On this episode of “Interesting Times,” Ross Douthat interviews Vice President JD Vance about the Trump administration’s deportations, the tariff backlash and how Vance’s faith influences his politics.
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Ross Douthat: Mr. Vice President, welcome to “Interesting Times.”
JD Vance: Thank you, Ross — wait, is that actually the name of your podcast?
Douthat: That is the name of our show. Do we not live in interesting times?
So we’re here in Rome, the day after the papal inauguration, and you just met with Pope Leo XIV, the first American pope.
Vance: I did.
Douthat: So what did you talk about?
Vance: Well, I want to be respectful of the private conversation we had.
Generally, we talked about issues the Vatican cares a lot about. Obviously, they care about the migration issue. They care a lot about world peace. They care a lot about what’s happening in Russia and Ukraine. They care a lot about what’s happening with Gaza and Israel. It was a very productive conversation. I mean, amazing to me. As you know, I was one of the last world leaders to meet with Pope Francis on Easter Sunday, before he passed away. I’m actually wearing the tie that you gave me, which is very cool ——
Douthat: That’s the Vatican seal on polka dots.
Vance: Yes, on dark blue polka dots.
So, in the life of one person’s faith who happens to be an American political leader, it’s been really an amazing three or four weeks. I’m sure I’ll have some time to think about it and reflect on what it all means, but I’m really just honored to be here and thrilled to be a part of it.
Douthat: How does being either a Catholic or just a Christian shape your politics? What are things that you feel like you believe or care about in politics that are specific to Christianity rather than conservatism, the Republican Party and so on? How would your worldview be different if you weren’t a Catholic Christian?
Vance: Well, I think one of the criticisms that I get from the right is that I am insufficiently committed to the capital-M market.
I am a capitalist. I believe the market economy is the best way of provisioning goods and services and coordinating people across a very complex society. But I’m not one of these people who says every intervention in the market is good — for example, trade, which I’m sure we’ll get into.
If you apply a tariff on an import good, there are a lot of people who say: Well, that is a violation of some market rule. I think one of the things that I take from my Christian principles and Catholic social teachings — specifically whether you agree with the specific policies of our administration — is the market is a tool, but it is not the purpose of American politics.
The purpose of American politics should be to encourage our citizens to live a good life. And part of that is good, dignified work. Part of that is having a high enough wage that you can support a family. That very much flows through my Catholicism.
To be clear, I’m not saying it has to flow and that people who don’t share my faith can’t worry about those things. But that is something very much that I take from Catholic social teaching, and it certainly influences my views on economics. Obviously, I’m pro-life. I care about the rights of the unborn. That very much flows from my Christian perspective. There’s a lot of stuff.
When we talk about family policy — we talked about this a little bit with the Holy Father today — American society, I think, has become way too hostile to family formation. I think it’s probably true across the West. In some ways maybe the Europeans are even worse off than we are. Europe and America have been quite bad at supporting families over the last generation, and I think you see that in the fact that fewer people are choosing to start families. That’s something else that I think a lot about because of my faith.
It would be easier to ask what does your faith not cause you to think about, because when you really believe something, and I do believe it — I’m not saying I don’t have doubts; I think everybody does — but when you really believe something, it ought to influence how you think about the way that you do your job, the way that you spend time with your wife and your children. It just kind of necessarily informs how I live my life.
Douthat: How should a Catholic politician like yourself think about issues where either the hierarchy of the church or the pope himself seems to be critical of the stances you’re taking?
I just want to preface this: It is going to lead us into a conversation about immigration. You mentioned migration as one of the political issues that the Holy Father wanted to talk about ——
Vance: I knew the hard questions were coming, Ross.
Douthat: Historically, American presidents have tended to almost always have some set of issues where they’re not in tune with the Vatican.
Vance: Yeah.
Douthat: For Ronald Reagan, it could be the nuclear issue. There was conflict between the Reagan administration and elements of the church on nuclear nonproliferation.
There was also conflict over Reagan-era policy and Central America; obviously, for liberal and Democratic administrations, it tends to be around abortion and issues related to that.
Even George W. Bush, as much as some conservative Catholics wanted to downplay the fact that Pope John Paul II was against the Iraq War and the Vatican was against the Iraq War, that was a point of tension ——
Vance: Yes. And they were right.
Douthat: And they were right. You and I agree.
Clearly there is some tension between Trump administration policy and things that the pope thinks or the Vatican thinks.
How do you as a Catholic think about that tension?
Vance: We could probably talk all morning about this.
Let me give you a very specific instance of the tension. So yesterday, after the mass — I am a Catholic, I believe that Pope Leo is actually the shepherd of 1.4 billion Catholics, and there are things like bowing before him or kissing the ring that are signs of respect for a spiritual father. But on the world stage, I’m not there as JD Vance, a Catholic parishioner. I’m there as the vice president of the United States and the leader of the president’s delegation to the pope’s inaugural mass. And so some of the protocols about how I respond to the Holy Father were much different than how I might respond to the Holy Father, or how you might respond to the Holy Father purely in your capacity as a citizen.
That’s just one very concrete observation about the tensions.
Douthat: Is there actually a rule that says you as vice president should not kiss the papal ring?
Vance: The protocol is that American presidents and vice presidents do not bow before foreign leaders and do not kiss any rings. Obviously, given our history, you can appreciate that. So, no sign of disrespect, but it’s important to observe the protocols of the country that I love and that I’m representing and that I serve as vice president of, the United States.
That’s an easy thing, right? This is more difficult, this question. I think there are three ways of thinking about it, and I tend to fall in the middle.
Way No. 1, and you see some Catholics, or some Christians, say politics is politics. Policy is policy. Religion is religion. And you know, we wish the pope all the best or we wish the church all the best in its moral teachings, but we have to focus on policy, and these are two totally separate matters. But I think that that’s wrong because it understates the way in which all of us are informed by our moral and religious values. So that’s not the right way to do it.
I think another way to do it would be to say: I’m just going to do everything the Holy Father tells me to do. I think that would be ——
Douthat: Some people were worried about that with John. With John F. Kennedy.
Vance: [Laughs.] Of course. And I think that would be a violation of the U.S. Constitution. I think just my obligation more broadly as a vice president to serve the American people, you’ve got to think about this stuff.
On the migration question in particular, you have to think about what they’ve said, and when the church says yes, we respect the right of a country to enforce its borders, you also have to respect the rights of migrants, the dignity of migrants, when you think about questions like deportation and so forth. You have to be able to hold two ideas in your head at the same time.
And I’m not saying I’m always perfect at it, but I at least try to think about, OK, there are obligations that we have to people who in some ways are fleeing violence, or at least fleeing poverty. I also have a very sacred obligation, I think, to enforce the laws and to promote the common good of my own country, defined as the people with the legal right to be here.
I’ve talked to a lot of cardinals this weekend, just because there are a lot of cardinals here in Rome, and one of the arguments that I’ve made, very respectfully — I’ve had a lot of good, respectful conversations, including with cardinals who very strongly disagree with my views on migration — is that it’s easy to get locked in left versus right; the left respects the dignity of migrants and the right is motivated by hatred. Obviously, that’s not my view, but I think some liberal immigration advocates get locked in the view that the only reason JD Vance wants to enforce the borders more stridently is because he is motivated by some kind of hatred or some kind of grievance.
The point that I’ve tried to make is I think a lot about this question of social cohesion in the United States. I think about how we form the kind of society again where people can raise families, where people join institutions together. Where what I think Burke would have called the mediating layers of society are actually healthy and vibrant.
And I do think that those who care about what might be called the common good, they sometimes underweight how destructive immigration at the levels and at the pace that we’ve seen over the last few years is to the common good. I really do think that social solidarity is destroyed when you have too much migration too quickly.
That’s not because I hate the migrants or I’m motivated by grievance. That’s because I’m trying to preserve something in my own country where we are a unified nation. And I don’t think that can happen if you have too much immigration too quickly.
Douthat: Let me propose a theory of papal interventions in politics. It might be useful to think of issues where presidents end up in some kind of tension with the papacy as “zones of temptation.” Meaning, it’s not that when the pope says you’re wrong about this and that automatically means that you say: Absolutely, your holiness, we’re going to change our policy tomorrow. But it might mean that you’re operating in an area where you’re going to be exposed to certain kinds of temptations and get into zones of danger.
Vance: That’s interesting.
Douthat: Take the Iraq War example. While George W. Bush was getting ready to go to war, people who defended the decision to go to war in Iraq would say: Look, even if the pope is against it, this is a prudential judgment. It’s a judgment that a statesman has to make, not the judgment the pope has to make. And I think they were right.
Vance: Yeah.
Douthat: Nonetheless, it would have been useful perhaps for more people in the Bush administration to say: OK, as we’re thinking about this war, the fact that the pope is against it should make us think, let’s say, 10 percent more carefully. We should take 10 percent more moral care around what’s going to happen to Christian minorities, for instance.
Or to take a case like Joe Biden, the former president of the United States. I look at his career and his relationship to the church on issues like abortion and I see a kind of tragic story. Biden started out as a pro-life Catholic politician, and by the end of his career, because of the nature of partisan politics, he ended up with a position on abortion indistinguishable from the secular left. Step by step, piece by piece, he ended up alienated from his faith.
So for someone in your position, whatever the pope says about immigration, it doesn’t imply that you need to change your general policy overnight, but it means that you need to be aware that this is a zone where you’re exposed to a certain kind of partisan temptation.
What do you think about that?
Vance: I think that’s fair. It’s more linear and more structured than what I just said, but I think it’s pretty consistent with that. It’s not that you follow commandments. It’s also not that you just disregard these things or say: Well, I know what this guy thinks, but I have to make a prudential judgment differently. I think it’s that you make a prudential judgment informed very much by the church’s teachings as reflected by these leaders.
And by the way, you mentioned Joe Biden. Two things on this: First of all, we just found out right before I was walking in here that apparently he has some very serious health issues. So we wish the former president the best in his health.
Also, to be candid — and this is going to sound like I’m beating up on him — I really don’t know how much Joe Biden’s late evolution on abortion was that thought out. Far be it from me to defend Joe Biden, but I really think the more that we learn, the more that we see the policy of the Biden administration was driven much more by staff than it was by the elected president.
Douthat: I think that’s probably fair to say. And I would join you in sympathy and solidarity with the former president on his cancer diagnosis.
I’m going to come back to that zone of temptation idea as we get a little bit deeper into the actual policy debate. We’re going to talk about immigration and trade with a similar sort of big picture question in both questions.
Vance: OK. Great.
Douthat: We’ll start with immigration.
The Trump administration, while running for president, made two promises: We’re going to secure the border and we’re going to deport a substantial number of the people who entered illegally under the previous administration.
I would say that you have been more successful than I expected at swiftly securing the border. On deportations, it seems like the actual process is not moving that quickly, and there’s a lot of debates in the courts and elsewhere about relatively small numbers of potential deportees.
Vance: Sure.
Douthat: So, looking ahead four years from now, what would constitute success in immigration policy at the end of this term?
Vance: Well, not to pat ourselves on the back too much, but I do think the most important success is stopping the flow of illegal migration to begin with. And I think that the president has succeeded wildly on that. I agree, it’s been greater than my expectations, and I had high expectations. We’ve done a very good job there, and I think the president deserves a great deal of credit.
On the deportation question, first, this is just a minor wonky point that kind of bothers me in the way this is reported in the media. Sometimes you will hear people say that deportations in the Trump administration are down relative to the Biden administration. That is in fact an artifact of the fact that the Biden border was effectively wide open. In other words, if somebody comes across the border illegally and you immediately turn them around, or you schedule a deportation hearing and say, come back for your hearing, a lot of both of those would get counted as deportation.
So you can have a lot of deportations when you have quite literally millions of people per year walking across the border. That’s low-hanging fruit in terms of deportation. So just a point of clarification there.
Douthat: That’s completely fair. But at the current pace of deportations, you would be deporting numbers commensurate with prior presidents and not commensurate with the numbers who entered.
Vance: That’s right.
I’m sure New York Times listeners are going to be scandalized by this line of argumentation, but I think it’s really important. In some ways, the deportation infrastructure that is developed in the United States is not adequate to the task, given what Joe Biden left us.
There are different estimates of how many illegal immigrants came in under the Biden administration. Was it 12 million? Was it 20 million? It’s hard to count this stuff because you have known got-aways, you have unknown got-aways. You have the people that we never even saw cross the border. So there’s a little bit of guesswork in all this.
I actually think the number is much closer to 20 million than to 12 million ——
Douthat: Just to pause there, one of the most hard-core, critical of illegal immigration think tanks, when I looked into this, had its estimate in the 10 million to 12 million range.
Vance: That’s right. They did. And I think they’re undercounting it, because I think they’re counting the people that we were aware of. I don’t think they were counting that estimate of unknown got-aways. They weren’t counting certain classes of asylum seekers, of temporary protected status seekers. So they were answering a question as honestly as they could. But I think, if you look at the grand scheme of it, it’s higher.
But look, whether it’s 12 million or whether it’s 20 million, it’s a lot. That’s a lot of work ahead of us, and here are two things that we can do. I think one thing is a little bit easier and one thing is a little bit harder. The first thing is you just have to have the actual law enforcement infrastructure to make this possible. And again, I think that we should treat people humanely. I think we have an obligation to treat people humanely, but I do think that a lot of these illegal immigrants have to go back to where they came from. That requires more law enforcement officers. It requires more beds at deportation facilities. It just requires more of the basic nuts and bolts of how you run a law enforcement regime in the context of deportation. And that’s one of the main things in the big, beautiful bill that is moving through Congress right now: more money for immigration enforcement. That’s what that money is for, to facilitate that deportation infrastructure.
There’s also a much more difficult question, and I think you see the president’s frustration and I’ve obviously expressed public frustration on this, which is, yes, illegal immigrants, by virtue of being in the United States, are entitled to some due process. But the due process ——
Douthat: To be clear, this is based on legislation. It’s not based on the judges who are making these decisions inventing this standard. It is a legislative standard.
Vance: But the amount of process that is due, how you enforce those legislative standards and how you actually bring them to bear, is, I think, very much an open question.
I remember when I was in law school, there were all of these people who were wanting to become immigration lawyers. There was almost a certain buzz around immigration law at the time because there was so much gray area. There was so much open space where the courts would interpret how to apply these rules. Now, in the context of the United States in 2011, 2012, 2013, when I was in law school, we had significant illegal immigration, but not that much. There was this idea that you could use the asylum claim process, you could use the refugee process, you could use all of these other tools of the immigration enforcement regime to actually make it harder to deport illegal aliens.
A lot of very well-funded NGOs went about the process of making it much harder to deport illegal aliens. In the year of our Lord 2025, we inherited a whole host of legal rules, and in some cases not even legal rules, and in some cases not even legal rules as much as arguments that had been made by left-wing NGOs that hadn’t actually been ruled on by the courts yet. And what we’re finding, of course, is that a small but substantial number of courts are making it very, very hard for us to deport illegal aliens.
Stephen Miller, our immigration czar in the White House, a good friend of mine, is thinking of all of these different and new statutory authorities, because there are a lot of different statutory authorities the president has to enforce the nation’s immigration laws. And there is, candidly, frustration on the White House side that we think that the law is very clear. We think the president has extraordinary plenary power. You need some process to confirm that these illegal aliens are, in fact, illegal aliens and not American citizens. But it’s not like we’re just throwing that process out. We’re trying to comply with it as much as possible and actually do the job that we were left ——
Douthat: OK, but ——
Vance: Let me just make one final philosophical point here. I worry that unless the Supreme Court steps in here, or unless the District Courts exercise a little bit more discretion, we are running into a real conflict between two important principles in the United States.
Principle 1 of course is that courts interpret the law. Principle 2 is that the American people decide how they’re governed. That’s the fundamental small-d democratic principle that’s at the heart of the American project. I think that you are seeing, and I know this is inflammatory, but I think you are seeing an effort by the courts to quite literally overturn the will of the American people. To be clear, it’s not most courts. But I saw an interview with Chief Justice Roberts recently where he said the role of the court is to check the excesses of the executive. I thought that was a profoundly wrong sentiment. That’s one-half of his job. The other half of his job is to check the excesses of his own branch. You cannot have a country where the American people keep on electing immigration enforcement and the courts tell the American people they’re not allowed to have what they voted for. That’s where we are right now.
We’re going to keep working it through the immigration court process, through the Supreme Court as much as possible. And look, my hope is that when you ask what success is, success to me is not so much a number. Though obviously I’d love to see the gross majority of the illegal immigrants who came in under Biden deported, that is actually a secondary metric of success. Success to me is that we have established a set of rules and principles that the courts are comfortable with, and that we have the infrastructure that allows us to deport large numbers of illegal aliens when large numbers of illegal aliens come into the country.
That, to me, is real success. But I think whether we’re able to get there is a function, of course, of our efforts, but also the courts themselves.
Douthat: Right. But it seems like the stable way to a settlement that would outlast your own administration would involve a combination of Supreme Court rulings. And I think it’s fair to say that there is a majority on the Supreme Court that is likely to be sympathetic to something other than a left-NGO reading of immigration law.
Vance: I hope that’s right.
Douthat: I think that’s likely. Combining that with perhaps a recognition that maybe the legislative setup around this issue is out of date, the asylum system assumed by legislation written in the 1950s doesn’t make sense.
Vance: That’s certainly true.
Douthat: So there you have two tracks. You have trying to get Supreme Court rulings that vindicate your interpretation of the law, and you have potentially legislative efforts where the existing law needs to be revised. But your administration, just to push ——
Vance: There’s a third track, too, which is using existing legal authorities that haven’t been used in the past but we think are there.
Douthat: And this is what I’m asking about. The legal authorities that you guys have tried to use, the particular one is the Alien Enemies Act, which is an extremely aggressive claim about wartime powers that, as far as I can tell, even under the most aggressive interpretation is likely to apply only to an incredibly small number of migrants. The claim is not actually that five million migrants here illegally are in a state of war against the United States. Or is that the claim?
Vance: No, it’s not that five million are engaged in military conflict. I take issue that it’s an aggressive interpretation. Let me back up and take some issue with that premise. I don’t think that the supposition, if you look at the history and the context of those laws, is that for something to be an invasion you have to have five million uniformed combatants.
We don’t have five million uniformed combatants. I think I have to be careful here because some of this information is classified. How to put this point? I think that the courts need to be somewhat deferential. In fact, I think the design is that they should be extremely deferential to these questions of political judgment made by the people’s elected president of the United States.
Because when you say there aren’t five million people who are waging war, OK, but are there thousands, maybe tens of thousands of people? And then when you take their extended family, their networks, is it much larger than that? Who are quite dangerous people who I think very intentionally came to the United States to cause violence, or to at least profit from violence, and they’re fine if violence is an incidental effect of it? Yeah. I do, man. And I think people underappreciate the level of public safety stress that we’re under when the president talks about how bad crime is. You know, the one thing I’d love for the American media to do a little bit more is really go to a migrant community where you have, say, 60 percent legal immigrants and 40 percent illegal immigrants. The level of chaos, the level of violence, the level of I think truly premodern brutality that some of these communities have gotten used to. Whatever law was written, I think it vests us with the power to take very serious action against this. It’s bad. It’s worse than people appreciate, and it’s not Donald Trump.
Most of your listeners probably hate the president I serve under and probably hate me. Maybe not your listeners, but a lot of New York Times readers ——
Douthat: We’ll talk about that question in a minute.
Vance: But I would just ask them, do not filter this through: I see President Trump and Vice President Vance up there, and I immediately assume that they’re lying to me and that they’re motivated by some bad value.
This is not sustainable. And it’s not just unsustainable, like, oh, this is more immigrants than we used to have. This is a level of invasion that I think we already have laws to help us deal with. I wish the courts were more deferential. We’re very early innings in the court process, and even some of the capital-W worst Supreme Court decisions that have been made, the media says: Oh, this is a big blow to the administration. A lot of these things are very narrow procedural rulings. I think that we’re very early innings here on what the court is going to interpret the law to mean.
Douthat: Shouldn’t this barbaric medieval landscape that you’re describing show up in violent crime statistics?
Vance: Sometimes no, because the people who are most victimized by this, they’re not running to the F.B.I., they’re not running to the local police. But certainly, if you look at the number of people dying of fentanyl overdoses — again, just go substantively, qualitatively.
You go to these communities and you see what they’re dealing with. I really think that we underappreciate just how violent these cartels are and how much they’ve made life pretty unbearable for, frankly, a lot of native-born American citizens, but also a lot of legal American migrants, especially those along the Southern border.
Douthat: So, to get to my idea of a zone of temptation here for you, what you’re describing is — again, you and I both lived through the Bush presidency, right?
Vance: Yes.
Douthat: And there are elements of what you might call a kind of war on terror mentality ——
Vance: Yeah.
Douthat: That you’re taking vis-à-vis the cartels or people associated with the cartels, or people allegedly associated with gangs and cartels, that seems to me similar to the approach taken to anyone associated with Islamic terrorism and so on in the aftermath of September 11th. You and I remember that in more than a few cases this ended up with situations where the U.S. was taking people into custody and remanding them to black sites, who turned out unsurprisingly not to be, No. 1, Al Qaeda terrorists.
Vance: Yes.
Douthat: And to the extent that it is possible, and it is somewhat difficult for the media to do this, but to the extent that it’s possible for the media to examine the figures and individuals that you guys have been trying to essentially remand to prison in El Salvador without extensive legal process, it just seems like this system is ripe for war-on-terror-style abuses. Where you are going to be sending people to prison in El Salvador, that advertises itself as a terrible place, and one, some of those people are probably going to be innocent. Two, some of them are going to be people who have committed a crime, who have some kind of gang affiliation, but who under normal American law, non-wartime law, would end up going to jail for six months or a year or something.
And they’re going to disappear, potentially, into a system for a decade or more. And that just seems like you are creating a context where injustice is inevitable even if your intentions are just to bring peace and order to communities along the border or anything else.
Vance: Well, look, I understand your point, and making these judgments, if you take the teachings of our faith seriously, they are hard. I’m not going to pretend that I haven’t struggled with some of this, that I haven’t thought about whether we’re doing the precisely right thing. So it’s a fair point, and I know that you think you’ve got me trapped here ——
Douthat: I don’t think I have you — no, let me be perfectly honest. I’m not interested in having you trapped here.
Vance: No, I know. [Laughter.]
Douthat: We’re having a conversation in Rome as a journalist and a vice president, but also as two Catholics.
Vance: I’m giving you [expletive], Ross. Trust me. To be clear, I think it’s a totally fair question and in fact illustrates ——
Douthat: I’m interested in what politics does to your soul.
Vance: Yes, of course. So, No. 1, the concern that you raise is fair. There has to be some way in which you’re asking yourself as you go about enforcing the law, even, to your point, against some very dangerous people, that you’re enforcing the law consistent with the Catholic church’s moral dictates and so forth.
Douthat: Well, and also, after that pitch to your soul ——
Vance: And American law ——
Douthat: And American law and basic principles.
Vance: Most importantly, American law. But we’re in Rome, and so that’s why I brought up the Catholic faith part of it.
Douthat: And the American flag is positioned behind you.
Vance: So with a caveat that I’m the vice president of the United States, and I am hardly an expert in every single case that has become a viral sensation or that people have criticized us over. But I am pretty well read on some of the cases.
Typically, what I find when I look at the worst cases — I mean, the ones that the media seems so preoccupied with — I’m going to make a couple of observations about it. No. 1, it is hard to take seriously — now, this doesn’t absolve me from doing my duty as an American leader and hopefully as a Christian leader, too — but it is hard to take seriously the extraordinarily emotive condemnations of people who don’t care about the problem that I’m trying to solve and that the president is trying to solve.
That’s not you. It’s why I actually take your concerns seriously. I listen to most of your podcasts. I read most of your columns. So when I see people who for legitimately four years told me that I was a xenophobe for thinking that what Joe Biden was doing at the border was a serious problem, I am less willing — there’s a witness element to this — and I’m less willing to believe the witness of people who are now saying that this MS-13 gang member, and we’ll talk about that case in a second, this guy is somehow a very sympathetic person and you violated his civil rights, et cetera, et cetera.
So that’s No. 1. No. 2, I still have an obligation to think about these cases. A lot of times I’ll read about these cases and I’ll reach out to the people who are enforcing immigration law, and I’ll try to find out what exactly is going on. I haven’t asked every question about every case, but the ones where I have asked questions and I try to get to the bottom of what’s going on, I feel quite comfortable with what’s happened. And the one that I’ve spent the most time understanding is the one of the Maryland father.
What I found so bizarre about that case is that the American media took one line, and I forget what line it was, but it acknowledged some error had happened in a Department of Justice filing without actually asking the two most important questions:
What is the nature of the error? And much more importantly, what is the remedy for an error, both as a matter of law, most importantly as the vice president, but also, again, as a matter of Christian principles?
I think this guy was not just a gang member, but a reasonably high-level gang member in MS-13. I think he had engaged in some pretty ugly conduct. Legally, he had multiple hearings before an immigration judge. He had a valid deportation order. What he also had was a sort of exception, what’s called a withholding order, that basically said: Yes, you can deport this guy. No one doubts that we could have deported this guy, but you can’t deport this guy to El Salvador because of particular conditions that obtained, I believe, in 2019, when his case was adjudicated.
So you fast-forward to 2025, we deport this guy, the courts hold that we’ve made a mistake, and then eventually it gets to the Supreme Court. And I believe, and we’re getting into the weeds, a little bit of the legal technicalities, but I believe the court term is you must “facilitate” his return. And I sat in lunch with Bukele, the leader of El Salvador, with the president of the United States and with others, and talked about this case.
And Bukele basically said: I don’t want to send this guy back. I think he’s a bad guy. He’s my citizen. He’s in a prison in El Salvador, and I think that’s where he belongs. And our attitude was: OK, what are we really going to do? Are we going to exert extraordinary diplomatic pressure to bring a guy back to the United States who’s a citizen of a foreign country who we had a valid deportation order with?
And, again, I understand there may be disagreements about the judgments that we made here, but there’s just something that it’s hard to take serious when so many of the people who are saying we made a terrible error here are the same people who made no protests about how this guy got into the country in the first place, or what Joe Biden did for four years to the American Southern border.
Douthat: In that meeting, the other thing that the president of the United States said was that he hoped or aspired to a situation where he could potentially send American citizens to El Salvador’s prisons. The worst of the worst.
Vance: He’s also said explicitly he would follow the law ——
Douthat: Right.
Vance: And he would follow American courts on this.
Douthat: Right.
Vance: So I don’t think it’s unreasonable for the president to say: Here’s this thing I’d like to do, so long as it’s consistent with the law.
Douthat: I think that you should be able to see, though, why, in the context of sending illegal immigrants to a Salvadoran prison and claiming to be unable for diplomatic reasons to bring them back, the prospect of then saying, We’d like to send U.S. citizens to that prison, would raise some concerns about how the administration uses the immigration powers that you think it should have under arguable wartime conditions.
Vance: Well ——
Douthat: Regardless of the particulars of a case, it just seems like you are setting up a machinery that people of good faith who are not hostile to your policies would reasonably regard as dangerous to particular people who are caught up in the system. That’s all.
Vance: So look, I understand the point. Especially as what the president says, or what I say, is refracted through the lens of an American press that I have my complaints with. But I’m going to defend my boss here. What did he say? I’m going to think about doing this only in cases of the very, very worst people, No. 1. And No. 2, only if it’s consistent with American law. I think that if that was the headline that was reproduced — the president is considering sending the very worst violent gang members in America to a foreign prison — so long as that is a legal thing to do, I don’t think that would inspire so much passionate resistance. That’s my understanding of the American people.
Douthat: In a context where the administration is saying, notwithstanding the Supreme Court’s desire that we facilitate the return of someone who was sent there in error, we can’t do it.
Vance: And by the way, it’s said that we understand facilitation to mean something. Of course, the Supreme Court or any other court can further illuminate that.
Douthat: Yes.
Vance: But this point is interesting to me. There are two things about my boss — and I never reveal private conversations — there are two things about the president of the United States that I am extremely fascinated by. One is he has better instincts about human beings than anybody that I’ve ever met. Just almost a bizarre level of intuition about people.
Second, which I think is very underappreciated and it motivates the foreign policy in Ukraine and Russia, it motivates the things that he said about the Middle East, it motivates really a lot of them, is he has this sort of humanitarian impulse. And I’ve heard the president say: Maybe if we sent the very worst people to different places, then American prisons would be a little less violent. Because as you know, American prisons are not a good place. They’re not very good at rehabilitation. I think we overstate how much people go to prison for truly petty crime, but they go in there for something that should at least give them an opportunity for a second chance. They end up getting stabbed while they’re in prison.
So the idea that there is just something fundamentally inhumane about sending a very violent person to another prison outside of the country, I don’t buy that. I don’t think that’s what motivates the president. And again, that’s a separate question from whether it’s legal, which the president’s been very clear he would follow the law.
Douthat: Let’s pull back to another issue: trade. What does success look like? We’ve ended up in a place where we had Liberation Day. We had a period of, let’s say, market difficulty and chaos.
Vance: Sure.
Douthat: It seems like we’re in a zone of partial stability where we’re setting tariffs around 10 percent. We’re negotiating new trade deals. So you have a policy set in motion that is trying to produce some kind of results. What results do you want? And specifically at the end of four years, are you looking at the number of manufacturing jobs? Is it the number of new factories open? Is it particular industries that are currently overseas that have national security implications that you want back home? Is it tariff revenue to help with the deficit? What do you want from this policy that we can actually measure and say, in three years, it succeeded or it failed?
Vance: So I want to answer your question, but I want to give some context here and back up a little bit, because I think that there has been a little overconfidence from the economic class and from other watchers of this policy that they know what Donald Trump doesn’t, that we’re sort of motivated by chaos or stupidity or something else.
And you don’t have to agree with the policy, but I think there are a couple of very important points that I think illustrate this. No. 1, yes, we are at a global minimum tariff of effectively 10 percent. That understates it in a lot of ways because we also have substantial tariffs on automobiles. We have substantial tariffs on steel. We have substantial tariffs on a whole host of other product categories.
One of the very classic, very straightforward predictions of the economics profession is that if you do this, the currency — being the U.S. dollar — the currency of the importing nation that’s applying the tariff is going to appreciate. What happened? The currency actually depreciated. I think it’s worth just stepping back and saying the consensus forecast of our economics profession is profoundly wrong on this particular question.
Similarly, if you look at the inflation numbers, if you look at the jobs numbers, if you look at nearly every metric, we keep on beating expectations. The one exception was the G.D.P. number. Even our critics have acknowledged the G.D.P., which went down, I think, by 0.3 percent last quarter, that has been very much an artifact of how the stuff’s measured. That’s not real G.D.P., actual decline, that’s how it’s measured. So just step back here. I think that we’re trying a new economic paradigm, but people who think that they know everything should have a little bit more humility. We have a lot of humility, trust me. Me and the president and the entire team, we are constantly testing this stuff. Do you want to say something or do you want me to actually answer your question?
Douthat: I’m trying to avoid having a long argument about the wisdom of the specific tariffs that were announced on Liberation Day.
As someone who hosts a podcast and tries to talk to people, I found it very difficult to get anyone in the administration or sympathetic voices outside of it to straightforwardly say: This is why this set of policies is good and defensible, the nation-by-nation tariffs. However, the place we’re in now with a global minimum tariff, I can find people who will defend that policy.
So, rather than litigating it, I want to start where we are.
Let’s say the economics profession is wrong in some way, and the U.S. economy can absorb these tariffs without dramatic impacts on prices and jobs and so on.
Let’s say that’s the case. Still, you are doing these tariffs not to just have them absorbed by the economy, but to achieve something.
Vance: Yes. That’s right.
Douthat: So tell me what you want to achieve.
Vance: So, again, I don’t want to litigate this, either. The one — allow me a bit of litigation here. I gave you 20 more minutes. Give me 30 seconds to make this point.
Douthat: But I have 30 more questions.
Vance: I’ll be brief.
The point of Liberation Day, as the president himself has said, was, one, to announce that the old global trading system was over, and two, that America was now open for business, open for negotiation, open to talk and open to a whole host of other policy interventions ——
Douthat: Which is why it was randomly selected by a Magic 8 Ball, and it didn’t really matter what the numbers were.
Vance: I totally disagree with that.
I think they’re based in large part on the trade deficit, which is a very reasonable place to start, especially for large economies versus large economies.
But anyway, we don’t have to have a debate.
Douthat: Tell me about success.
Vance: We’ll stop litigating. The goal here, Ross, there are a few things that we want out of this.
First of all, I think the president’s been very clear that the 10 percent minimum is going to apply nearly universally, if not universally. So, yes, there is one way in which we’re trying to raise revenue. Meanwhile, we’re trying to lower taxes on domestic producers and consumers. And if you combine those two policies, he’s trying to make it more expensive to import into the United States. He’s trying to make it a little bit cheaper to produce or to work in the United States. So those two policies go hand in hand.
Second of all, and this is related, you asked: What does success look like? Look, does it mean that we have more manufacturing jobs than we do right now? Yes. I think that’s one of the things that we want. Now, it’s going to take a little while to get there.
One very important metric of success, which I think you already saw in the Q1 numbers, which is way more important than this sort of weird artifact of measurement on G.D.P., was how much private capital investment is coming into the country. You saw a very significant increase.
A lot of people pooh-pooh the Middle Eastern trip. They say: Oh, well, these investment numbers that he’s getting from foreign countries or from American companies, those aren’t real numbers. But if you look at the actual measured amount of capital investment in the country, that is on the rise, and we think that capital investment will produce factories and other companies will produce good jobs and so forth.
I think the best way of measuring where we’re headed here is whether we still have a $1.2 or $1.3 trillion trade deficit. Not next year, because it takes a while. You’ve got to build factories, you’ve got to change the trading regime with other countries. We’re trying to make our exports cheaper — which, by the way, give the president credit, if you look at the U.K. trade deal, it is very, very good for us. Our manufacturers got better access to the sixth largest economy in the world. Our agricultural producers got major access in a way they’ve never been able to get to the sixth largest economy in the world.
But all of this is, I think, in service of America making more of its own stuff, relying less on foreign countries, and the best way to measure that, not the perfect way, but the best way to measure that is are we still losing, as the president would say, $1.2, $1.3 trillion on trade?
Douthat: OK, so if that’s the case, isn’t there then a big missing piece of this agenda? China has major industrial policy. And if you talk to a lot of the people who are most supportive of some kind of economic change along the lines you’re describing, they will say tariffs and trade barriers are part of it, but you also need to increase manufacturing and domestic industry, and the government has a big role to play in that.
So, one, is that true? Two, to the extent that it is true, when I look at things that DOGE has done in terms of cuts, it’s made. When I look at the big, beautiful bill working its way through the House and Senate, I see very conventional, small government Republican policymaking. Certainly not a kind of new industrial policy for the 21st century.
So is that out there as a possibility for the administration?
Vance: So, yes. But I think you’re underweighting how much there’s both a carrot and stick element to this and the Trump administration. Again, you see traditional Republicans, small government, blah, blah, blah, blah. OK, but we’re talking about no tax on overtime, no tax on tips. These are things that give domestic consumers more money. And if you combine giving domestic consumers more money with making it easier and cheaper to produce in America and more expensive to produce overseas, then that is, in our view, at least a form of industrial policy.
There are other things that we’re doing. No. 2: massive, massive changes to the regulatory regime. Our biggest belief, or at least mine — I don’t want to speak for the president because I haven’t talked to him on this issue, but I think his policy is consistent with his perspective — is we actually have an industrial policy in this country.
The biggest industrial policy that we have is a regulatory regime that is incredibly rewarding to software, to the world of bits, as Peter Thiel and Tyler Cowen might say, and is incredibly punitive in the world of atoms. We would like to reverse that, or at least equalize it.
If you look at what we’re trying to do on the regulatory regime, we’re trying to make it so much easier to produce things in the real world, not just to write code, as important as that can be. That is a form of industrial policy.
To that point, I think our energy policy is a form of industrial policy because that’s the most important cost input, especially for high-value-added manufacturing. And then the final point here, give us some credit here, because you know what our secretary of the Army did two weeks ago didn’t get a whole lot of headlines, but he’s completely rejiggering the Army’s procurement process. Because we have a trillion-dollar industrial policy at the Department of Defense that’s rewarded slow incumbents instead of innovation and technology. And so we’ve empowered our service leads in a way that no administration has in a generation to actually spend that money on tech and innovation and developing the next generation of tools.
So I agree with you that industrial policy is part of this, but it’s got to be smart industrial policy, and I think that’s what we’re doing.
Douthat: Is there a legislative vision after the tax bill passes?
Vance: You know, you have to bite off only so much at a time, Ross, and I think that it’s not just a tax bill, of course, it’s an immigration bill. There are a lot of other parts of the policy agenda that matter. There’s a lot of regulatory relief in this bill. This bill is what we’re focused on. And then, yes, once we get this bill passed, we’re going to think about other legislative priorities.
But I would be lying to you if I told you I had some detailed legislation idea for what comes next. The president probably does, but we’ve got to take one step at a time.
Douthat: OK. Speaking of the economy and industrial policy and everything else, and the pope. Bring it all together ——
Vance: [Laughs.] We’ve come full circle.
Douthat: Pope Leo took the name Leo XIV, a reference to Leo XIII ——
Vance: Of course.
Douthat: Who was engaged in figuring out the Catholic response to the industrial era.
And the new pope has said explicitly that he’s thinking about the Catholic response to the age of information technology and A.I.
You have been a point person for the administration on A.I. issues. I’m curious, one, there are people who think that we are essentially getting a profound economic revolution driven by A.I. while you guys are in office. In the Trump-Vance administration.
So I’m first curious how likely you think that is, because the last guest on this podcast was making prophecies of imminent A.I.-driven doom ——
Vance: I am aware.
Douthat: How much do you worry about the potential downsides of A.I.? Not even on the apocalyptic scale, but on the scale of the way human beings respond to a sense of their own obsolescence? These kinds of things.
Vance: So, one, on the obsolescence point, I think the history of tech and innovation is that while it does cause job disruptions, it more often facilitates human productivity as opposed to replacing human workers. And the example I always give is the bank teller in the 1970s. There were very stark predictions of thousands, hundreds of thousands of bank tellers going out of a job. Poverty and commiseration.
What actually happens is we have more bank tellers today than we did when the A.T.M. was created, but they’re doing slightly different work. More productive. They have pretty good wages relative to other folks in the economy.
I tend to think that is how this innovation happens. You know, A.I. ——
Douthat: But just to be clear, by the standards of the predictions people are making, that prediction is of a relatively slow pace of change.
Vance: Well, I think it’s a relatively slow pace of change. But I just think, on the economic side, the main concern that I have with A.I. is not of the obsolescence, it’s not people losing jobs en masse.
You hear about truck drivers, for example. I think what might actually happen is that truck drivers are able to work more efficient hours. They’re able to get a little bit more sleep. They’re doing much more on the last mile of delivery than staring at a highway for 13 hours a day. So they’re both safer and they’re able to get higher wages.
So anyway, I’m more optimistic — I should say about the economic side of this, recognizing that yes, there are concerns. I don’t mean to understate them.
Where I really worry about this is in pretty much everything noneconomic? I think the way that people engage with one another. The trend that I’m most worried about, there are a lot of them, and I actually, I don’t want to give too many details, but I talked to the Holy Father about this today.
If you look at basic dating behavior among young people — and I think a lot of this is that the dating apps are probably more destructive than we fully appreciate. I think part of it is technology has just for some reason made it harder for young men and young women to communicate with each other in the same way. Our young men and women just aren’t dating, and if they’re not dating, they’re not getting married, they’re not starting families.
There’s a level of isolation, I think, mediated through technology, that technology can be a bit of a salve. It can be a bit of a Band-Aid. Maybe it makes you feel less lonely, even when you are lonely. But this is where I think A.I. could be profoundly dark and negative. I don’t think it’ll mean three million truck drivers are out of a job. I certainly hope it doesn’t mean that. But what I do really worry about is does it mean that there are millions of American teenagers talking to chatbots who don’t have their best interests at heart? Or even if they do have their best interests at heart, they start to develop a relationship, they start to expect a chatbot that’s trying to give a dopamine rush, and, you know, compared to a chatbot, a normal human interaction is not going to be as satisfying, because human beings have wants and needs.
And I think that’s, of course, one of the great things about marriage in particular, is you have this other person, and you just have to kind of figure it out together. Right? But if the other person is a chatbot who’s just trying to hook you to spend as much time on it, that’s the sort of stuff that I really worry about with A.I.
And then there’s also a whole host of defense and technology applications. We could wake up very soon in a world where there is no cybersecurity. Where the idea of your bank account being safe and secure is just a relic of the past. Where there’s weird shit happening in space mediated through A.I. that makes our communications infrastructure either actively hostile or at least largely inept and inert. So, yeah, I’m worried about this stuff.
I actually read the paper of the guy that you had on. I didn’t listen to that podcast, but ——
Douthat: If you read the paper, you got the gist.
Last question on this: Do you think that the U.S. government is capable in a scenario — not like the ultimate Skynet scenario — but just a scenario where A.I. seems to be getting out of control in some way, of taking a pause?
Because for the reasons you’ve described, the arms race component ——
Vance: I don’t know. That’s a good question.
The honest answer to that is that I don’t know, because part of this arms race component is if we take a pause, does the People’s Republic of China not take a pause? And then we find ourselves all enslaved to P.R.C.-mediated A.I.?
One thing I’ll say, we’re here at the Embassy in Rome, and I think that this is one of the most profound and positive things that Pope Leo could do, not just for the church but for the world. The American government is not equipped to provide moral leadership, at least full-scale moral leadership, in the wake of all the changes that are going to come along with A.I. I think the church is.
This is the sort of thing the church is very good at. This is what the institution was built for in many ways, and I hope that they really do play a very positive role. I suspect that they will.
It’s one of my prayers for his papacy, that he recognizes there are such great challenges in the world, but I think such great opportunity for him and for the institution he leads.
Douthat: So, a couple of times in this interview, you’ve said something to me to the effect of: I know New York Times readers hate me, I know New York Times readers don’t like me and so on.
Vance: [Laughs.]
Douthat: But here’s the reality of the last couple of years as I experienced it as a New York Times conservative. The Trump-Vance ticket won a constituency you didn’t have before, that Trump didn’t have before in 2016.
Vance: Sure.
Douthat: That included the kind of people who read The New York Times. People who were exhausted by wokeness ——
Vance: Yes. And by the way, if they don’t like me, I still love them.
I’m just trying to acknowledge that a point that I make may not land particularly well, but go ahead.
Douthat: I’m interested in this constituency because I talk to these kinds of people all the time, so I may have an outsize sense of their importance.
Vance: So do I. They all live in Washington. [Laughs.]
Douthat: They live around the country, right?
There’s a group of people who, it’s not millions and millions of people, but it’s a real and substantial constituency that voted for you guys, to their own surprise. Or even if they didn’t vote for you, they woke up the day after the election — I heard a lot of people say this — and said: You know, in the end, I was glad they won.
Then a lot of those people have experienced the first few months of the administration as a series of unpleasant shocks. It’s not one big issue, but it’ll be something that they care about in particular that DOGE has cut, or it’s the issue we were arguing about before with renditions to El Salvador, where they’re like: Well, I voted for this administration, but I didn’t expect them to go this far or push this hard.
I want to know what you say to them in general, but I have two examples of that that I think are close to your own interests that I’ve heard a lot about from people.
One is how we handle addiction in the U.S.
Vance: Yeah.
Douthat: The Trump administration has cut staff to the health administration that handles addiction and mental health — it’s being reorganized inside R.F.K. Jr.’s H.H.S. department. People I know in addiction medicine, people who are working with people addicted to fentanyl and other drugs are incredibly anxious and distressed about some of these changes.
Another case where it’s people who you know, who are evangelical and Catholic, who are concerned about foreign aid. The Trump administration came in and said: Look, we’re reorganizing foreign aid. We’re not getting rid of it entirely, but we’re looking at it anew. Right now foreign aid has been dramatically cut.
So on those two issues, is your expectation that at the end of four years the Trump administration is just going to spend less on drug addiction and foreign aid? Do you think at the end of four years those who have those kinds of anxieties will feel like the administration took our concerns seriously and took our concerns about lifesaving treatments in Africa seriously? Took our concerns about fentanyl addiction seriously?
Vance: Let me answer the specific question first because I think they’re basically the same answer, though different questions.
One is, while there have been some disruptions, what really has happened here is not an end to supporting people with fentanyl problems or an end to supporting humanitarian causes and people who are suffering from famine or H.I.V., you know, H.I.V., drugs in Africa or other places.
What has really happened is a reorganization of a very complex bureaucracy. And I’m not saying there haven’t been disruptions, because there have been, but I’ve talked to Secretary Marco Rubio about this a number of times just in the past two days. The goal here is one, to make the spending a little bit more efficient, and two, eliminate the graft that is built into the system.
Marco has told me stories as he dug into this, as one of his many jobs as secretary of state ——
Douthat: He’s the archivist ——
Vance: He’s the U.S.A.I.D. director.
That some of the model in U.S.A.I.D. was to subcontract — I mean, to separate out the crazy stuff, like doing lesbian puppet shows in very conservative Christian societies.
That’s insane — but a more fundamental problem is a given NGO contracts to another NGO, which contracts to another NGO. And this isn’t true across the board, but some of these grants, they felt like getting 11 to 12 cents on the dollar that was actually making it to people.
So if we eliminate most of that graft, we could actually save a little money while simultaneously ensuring better services for people. And that, I think, would be a win for the American taxpayer. And of course, we care a lot about them, but would also be a win for a lot of poor populations across the world.
And that’s the same thing with Bobby Kennedy at the H.H.S. A lot of what we’ve done is, yes, about saving money. Making the government more efficient. But it’s more fundamentally about bringing some of these bureaucracies within the control of the secretary of state as opposed to this random entity that’s out there, or within the control of Bobby Kennedy, the secretary of H.H.S., as opposed to this vast bureaucracy that’s out there.
Do I promise that everything is going to be perfect? No. But do I think, having talked to Marco a lot about this and having talked to a lot of folks in the administration, is our goal to radically cut the provision of mental health services for people who are dealing with fentanyl abuse? No, not at all. That’s not what the president has said. Our goal is to make things more efficient and, importantly, to make it more subject to democratic control.
Douthat: So then, generally, you’re going to face the voters by proxy in the midterms.
You may face the voters personally in some future.
But to this constituency that was pro-Trump — again, maybe it’s to its own surprise, but has found itself sort of shocked at various points in the first few months — what is your pitch to them right now?
Vance: I guess my pitch to them would be: We came into the administration with what we believe was a mandate from the American people to make government more responsive to the elected will of the people and less responsive to bureaucratic intransigence.
And changing that is not perfect. I won’t even say that we’ve gotten every decision right. I think that sometimes even Elon Musk has admitted: We made a mistake, we corrected the mistake. So the point is not that this is perfect, the point is that it was a necessary part of making the people’s government more responsive to the people.
I think that if in two years you look at the past two years, or in four years you look at the past four years, what I hope to be able to say and what I think is true today and will still be true then is that we actually have done, with some bumps, we’ve done a good job at making the government more responsive. More efficient to the cabinet secretaries or the deputy secretaries in those departments. And that this sort of feeling of shock, I don’t dismiss it or diminish it, but I think that the system actually needed some pretty significant reform.
And I’d ask people for patience, because we’re on the inside of this. You elected us to do a job and you get to make the judgment with the benefit of hindsight, whether we were just breaking stuff or whether we were actually doing something in the service of fixing things.
I promise you that I believe that we’re fixing things, but ultimately, the American people will be the judge of that.
Douthat: Well, hopefully we can talk again around when they make that judgment.
Vance: That’s right.
Douthat: Perhaps in Jerusalem? Athens?
Vance: We’ll see. [Laughs.]
Douthat: Probably not Moscow. Mr. Vice President, thank you so much.
Vance: Ross, thank you. Good to see you.
Thoughts? Email us at [email protected].
This episode of “Interesting Times” was produced by Katherine Sullivan, Andrea Betanzos, Sophia Alvarez Boyd and Elisa Gutierrez. It was edited by Jordana Hochman. Mixing and engineering by Pat McCusker. Cinematography by Jonah M. Kessel and Marina King. Video editing by Jonah M. Kessel. Original music by Isaac Jones, Sonia Herrero, Aman Sahota and Pat McCusker. Fact-checking by Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Video directed by Jonah M. Kessel. The director of Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.
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Ross Douthat has been an Opinion columnist for The Times since 2009. He is also the host of the Opinion podcast “Interesting Times.” He is the author, most recently, of “Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious.” @DouthatNYT • Facebook
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