who had children were really reacting to what I would call the Covid tyranny — 3-year-olds being forced to wear masks and not even asking ourselves: Well, OK, the main way that 3-year-olds pick up on language development is they see the nonverbal expression that comes along with it. Are we completely obliterating the language and social development of children? A lot of parents were thinking that. A lot of our elected leaders were not taking that parental perspective, and I think because of it, we responded to it in a disastrous way for our kids, our education system, pretty much everybody will tell you that our public schools in particular, our kids fell behind in reading. They fell behind in mathematics. Our toddlers fell behind when it comes to language development. We have become anti-family in this country. I believe that. I think the data is very clear about that. And yeah, I should have put this in a better way. But the point still remains.
I want to talk about another big issue when it comes to women and families. It has been hard to figure out what you and former President Trump would do when it comes to reproductive rights. Trump has said he believes abortion laws should be left up to the states. He sometimes supported a six-week ban. Sometimes he’s not supported a six-week ban. He supports exceptions for rape and incest. You have previously come out in favor of federal restrictions in your campaign for the Senate with no exceptions except to save the life of the mother. You said Trump wouldn’t sign a national abortion ban. But then he said that you don’t really know what he’ll do. And, in the debate, you did try to appear somewhat more moderate on the issue. It is all painting a very confusing picture. Well, I don’t think it should paint a confusing picture. President Trump’s view is, leave it to the states. His view is, he wants any state to have the three exceptions. He cares very, very much about that. And national policy should focus, as I said in the debate, on expanding the optionality. Because again, I knew a lot of young women who had abortions — almost always, it was motivated by this view that that was the only choice really available to them. That if they had had the baby, it would have destroyed their relationships, their family, their education, their career. And I think that we want to be pro-family in the fullest sense of the word. We want to promote more people choosing life. But I think that there has to be a balance here. A balance between states that are making their own abortion policies. Of course, California is going to have a different policy from Georgia, as we’ve already seen. And then at the federal government, promoting and increasing the optionality, the choices available, which is going to make it easier for women to choose life in the first place. And you talk about being confused. I never came out for a national abortion ban, no restrictions. What I did, to be clear, in my Senate campaign, is I endorsed the Lindsey Graham bill that had exceptions, and that would have, after a threshold, I think it was 15 weeks with reasonable exceptions, that’s a reasonable place to kind of draw the line.
You said in a podcast, and I’m going to quote here, that you’d “like abortion to be illegal nationally.” That was on the podcast Very Fine People in 2022, and you discussed the fact that people might be able to get abortions in other states, and you said you would need some federal response to prevent that from happening. “I’m pretty sympathetic to that, actually.” Well, what Trump has said, and what we’ve said on this campaign, is states are gonna make these choices. Yes, what I said in a podcast — I don’t have the podcast in front of me, but I’m sure that I said what you said I said — but that’s just reflective of my view expressed in 2022, that I want to protect as much vulnerable life as possible. But we’re in a different world than we were in 2022. No. 1, of course, we now have this decision primarily, thanks to the Supreme Court, left to the states. I think that’s where Donald Trump and I think it should be. But also, look, I’ve learned a little bit about this, and I talked about this in the debate. When the Supreme Court threw this back primarily to the states, what all Republicans should have learned is when you see people voting, sometimes even people who describe themselves as pro-life, voting for increased access to abortion, the conclusion that we should take from that is we’ve lost the trust of the American people. In 2023, we had a big referendum in the state of Ohio. I campaigned on one side; the people of Ohio — not, like, a super right-wing state by any means but, you know, a center, center-right state certainly — the state of Ohio voted 60-40 to go in the other direction. And to implement, I think, a much more liberal abortion regime than certainly the people on the other side were campaigning for. Well, what do you take from that? You can take the lesson that we just didn’t campaign hard enough, we didn’t make the case hard enough. I don’t think that’s right. I think the proper thing to take from that is we have lost the trust of the American people. When we went out there and campaigned for our position, they instinctively mistrusted us, and we need to get trust back.
What does that mean, though? I’ve heard you say that, but I don’t understand what that means. I think it’s by pursuing these pro-family policies. I think it’s by making it easier —
So it’s not by moderating your position on abortion? No. Rather than trying to say that we’re going to take options away from women, we want to make it easier for young women to choose life. But I think the way that you’re going to do that in 2024 in the United States of America is to let the states determine their own abortion policy. Now, again, part of that is protecting the ability of the states to make these decisions. Kamala Harris wants to re-nationalize the abortion conversation — go in the exact opposite direction. President Trump and I are saying, yes, sometimes these issues are messy. Sometimes, it’s going to be a little unusual for, say, California to have a different abortion policy than Alabama. But democracy is sometimes messy. We want to preserve the right of the states to make these decisions.
So you are OK with women traveling to another state to get an abortion? That is something that you would like to see preserved in this country? [Laughs.] OK. …
Yes or no? It’s a pretty — Lulu, I’m saying I’m OK with the states making these decisions. Now, you talk about what I’m OK with. Do I think that the voters of California are going to enact a more liberal policy than I might like to see? Yes. In fact, I accept that as the reality of the state level, state-focused regime that President Trump and I are encouraging people to take. Am I OK with it? I don’t think that’s the right way to look at it. I’m OK with the states making these decisions, even if they make decisions that JD Vance or Donald Trump might not make.
I want to move on to immigration. It’s another place where you have had a bit of a conversion. You wrote a piece in 2012 while you were still at Yale criticizing the G.O.P.’s immigration positions. And in it, you said: “Think about it. We conservatives rightly mistrust the government to efficiently administer business loans and regulate our food supply, yet we allegedly believe that it can deport millions of unregistered aliens — the notion fails to pass the laugh test.” What changed? Well, three and a half years of Kamala Harris didn’t help, right? You have 25 million people illegally in the country. I think when I wrote that piece, we were probably —
We don’t know the number. We were at six or seven million. [The Department of Homeland Security estimated there were 11.4 million undocumented immigrants in the United States in 2012.] Yeah, I mean, look, it’s an estimate, right? I think D.H.S. has said it’s probably 20 million. I think they’re undercounting it for a whole host of reasons. But whatever it is, it’s a hell of a lot higher than it was 12 years ago. [D.H.S. says there were 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. in 2022, which is the most recent official estimate. There was an increase of illegal migration after 2022, but there are no official numbers yet.] And I think that what we’ve learned is that unless you’re serious about deportations, you are never going to meaningfully enforce the border. It’s just too easy to come here, right? So you need two things, fundamentally. You need — whether it’s physical or technological, ideally both — you need some sort of physical barrier, a wall, to make it harder for people to come here illegally in the first place. And you need to be willing to deport people, I think, pretty substantially, when you have numbers that are as high as they are today.
How long do you think it would take to deport 20 million people? Because President Trump has promised to deport as many undocumented people in this country as there are. So what does that timeline look like for you? Well, I don’t think you’re going to have to deport every single one of them, because a lot of them will actually leave the country willingly if you make it harder for them to work, right? So I think that you have to combine — and again, President Trump and I really think this is necessary — you have to deport a large number of people. There are way too many illegal aliens in this country. You have to re-establish some deterrence and law enforcement for people coming here illegally. I think it’s certainly reasonable to deport around a million people per year. Now, of course, we have 25 million. So that would take a long time — 25 years, if my math is correct. But again, I don’t think that you have to deport everybody, because if you re-establish some semblance of a reasonable border policy, a lot of those people are going to go home willingly. If you make it harder for American companies to undercut the wages of American workers by hiring illegal labor, a lot of those folks are going to go home. I’ve introduced legislation to tax remittances, because a lot of what goes on is that people come into the country, they make money, they send a lot of it home to whatever country they came from. If you tax the remittances, then people aren’t going to come here to sort of try to work under the table to begin with. So, again, I think the focus here is somewhat off, because people talk about the logistical difficulty of making this happen. Well, we have had large-scale deportation efforts in the United States. I mean, look, Barack Obama, to his great credit, deported a hell of a lot more people than Kamala Harris has. So you can deport people in this country who are here illegally. You just have to have the political willpower to do it. But if you don’t do this, Lulu, I mean, you’re basically saying the United States doesn’t have meaningful border policy. The Mexican drug cartels have become the wealthiest criminal organization maybe in the entire world because of what Kamala Harris has done at the border. Not to mention, I’m a big believer in the social contract in this country. I benefited sometimes from a generous United States government, meaning a generous United States taxpayer, that made it possible for us to afford things that we wouldn’t have always been able to afford. So when you bring in millions upon millions of people, you degrade and destroy the social trust that’s necessary to support any kind of a modern support for poor people, food assistance, housing assistance, you are not going to have that stuff if you allow millions upon millions of people into this country illegally, and then they get to take advantage of it.
Let’s say you were successful in carrying out those mass deportations. One thing that everyone agrees on is that more housing is necessary in this country, right? The reason that there is a housing crisis is that not enough houses have been built. And that we have 25 million people who shouldn’t be here. I think it’s both.
I know you do. I don’t think that many people who look into this agree with you. But about a third of the construction work force in this country is Hispanic. Of those, a large proportion are undocumented. So how do you propose to build all the housing necessary that we need in this country by removing all the people who are working in construction? Well, I think it’s a fair question because we know that back in the 1960s, when we had very low levels of illegal immigration, Americans didn’t build houses. But, of course they did. And I’m being sarcastic in service of a point, Lulu: the assumption that because a large number of homebuilders now are using undocumented labor, that that’s the only way to build homes, I think again betrays a fundamental —
The country is much bigger. The need is much bigger. I’m not arguing in favor of illegal immigration. I’m asking how you would deal with the knock-on effect of your proposal to remove millions of people who work in a critical part of the economy. Well, I think that what you would do is you would take, let’s say for example, the seven million prime-age men who have dropped out of the labor force, and you have a smaller number of women, but still millions of women, prime age, who have dropped out of the labor force. You absolutely could re-engage folks into the American labor market.
To work in construction? Of course you could, so long as —
I mean, the unemployment rate is 4.1 percent. But the unemployment rate, Lulu, this is important, unemployment —
Most people who don’t work can’t work in the regular economy. They’re in the military, they’re parents, they’re sick, they’re old. They might not want to work in construction. The unemployment rate does not count labor-force participation dropouts. And again, this is one of the really deranged things that I think illegal immigration does to our society is it gets us in a mind-set of saying we can only build houses with illegal immigrants, when we have seven million — just men, not even women, just men — who have completely dropped out of the labor force. People say, well, Americans won’t do those jobs. Americans won’t do those jobs for below-the-table wages. They won’t do those jobs for non-living wages. But people will do those jobs, they will just do those jobs at certain wages. Think about the perspective of an American company. I want them to go searching in their own country for their own citizens, sometimes people who may be struggling with addiction or trauma, get them re-engaged in American society. We cannot have an entire American business community that is giving up on American workers and then importing millions of illegal laborers. That is what we have thanks to Kamala Harris’s border policies. I think it’s one of the biggest drivers of inequality. It’s one of the biggest reasons why we have millions of people who’ve dropped out of the labor force. Why try to re-engage an American citizen in a good job if you can just import somebody from Central America who’s going to work under the table for poverty wages? It is a disgrace, and it has led to the evisceration of the American middle class.
So this brings us to another point, because the way that you discuss immigrants has gotten a lot of scrutiny. The Springfield situation in particular, where you talked about the Haitian immigrant community, which we should say: They are legally here and allowed to work. And you spread a rumor, or helped spread a rumor, that they were eating pets, which turned out to be completely false. Off the back of that, there has been an enormous amount of hate, turmoil in that community. Bomb threats, kids not being able to go to school. Was the trade-off worth it to you? Well, there’s a lot there that I want to respond to, but I want to pick up on the overall attitude. I think we’ve had a nice, respectful conversation here, but you know, sometimes you can feel happy about the direction of this country, happy about its people, and very frustrated with American leaders. This issue more than any other makes me extraordinarily frustrated at American leaders. Because American leaders who are talking about Haitian immigrants who have no right to be in this country — and we’ll get to that in a second — they talk with such compassion about what’s happened to the schools, about what people have been unable to do. Where is their compassion for American citizens in Springfield, Ohio, who now, a community of 60,000 people, there are 1,000 children in Springfield schools who do not speak English. For years, I have heard from the American citizens of Springfield, Ohio, that their lives have gotten worse. Have we talked about the fact that many of them have been evicted from their homes, and then Haitian migrants are moved in, four families to a home, massively violating zoning laws?
They’re not moved in. They have been attracted there because they’re working — They’ve been attracted there to violate zoning laws, Lulu. They’re subsidized by the local authorities, by the federal authorities, by your tax dollars. So now four families are living in a home. [We asked the Vance campaign for credible evidence of these zoning-violation claims, but it has not provided any.]
It’s a Republican-run city and a Republican-run state. Your state. I’m talking about federal authorities, federal housing right now. Four families are living in a home. They are paying way more for rent than an American citizen in Springfield can pay. So the American citizens have been evicted from their homes. They are finding housing unaffordable. They are waiting longer at hospitals. Their children are going to schools that are stressed because there are too many kids there who don’t even speak the native language. I am so much more concerned by the American citizens of Springfield, Ohio. And I think that it is disgraceful that American leaders pretend that they care about these migrants. More than they care about the people that they took an oath of office to actually look after. And when you say that these Haitian migrants in Springfield are legal, what you’re doing is, I think, making an intentional bait-and-switch. Because what most people think when they say legal resident, they think about somebody who comes to America, they get a green card, they come through the proper channels.
There are many ways to come to America. But what happened, it’s not just T.P.S. [temporary protected status]. It’s mass parole, which, by the way, has been challenged in court and is likely illegal. Kamala Harris has facilitated a massive amount of migration into American communities. And it is my job, as a United States senator, and hopefully as the next vice president, to look after the people who are affected. When you flood their community with millions — the national community, I’m talking about — with millions upon millions of people who shouldn’t be here, that is our responsibility. And I really don’t understand the perspective of an American leadership class that seems to have so much compassion —
And those are Republicans too. I mean, Mike DeWine came out and criticized you, the governor of your home state. I’m not talking about Mike DeWine right now. By the way, he endorsed us. But I’m talking about, OK, you’ve got 20,000 Haitian migrants. A lot of them, I’d say most of them, are probably very, very good people, but my compassion and my focus and my efforts as a political leader in this country, it is not for people, however good they might be, who don’t have the legal right to be in this country. [The Haitian immigrants are in Springfield legally.] It’s for American citizens.
Last few questions. In the debate, you were asked to clarify if you believe Trump lost the 2020 election. Do you believe he lost the 2020 election? I think that Donald Trump and I have both raised a number of issues with the 2020 election, but we’re focused on the future. I think there’s an obsession here with focusing on 2020. I’m much more worried about what happened after 2020, which is a wide-open border, groceries that are unaffordable. And look, Lulu —
Senator, yes or no. Did Donald Trump lose the 2020 election? Let me ask you a question. Is it OK that big technology companies censored the Hunter Biden laptop story, which independent analysis have said cost Donald Trump millions of votes?
Senator Vance, I’m going to ask you again. Did Donald Trump lose the 2020 election? Did big technology companies censor a story that independent studies have suggested would have cost Trump millions of votes? I think that’s the question.
Senator Vance, I’m going to ask you again. Did Donald Trump lose the 2020 election? And I’ve answered your question with another question. You answer my question and I’ll answer yours.
I have asked this question repeatedly. It is something that is very important for the American people to know. There is no proof, legal or otherwise, that Donald Trump did not lose the 2020 election. But you’re repeating a slogan rather than engaging with what I’m saying, which is that when our own technology firms engage in industrial-scale censorship — by the way, backed up by the federal government — in a way that independent studies suggest affect the votes. I’m worried about Americans who feel like there were problems in 2020. I’m not worried about this slogan that people throw: Well, every court case went this way. I’m talking about something very discrete, a problem of censorship in this country that I do think affected things in 2020. And more importantly, that led to Kamala Harris’s governance, which has screwed this country up in a big way.
Senator, would you have certified the election in 2020? Yes or no? I’ve said that I would have voted against certification because of the concern that I just raised. I think that when you have technology companies —
The answer is no. When you have technology companies censoring Americans at a mass scale in a way that, again, independent studies have suggested affect the vote. I think that it’s right to protest against that, to criticize that, and that’s a totally reasonable thing.
So the answer is no. And the last question, will you support the election results this time and commit to a peaceful transfer of power? Well, first of all, of course we commit to a peaceful transfer of power. We are going to have a peaceful transfer of power. I of course believe that a peaceful transfer of power is going to make Donald Trump the next president of the United States. But if there are problems, of course, in the same way that Democrats protested in 2004 and Donald Trump raised issues in 2020, we’re going to make sure that this election counts, that every legal ballot is counted. We’ve filed almost 100 lawsuits at the R.N.C. to try to ensure that every legal ballot has counted. I think you would maybe criticize that. We see that as an important effort to ensure election integrity. But certainly we’re going to respect the results in 2024, and I feel very confident they’re going to make Donald Trump the next president.
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