JD Vance has pinpointed one of the world leaders whose company he and the president enjoy the most.
The vice president’s jetsetting in recent months has placed him in a position to play favorites with world leaders. Vance’s globetrotting agenda has taken him from India to Paris to Munich to Greenland as he carries out the administration’s foreign policy for President Trump, who has only gone on two overseas trips thus far.
As he headed back to Washington from Rome on Tuesday, Vance revealed to NBC News that he and the president are fond of one foreign leader in particular: Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.
“One leader that both of us have consistently found is a really helpful bridge between the United States and Europe is Meloni,” he said.
Meloni, a key figure for the far-right in Europe, is a “very good listener” and “extraordinarily direct,” Vance said.
“If you have two people who really disagree on something, she tries to understand where both of them are coming from, and she’s perceptive and insightful enough that she actually understands it,” he said.
Vance added that the Italian leader reminded him of his own wife.
“She actually reminds me a little bit of Usha in that way, where she can deliver an extraordinarily direct message without coming across as offensive,” he said. “That’s just a skill, right? There’s a skill in actually being direct with somebody but not raising their guard.”
Vance’s remarks followed his meeting with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, which was brokered by Meloni and held at the Chigi Palace in Rome. The two sat down for a dialogue as Europe reckons with America’s tariffs and adversarial approach to the continent.
Vance went on a three-day trip to Italy to attend the inaugural mass of Pope Leo XIV on Sunday, but his agenda was quickly jam-packed with meetings with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, and British Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner.
“When we first started sketching out the trip, I thought, ‘Oh, this is kind of nice. We’ll go to the papal Mass, Usha and I will have lunch afterwards, and just kind of take it easy on Sunday and fly home Sunday night or Monday,’” he told NBC.
“It was a very personally rewarding trip,” he went on. “Once you’re here and there are all these other world leaders here, you might as well try to try to sit down with them and talk to them.”
Though Vance has become central to the Trump administration’s foreign policy, the vice president said he and State Secretary Marco Rubio work closely—and without competition.
Vance added that there was never a deliberate strategy of having him travel more so that Trump could fly out less.
“I just think it’s kind of the way it’s fallen,” he said. “A lot of people always asked me between the election and the inauguration: What would my role be? I would always say… I think it’ll be being an extra set of eyes and ears for the president, doing the things that he thinks that I need to do, and that’s largely how it’s worked out.”
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