OVER ARIZONA — A potential second Trump presidency would likely have familiar issues in the spotlight: border and immigration policy, tax policy and the fate of Obamacare.
How exactly Donald Trump plans to deal with those issues is vague at best. His running mate, Sen. JD Vance, is now trying to fill in some gaps, sometimes in ways that differ from Trump’s own fluctuating positions.
In an interview with NOTUS this week, Vance detailed his views on the Child Tax Credit, the border wall and the health care law Trump tried and failed to repeal during his presidency.
A top priority in a second Trump administration would immediately be border security: extending the currently limited southern border wall and implementing the “largest deportation effort in American history,” as Trump and Vance have labeled it.
Asked to lay out how many miles of border wall need to be constructed in a second Trump term to qualify it as a success, Vance wouldn’t put a firm number on it, or say how to pay for it.
“Obviously, you want as much of the southern border covered by a wall as possible, because so long as there are holes people are gonna get through,” Vance said. “Now, there are obviously areas where you have effectively no passage, right? So those are lower priority areas of the southern border. But look, you need to build some more in order for it to have maximum effect.”
Building on what Trump has said, he also suggested the possibility to “secure the southern border with a combination of physical barrier and technology.”
Vance, though, wasn’t as dogmatic as Trump has famously been about who would pay for the wall.
“I mean, look, I think that anything that gets the wall built is good. And people always say, ‘Well, President Trump says Mexico would pay for the border wall.’ What he was saying is using tariffs and using economic leverage, we would take in far more money from Mexico than it took to build the border wall. I think that’s true. But I want to get it built,” he said.
Trump has himself vacillated on how much of the wall Mexico would pay for. But he launched his first campaign in 2015 with the promise that he would “have Mexico pay for that wall, mark my words.” Ultimately, the U.S. government spent a reported $15 billion for just 47 miles of wall.
On taxes — which will be a marquee issue next year as the Trump tax cuts are set to expire — Vance has been a vocal proponent of an increased Child Tax Credit, while Trump has been more focused on extending the corporate tax cuts and ending taxes on tipped wages. Trump has not taken an explicit position on an extended Child Tax Credit.
“I like a larger Child Tax Credit,” Vance told NOTUS during the interview.
“I do think that working families are struggling. And if you’re a parent of young kids, you’re struggling more than a lot of people,” he added.
Congress, along with whoever is in the White House next year, will have to address the expiring tax cuts from Trump’s first term, and — if he’s president again — Trump wants to see the corporate rate cut even lower to 15%.
Asked how that proposed cut meshes with a more populist tax policy, Vance brushed off the disconnect.
“Well, I think that the president’s overall tax policy is certainly about putting the interests of workers first. And obviously, he messages it better than anybody. I mean, the ‘no tax on tips’ thing, like who does that benefit, if not workers?”
The Senate on Thursday blocked a bill that would have expanded the Child Tax Credit, with Republicans largely voting against it. Vance wasn’t present for the vote, as he’s out campaigning.
Vance also tried to thread the needle on Obamacare, a policy priority that repeatedly tripped Trump up in his first term and became a massive political boon for Democrats during the 2018 midterm elections. Trump was clear in November of last year that he still intends to repeal the 2010 health care law. But that position, politically, is unpopular.
Even Speaker Mike Johnson recently told NOTUS that he doesn’t believe “repeal and replace is on the agenda,” pointing to the amount of time and political capital wasted on trying to accomplish this feat in Trump’s first term.
Vance suggested overhauling Obamacare would still be a priority.
“Well, I think we’re definitely gonna have to fix the health care problem in this country,” he said. “The problem with Obamacare is that for a lot of people, it just doesn’t provide high-quality health care, right? So you have a lot of people paying out the ass, paying very high prices for health care that isn’t high quality. And I think the president actually, unlike a lot of Republicans, frankly, cares a lot about people having access to high-quality care.”
Vance said the “repeal and replace efforts” during Trump’s presidency were “fundamentally focused around the idea of fixing what was broken, not about stripping people’s health care away. So yeah, I think you’re certainly gonna see efforts to reform the system. Obviously, what that looks like will depend a little bit on Congress because Congress has to have a role to play.”
Trump’s Obamacare repeal and replace plan failed early in his term, when after going through multiple iterations, it ultimately failed in the Senate. That final version that was rejected, a far less sweeping plan than an earlier draft that had been in the House, was still estimated to increase the number of uninsured Americans by 15 million. Trump soon after said that he would “let Obamacare fail.”
Trump has been slippery on what exactly he wants on health care in a new presidency. Earlier this year, he said he’s “not running to terminate the ACA” but rather wants to “MAKE THE ACA, or OBAMACARE AS IT IS KNOWN, MUCH BETTER, STRONGER, AND FAR LESS EXPENSIVE.”
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This story has been updated to clarify Vance’s stance on Obamacare.
Reese Gorman is a reporter at NOTUS.