Seven days after President Trump delivered an economic address in Pennsylvania, Vice President JD Vance visited the state on Tuesday to give a remixed version of the speech his boss had given.
Whereas the president’s remarks had been long (90 minutes) and meandering (“I love the weave, the weave! You know what the weave is?”), the vice president’s were short and focused.
It was the sort of speech that Mr. Trump’s political advisers keep hoping he will give but that he has so far been unwilling to deliver. (“By the way, if I read what’s on the teleprompter,” the president said last week, “you’d all be falling asleep right now.”)
Standing in front of a sign that said “Lower Prices, Bigger Paychecks” inside a warehouse near Allentown, Pa., the vice president talked about tax refunds and legislation.
Still, there was a limit as to how much he could really deviate from the script that his boss had established.
A reporter pointed out that Mr. Trump had graded his own economy an “A plus plus plus plus plus” in an interview with Politico last week. It was an assessment that struck some as being out of touch with the polling on how many Americans feel about the economy.
So, the reporter asked, what grade would Mr. Vance give that same economy?
“A plus plus plus,” he said dutifully.
The whole speech was a case study of the pickle that the administration finds itself in. Mr. Vance was there to repeat the president’s contention that the economy is rocking, while also expressing sympathy for people who say they have experienced no relief since Mr. Trump returned to office 11 months ago.
Mr. Trump will have another couple shots this week, as he is scheduled to give a prime-time address from the White House on Wednesday and from North Carolina on Friday.
According to a new jobs report, the unemployment rate ticked up last month to 4.6 percent, the highest level in four years. That constituted the highest unemployment rate since September 2021, when the economy was emerging from the pandemic. The White House shrugged off the numbers — and the markets had a fairly muted reaction — but some analysts considered it a blinking sign of more economic trouble ahead.
On Tuesday, the vice president pleaded with everybody to just hang in there a little longer.
“If you look at what we’re doing every single day,” he said, “you are going to have — and if this doesn’t turn out to be true, I’ll come back here, and you can all tell me I’m wrong, but I’m telling you, it’s going to be true — you are going to have, middle-class Americans, middle class Pennsylvanians, some of the best tax season in 2026 that you’ve ever had.”
And yet, he conceded that “I know that there is so much more progress to be made.” He said a couple times that “Rome wasn’t built in a day.”
That was not the focus of the president’s speech one week earlier, when he said some people would just have to get used to the idea that their children don’t need so many dolls and pencils.
Mr. Vance struck an empathetic note, invoking his hardscrabble upbringing to help sell the administration’s message at a time when some of its own allies have accused it of having lost touch with the public.
“I remember what it’s like when you’d have to choose between putting food on the table or getting the prescription that you need to stay healthy,” he said. “And that is not a life that Donald Trump or I want for the citizens in the greatest country in the world.”
But at many other points in his speech, he echoed Mr. Trump. There was a lot of talk about how former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was still to blame for economic troubles. “We inherited a mess, ladies and gentlemen,” Mr. Vance said. “I’m not going to sugarcoat it.”
At the start of his speech, he made an unusual aside about Mr. Biden and a patch of black ice near the warehouse. “If I wiped out on that runway,” he said, “you all know, that would be national news for the next week. Now, Joe Biden could fall walking up the steps in broad daylight, in 80-degree weather. Nobody would mind it, but if me or the president do anything like that, it’s going to be plastered all over the news.”
It was, in theory, the sort of thing an audience might hear from Mr. Trump, who mentioned Mr. Biden 30 times during his speech last week. The vice president attempted a transition from the hypothetical slip on black ice and Mr. Biden’s theoretical news coverage to the economy.
“We have not wiped out,” Mr. Vance said. “We’re here to talk about America’s economic comeback.”
Shawn McCreesh is a White House reporter for The Times covering the Trump administration.
The post Remixing Trump’s Economy Speech, Vance Strikes a Different Tone appeared first on New York Times.
