OVER ARIZONA — JD Vance is downplaying how rocky his first days as the Republican vice presidential nominee have been, and he insists he still has the support of the person who matters most.
“Look, it’s the same thing they did to Dick Cheney, the same thing they did to Mike Pence,” the Ohio senator said in an interview with NOTUS on his plane between campaign stops on Wednesday. “I think that any Republican who comes out of the gate as the new VP nominee is gonna get attacked. I have no doubt that the president is confident in the way that I’ve been doing things.”
“We have a good relationship,” Vance said of his tie to Donald Trump, “and that will keep on going through all the way to November, hopefully past that too.”
Vance is in a peculiar place two weeks after becoming his party’s nominee for vice president. In that time, the person he expected to directly face off with has instead become her own party’s likely presidential nominee, scrambling the Trump campaign’s plans by Vance’s own admission. And he’s spent days defending himself against his own now-viral clips from the past — like a remark he made during a 2021 interview about “childless cat ladies living miserable lives.”
“The left has frankly lied about what I actually said,” Vance told NOTUS Wednesday. “They’ve said that I’ve criticized people for being infertile. I did not say that. That is a 100% lie. What I have said is that there are elements of the far left that have become explicitly anti-family, and I’d like us to fix that. Like, it is way too expensive to raise a family in this country right now. Housing prices are through the roof. You have a lot of young parents who come home from the hospital and have $20,000 in unexpected medical bills because they chose the incorrect anesthesiologist for their plan. There are things that we have to do to make the country more pro-family.”
“It’s telling that the left doesn’t want to engage in the substance of what I said, and instead just lies about it,” Vance said.
Despite Vance’s confidence in his relationship with Trump, the former president has a history of sharply turning on his allies, and in particular his vice president. Asked how he would avoid Pence’s fate with Trump, Vance said he thought Trump and Pence had a strong relationship for “the gross majority of the administration.”
“Obviously, there was a fallout in the aftermath of the November 2020 election,” Vance said. “My attitude is I want to unite the party. And I certainly have disagreements with Mike Pence. I’m sure he has disagreements with me. But I’m here now. I’m gonna try to do this job as well as I possibly can and serve the American people.”
Asked if that means he would go so far as to put Trump’s desires above his constitutional authority — as Pence has said he was asked to do on Jan. 6, 2021, when Trump wanted him to send the election back to the states — Vance wouldn’t entertain the “hypothetical.”
“I think it’s weird to engage in hypotheticals given the law’s changed here,” Vance said, referring to legislation that Congress passed and President Joe Biden signed to restrict how the Electoral College is counted.
“As I’ve said repeatedly, I think there absolutely were problems in the election of 2020. I think it’s important for the vice president to not, to do whatever he can to try to rectify those problems,” Vance said. “The role necessarily is going to be a lot different than it was back then, because the laws have changed.”
Vance has also come under scrutiny because of his close ties to The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a political operation backed by many Trump allies that the Trump campaign has recently tried to distance itself from as Democrats repeatedly attack it. Vance wrote a glowing foreword for a forthcoming book by The Heritage Foundation’s president, Kevin Roberts.
“The Heritage Foundation isn’t some random outpost on Capitol Hill; it is and has been the most influential engine of ideas for Republicans from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump,” Vance wrote.
Asked if he regretted his kind words about the think tank, given the political problems Project 2025 is causing for Trump and Republicans, Vance was clear: “No.”
“The Heritage Foundation has some good ideas, and also has some ideas that … I think are bad ideas. And regardless of whether you think they’re good ideas or bad ideas, it has nothing to do with the Trump campaign,” Vance said.
He noted that Project 2025 was a 900-page document, and he was clear that he hadn’t read “the whole thing,” but he certainly wasn’t about to disavow the entire effort.
“There are some things I like about it, and some ideas in there that I strongly disagree with. It’s just insane to say that anybody other than Donald Trump speaks for Donald Trump,” Vance said.
Pressed to name some of the ideas he disagrees with, Vance mentioned a proposal that would “radically reform Social Security in a way that would be bad for America’s seniors,” but he also highlighted policies that would slash “administrative bureaucracy” as a “good idea.”
“I think in any 900-page document, you’re going to find things you like and things you dislike,” he said.
Vance is largely keeping himself tied to Trump, rather than other political allies. In remarks to a small group of reporters aboard the plane Wednesday night, Vance actually doubled down on remarks that Trump made earlier in the day questioning Kamala Harris’ racial identity.
“She was always of Indian heritage, and she was only promoting Indian heritage,” Trump said of Harris, who attended Howard University and identifies as both Indian and Black. “I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black.”
Vance told the reporters on his plane that Trump’s comments were “hysterical.”
“He pointed out the fundamental chameleon-like nature of Kamala Harris,” Vance said.
—
Reese Gorman is a reporter at NOTUS.