Vice President JD Vance Joins Breitbart’s Matthew Boyle for a Fireside Chat

Welcome everybody, to a very special conversation with Vice President Vance. We've got a great program for you. Before we bring the main event up, we want to thank our partners, CGCN Alpha Institute, and we're very grateful to all our sponsors. So I want to list them real quick. American Chemistry Council, one brief bit, dear T1 Energy, RJ Reynolds, Chevron Meta, Microsoft, bank of America, American Petroleum Institute, American Global Strategies and Bank Policy Institute. So now I'd like to bring to the stage Washington Bureau Chief for Breitbart News, Matt Boyle and the Vice President of the United States, Mr. J.D. vance.

I'm American made, I got American parts. I got American faith in American heart, they say.

Mr. Vice President, thanks for taking the time to do this.

Absolutely. Well, I love to be here with all of you. It's a beautiful building and a beautiful morning. I always joke with Matt, but it's actually not a joke. I'm being dead serious that this is the most well sourced journalist in Washington D.C. and if you remember maybe six months ago, maybe it was actually a year, year and a half ago when there was this big conversation, the Washington Post, about what do we do to actually get in touch with the other half of America? How do we actually make our journalism more appealing to the half of the country that doesn't agree with far left politics? And I actually, I think I texted Jeff Bezos and I said, if you're really serious about this, you should just hire Matt Boyle and make him run your entire political reporting shop. Now, Larry Solof, I'm sure is pissed off at me for that suggestion, but unfortunately for the Washington Post, they did not take my advice. So I'm proud to be here with Matt Boyle and Breitbart and thanks for everything you guys do.

All right, so, Mr. Vice President, the big news this morning is new jobs numbers blew away expectations huge from the September numbers. So these were delayed because of the government shutdown. More than double 119,000 new jobs. And then also there's some interesting stuff in the wage number wages numbers there as well that shows wages on the rise. Your thoughts on the jobs numbers?

Okay, so a huge jobs report, and I assume the market is going crazy right now, probably just opened, because what this shows is that the Trump economic policies are actually working and you've got 119,000 new jobs. Economists thought that we would have about 50,000 new jobs, but that's actually just the headline number. If you look below the surface, I think the numbers are actually better. So number one, wages continue to way outpace inflation. If you go back to the three years of the Biden administration, the average American worker actually lost about $3,000 of take home pay in the first 10 months of the Trump economy. We've increased take home pay by about $1,200, adjusting for inflation. So that's a huge, huge thing. And this jobs report confirms that you have the number of manufacturing hours worked in the economy is actually going up. You see, the private sector is really driving this economic growth and is driving the job creation. And this is really important, I know to you, Matt, but really to me. And it's that we are seeing the job growth go to native born American citizens. And what happened under the Biden administration is to the extent there was any job growth at all, if you looked at the data, almost all of the net job creation in the United States under the Biden administration went to the foreign born. Now, of course, some of those people are illegal immigrants to the United States, but that means that a lot of the job creation was actually to illegal aliens who shouldn't have been in our country. The best thing that you can say about the Trump economy is that American jobs are going to American workers for a change. And that's the thing that I'm proudest about with these numbers.

Right. So now another big story is that last night President Trump announced that tomorrow he's going to be hosting a meeting with the New York City Mayor elect Zoram Mamdani. He calls him communist.

I might have a wrong about that. So.

But anyway, point is, is that Mamdani's rise can be attributed to his, you know, everybody's the new buzzword, if you will, is affordability.

Sure.

Right. Like, so how do we.

People out.

There feel like they're, you know, the economic situation isn't that great. Look, we're 10 months to the day here since the inauguration, but they want to see more. They want to see more action. We've seen a lot of steps you guys have taken. A lot of people are putting a lot of faith in what Secretary Bessen is saying, that the first half of next year the economy is going to boom because of the policies you guys have have enacted. What's your message to those out there who feel like that they haven't seen that gain yet?

Yeah. Well, first, Matt, the government shutdown didn't help to be clear. And I do think that actually pumped the brakes a little bit on all the great economic news that we were seeing. And look, the Democrats, our attitude was why are the Democrats doing this? They're the party of government, why are they shutting down the government for 10 years? They said to shut down the government is an act of economic terrorism on the United States. And it's sort of a question that answers itself because I think that they were so worried about what the Trump administration is doing that they were willing to blow the whole thing up, hold a gun to the head of the American economy in order to get what they want. And that's going to cause a little bit of damage, but I think it'll be ultimately very, very minor because we were able to get the shutdown wrapped up. And I guess my message to the American people, who are still feeling like things are unaffordable, who are still feeling like things are rough out there, is, look, we get it and we hear you and we know that there's a lot of work to do. There's a lot of wood to chop because the Biden administration put us in such a very, very tough spot. And the way that I think about this is it's always helpful to take this from the abstractions to the actual real things that people are worried about. So take for example, a dozen eggs. I'll never forget this. It was one of the very first, maybe the single first press conference that the President had done since he had been, since he had started his second term. And some reporter probably from ABC, yells at him and says, what have you done about the price of eggs? The price of eggs are up 300% over the past three years. And it's like it was January 23rd. It's like, what do you mean, what have we done in two days? It's going to take a little bit of time to fix that problem. And so you, if you're an American who's just struggling to get by, you work hard, you pay your taxes, you want your kids to have good opportunities. And the price of eggs goes from $2 a dozen to $8 a dozen under the Biden administration. And then under the Trump administration, it goes from $8 a dozen to maybe $6.50 a dozen. Well, to you, that, that is still a major problem. And even though we've made incredible progress, we understand that there's a lot more work to do. And, and the thing that I'd ask for the American people is a little bit of patience. This economy was not harmed in 10 months. It took a deliberate four year administration that was making life harder for everyday Americans, that was importing foreign workers instead of giving jobs to American workers, that was overregulating, overtaxing. Overspending. They were doing everything wrong. And as much progress as we've made, it's going to take a little bit of time for every American to feel that economic boom, which we really do believe is coming. We believe that we're on the front end of it, but we also recognize that we've got a lot of work to do to undo the damage that Joe Biden did to the American economy. And the last one, I'll say, Matt, is, let's be honest, it's not just Joe Biden. As much as I think Joe Biden was one of the most disastrous presidents of American history. We had a policy in this country for 40 years of shipping American jobs overseas and hiring foreign workers instead of American workers that has caused the economic stagnation of the American middle class. There was one bright spot in 40 years, and that was the first Trump administration. And there is going to be a massive exception to that 40 year trajectory of American decline. And that's the second Trump administration. We just got to keep it going.

Right. So now we're a year removed from you and President Trump winning a massive electoral victory in November 2020, 24. And we're just a couple of months since our friend Charlie Kirk was brutally murdered by a radical leftist. But at the same time, we are seeing some, whether it's inside Congress, outside Congress, some divisions in the MAGA movement. And I get it that there's this issue, that issue, whatever. What would be your message to how to reunify this movement for the fights ahead, whether it's the midterm elections, 20, 28 and beyond?

Yeah, I mean, I think that we have to remember that we have a lot more in common than we do not in common. And that the disagreements that animate the Republican Party, while they matter and they're important, I think these debates should happen. They should happen in podcasts and they should happen in the media. They should happen on the op ed pages. It's totally reasonable for the people who make up this coalition to argue about what our foreign policy should be, what our specific tax policy should be, what our housing policy should be. I mean, I had a meeting just yesterday that was focused in the West Wing about how do we get housing more affordable for young Americans because of all the things that got completely out of control under the Biden administration. You had homes that doubled or tripled in price, depending on the geography, in four years under the Biden administration, we've got to solve that problem for our young people so they can afford to buy homes, start families and actually build their own American dream. So I think my attitude is let these debates play out, but don't let the debates that we're having internally blind us to the fact that we are up against a radical leftist movement that murdered my friend a couple of months ago. And that would throw many people in the Trump administration in prison, not for doing anything illegal, but for not following the far left's agenda. That is the real opponent here, a political movement in this country that has no animating principle, that, that has no agenda for the American people. Their sole obsession is to take down Donald Trump and anybody who helped Donald Trump govern. Focus on the enemy, have our debates, but focus on the enemy so that we can win victories that matter for the American people. That's my message.

Right, so now one of the things that powered your guys victory, I think a year ago was a political realignment in this country where we're seeing working class people shift to the Republican side and the Democrats, frankly are becoming the party of the rich. There was a new report that our partners here that put on this event CGCN published a couple of weeks ago called Class Dismissed 2. And in this report they go into detail about how some of the numbers on this political realignment. 75%, more than 75% of the top 30 income congressional districts are represented by Democrats. Now that's a totally new thing. The last three presidential elections the Democrats counties were represented more than 60%. In the case of the 2020 election, more than 70% of aggregate GDP in this country. President Trump won counties 30 something percent in each of those elections. So your thoughts on what we're seeing now with this political realignment, some of those statistics.

So let me say a few things, Matt. So first of all, I think that part of what you see as division in the Republican Party is a consequence of this realignment. We have a new governing coalition, we have a new political coalition. We have people who didn't used to vote Republican and frankly they have different preferences sometimes on certain issues than maybe the Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush Republican Party did. I think the Donald Trump party is a fundamentally new phenomenon in American politics. I think that it can govern the country successfully for the next generation. But some of those divisions you talk about are just the natural outgrowth of the fact that, that we've got a lot of working class voters who frankly don't care what was Republican orthodoxy 25 years ago. And so they're pushing the party in a different direction. And again, I think that that debate is natural and normal and it's something that we should frankly lean into, recognizing that the far left is really the problem we have to confront in this country. The second thing that I'll say about it, Matt, is I think it's a great thing, you know, and I'm biased, obviously. I grew up in a working class family. I was raised by the kind of people who were Blue Dog Democrats, socially conservative Democrats in the 80s and 90s, and have turned hard towards Donald Trump's Republican Party. These are the people who built America's greatest icons, who built America's greatest buildings, who drive our food into the grocery store every day. They are the human beings who actually make this country run. I'm proud of them. And I want to keep the Trump coalition together. That's one of the things that we have to do in 2026. And this is my third point, and this is tough, because one of the things that was true of the Democratic coalition In, say, the 1990s is that because the Democratic coalition in the 90s was more upscale. They showed up. Excuse me, the Republican coalition, the 1990s was more upscale. They showed up in midterms. So Republicans tended to do a little bit better in midterm elections in the 1990s than say, Republicans do today. And that's because while these working class voters are great, they're also people who don't necessarily show up to vote in the midterms all the time. We've got to motivate them. We've got to get them out to vote. I think that's one of the lessons that we learned in Virginia and New Jersey is that when Donald Trump is not on the ballot, you've got to give people something to actually believe in, something to be inspired by, to get out there and vote. They're not going to vote just because you have an R next to your name. You, you've got to speak to this new working class coalition. And the one worry that I have when I look at so many of our great congressional allies, I do think that some of our folks in Congress, they want to go back to the Republican Party of 20 years ago. That Republican Party was a Republican Party that lost and that couldn't successfully govern the country. We need to lean into this no coalition, do a better job serving them, and that's how we get them to show up in these midterm elections so that we can win not just presidential races, but midterm races, too.

Right. Okay, so you mentioned George W. Bush at the beginning of that answer. Now, there's a lot of news going on out there. Today is a somber day for the Bush family and for, you know, your predecessor, former Vice President Dick Cheney, who passed away. Today's his funeral. So I wanted to see if you have any thoughts on or message to the Cheney family. I know there was some misreporting out there about whether or not you were invited to that or whatever. But outside of that, there's also another big report that came out a couple of days ago about how George W. Bush and the people around him are plotting for retaking the Republican Party from President Trump and you down the road and going back to the old way of doing things. I guess they don't like to win, but the point is that that's out there. So any response to that as well?

Well, first of all, my condolences go to Dick Cheney and his family. Obviously there are some political disagreements, disagreements there. But he was a guy who served his country. We certainly wish his family all the best in this moment of grieving on the issue of George W. Bush. I mean, look, as you know, Matt, I don't put stock in any story that doesn't come from Matthew J. Boyle at Breitbart News. So this could be totally fake news. But I definitely think, and you already see this, you saw this in 2020. You're going to see it in 2025 and 2026. There is an effort to try to wrest control of the Republican Party away from the voters and away from the coalition that really delivered the big victory in 2024. I think it's a huge mistake. Look, the American people don't want stupid wars and America's jobs going overseas and wide open borders. That is whether intentional or not, that was the legacy of the Republican Party that came before Donald J. Trump. I'm glad the president got us away from that Republican Party. It lost, but it was also a disaster for the United States of America. Let's actually have a foreign policy where we focus on the interests of American citizens. Let's have an economic policy that's about building in the United States of America rather than shipping all of our jobs overseas and getting Wall street enriched in the process. Let's have an economic policy that's about more self sufficiency. I mean, I have three kids. I have an eight year old, a five year old and a three year old. I don't want to wake up in a country where I take my kid to the doctor and, and they can't get antibiotics because the antibiotics that were invented in the United States of America are manufactured in some foreign country. That is the legacy of the Republican Party. That came before Donald J. Trump. We're not going back to it.

Okay, so now you mentioned the foreign policy and the deals that we're seeing around the world. One of the things that's been the hallmark here of President Trump's second term, again we're 10 months to the day since the inauguration has been these deals. We were going to try to do this event last month, but I know you got called over to Israel on the Gaza deal.

Sure.

So give us kind of. And by the way, we have in the audience here today, I know that there are ambassadors from at least two places. The European Union ambassador and the Taiwanese ambassador are here. Walk us through how President Trump has approached these various big picture deals because, I mean, he's got more than, I think 85% of world GDP now in trade deals with the United States and he's. I lost count of how many peace deals he's done this year.

Yeah. Well, greetings to the ambassadors. We're thrilled to have you, of course. And greetings to everybody else, including even the fake news I'm sure is reporting.

There in the, a lot of fake news. I'm sure they're all lined up.

I'm sure there are, I can see their fake news eyes peering up at me. I'm sure ready to misreport everything that I've said today. But, but, but no, we love you guys too, kind of. So here, here's the thing about the President's negotiating style. And I actually, you know, we were a little delayed because the President called me right before I got on stage just about one of these deals that we're working on. And what I love about it is that it's never enough. Right. And so you bring him a deal and you know, he sort of asks for this, this and this. We want this tariff rate. We want this country to drop their tariff barriers. We want this country to drop their non tariff barriers. And you say I'm never going to be able to get, get that done. And then you get it done and you bring it to him. And he said, well, I want three other things too because his attitude is he wants to get the best deal possible for the American people. And for too long we had trade negotiators that so believed in the fake idea of free trade over fair trade, that they were willing to sell American workers down the river without actually negotiating on the interests of American workers. And so whether it's with China or India or any of the countries that we struck deals, the basic principle is we want Americans to have better access to their markets. We believe in our workers. We think that we have the best products in the world. We want to be able to sell them everywhere. That's number one. Number two, we don't want foreign products to undercut the wages of American workers. We're actually going to protect our markets, protect our, our important industries. And that's a very important part of the Trump trade, trade plan. And you've seen it happen in a lot of different ways. And then the final thing, and this raises your point about Gaza or any of these other foreign deals, is we've been able to use the incredible economic leverage of the United States of America. I mean, we're 25%, probably a little bit more than that of the world gdp. Why don't we ever use our economic leverage to achieve peace? Because when countries aren't fighting each other, when they're actually using their economic talents to manufacture good, good things rather than weapons to kill each other, then that actually creates incredible economic opportunities for Americans. And that's what the president, that's why he's so focused on peace. He's fundamentally a humanitarian. And we've got eight peace deals at this point. We're working on number nine and number 10. And I think that, you know, if he gets number 10 purely for, like, mathematical harmony, if he gets to 10, the Nobel Prize should be awarded to Donald J. Trump, even though he certainly earned it with the first. First date. But, but I also think that there's this sense that while he wants to save lives, he also sees a world where people are engaging in commerce with one another rather than killing one another. And he just, you know, he's, he's, he's a tough guy, but he's not a violent human. Like, he's, he's not a person, you know, who, who I think understands violence at a sort of fundamental level. It's like, why don't you stop killing each other and start trading with one another? Why, rather than Russia and Ukraine killing one another, why don't they actually engage in some commerce with one another, travel between the two countries, engage in some sort of cultural exchange? That is his fundamental perspective that he takes into these things. And fundamentally, if we get more peace in the world, it's good for American workers, it's good for the American people. And the President's going to keep on pursuing peace. He's done very well so far, but he's going to keep on working at it.

Yeah. So There's a lot I want to pack into this next question. So one of the things that we've seen, I think so, since your guys victory last year, the whole world over, everybody I've talked to around the world really seems to have rallied to President Trump's vision on things like trade and immigration. I just saw, and particularly with regard to China and how we need to have a better deal with regard to there. And we just saw the President get back from there.

Yep.

I just saw comments that Pope Leo made about immigration. He said just the other day we did a huge story on it on Breitbart last night that every country should get to decide. I'm paraphrasing him here. Every country should get to decide who gets to come in. I mean, that's amazing to see that from the Pope himself. Your thoughts on more broadly how President Trump really does seem to have electrified the world and woke them up to these major issues that we're talking about here.

Yeah, well, Matt, you know, I'm a devout Catholic, so I followed those comments close, including on, of course, breitbart.com and that's my third Breitbart shout out. I've done pretty good. Right? 20 minutes. Not bad. Okay, thank you guys. But you know, it's interesting because you may not know it judging purely from the comments of some people on social media, but the Catholic Church's views on this are actually quite clear. And it's that, yes, you must treat immigrants humanely. On the other hand, every nation has the right to control its borders. And obviously how you strike that balance is very important. But there's a lot of room there to actually control your own borders for the sake of your own people. One of the things, Matt, that, you know, always frustrated me about the immigration debate is that we ignored how open borders were not actually good for the dignity even of the illegal migrants themselves. You had little kids getting sex trafficked. We had 300,000 missing children under the Biden administration that the Mexican drug cartels had brought into our country. You had cartels using some cases, 9 and 10 year old children as drug mules for their activity. Border security is not just good for American citizens, it is the humanitarian thing to do for the entire world. Because when you empower the cartels and when you empower the human traffickers, whether in the United States or anywhere else, you're empowering the very worst people, people in the world. Now, you've seen this in Europe, you've seen this in a whole host of places, but you know it's almost like Europe and America got this idea in their head that to control your border at all was fundamentally, you know, uncompassionate. Maybe it was even racist and bad. The president and I reject that wholesale putting the interests of your citizens first. It's not some ancillary thing. It is the very purpose of government. I am the American Vice President. I wish very good things for the people of Mexico or the people of the United Kingdom or the people of any other country. But my priority, my charge, is to look after the people of the United States of America. And you cannot do that if you're flooding the country with a ton of illegal immigrants and the drugs and the crime that they bring.

Yeah. So the last question I've got. Please give them applause for that one. That's. That's incredible. Okay, so, Mr. Vice President, the last question.

Even the Washington Post applause.

I know. I think they did. So I got fired. So, Mr. Vice President, the last question I got for you on that note so is that there's a big discussion right now about health care in this country. You know, the ACA subsidies expire at the end of the year. There's a lot of questions about what's going to happen about this. The Democrats shut the government down, supposedly over this, but where does this go? What do we do to address healthcare prices and premium prices and so on and so forth. What does that look like? Is it a reconciliation plan? Walk us through what happens.

So what's so crazy about this, Matt, is right before the government shut down, we had a meeting with Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer in the Oval Office.

Is this where they get President Trump gave them a MAGA hats?

This is. No, no, not just that, but the president whispers to one of his personal assistants. They're all very good people. And she kind of runs off. And I think to myself immediately, oh, what the hell have I gotten myself into? And she comes back with two Trump 2028 hats to give to Jeffries and Schumer. And then he has the photographer come in and he points at Jefferies as he's holding the Trump 2028 hat. And he's like, he says to the photographer, make sure Hakeem gets that. I'm sure he's going to want to use it in his camera campaign advertisements. And it was like a hysterical moment. But when we got to the serious stuff and they said, we really want to address the health care problem confronting the American people, the President said, well, absolutely, we agree. We want to address the Health care problem confronting the American people. In fact, you people screwed it up with Obamacare, the Unaffordable Care act. And now you're coming to us saying, let's fix it. Great, let's fix it. And then they said, I think they were kind of caught off guard and they're like, well, but we want the fix before we. Before we're willing to open up the government. And the president was like, that's like three days from now. You want us to fix American health care in the next three days. And unless you do it, you're not going to. You're going to shut down the government. How about we open up the government and then work together to fix American health care? And of course, we know the history. They rejected it. They shut down the government. But I don't want to get ahead of the president, Matt, because we had a very, very good meeting in the Oval Office yesterday. I think that we have a great health care plan come together. I think that it's going to get Republican and Democrat support. And I think the president. Look, right now, American people. The American people get crap health care, and they pay way too much for it. You have people who are paying thousands of dollars a month in premiums for a family of four, a family of five, and the access to health care is really low. This system is broken. The Democrats broke, broke it, but who cares? We're going to work together if they're willing to fix it. And the interesting thing, Matt, is, you know, people say, and this is one of the things I love about the president, people come to the president, say, no, no, no, don't talk about health care. That's a graveyard for Republicans. Republicans always lose on health care. And the president's like, I don't care about the politics of it. This system is screwed up for the American people. We need to fix it. So let's go and do it, politics be damned. I love that. That's leadership. And that's exactly what we should want coming from the White House.

Mr. Vice President, really want to thank you for taking the time here.

Thank you, Matt. Good to see you guys.

I'm American made. I got American parts. I got American.