Vice President JD Vance Talks First 100 Days
CLAY: Welcome back in appreciate all of you hanging out with us, Clay and Buck here, hundred days of the Trump Vance Administration and we are joined now by Vice President JD Vance and we’re gonna get into all the successes the border and more, But, JD, I don’t know if you’ve answered this question, but on the first day of your administration, Ohio State won the national championship against Notre Dame. But you had a ton of obligations as the newly inaugurated vice president. Did you have like an official Buckeye guy who was following you around that day, giving you updates during the course of the game? I know you’re a big fan. I’ve actually, I wondered about it that night. I don’t know if you’ve answered it. I would if my University of Tennessee ever gets back in the in the title game, I would be terrified to miss any of it. What was your play there for national title game day as a Buckeye?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Yes, there are a couple of different things going on. So, first I actually talked to my team about whether it would be possible to skip the inaugural balls so that I would be able to go to the game. And actually, you know, I guess we’d get inaugurated. We go to a few parties and then I’d be able to watch the game while the president took care of the inaugural balls. The team was not a huge fan of that. Apparently, it would have been unprecedented for the vice president to skip the inaugural balls the night of the inauguration. What we were able to do though is before the first ball, I actually had all of my friends and family. We got basically, we turned the big hotel room into a sports bar. And so I was able to watch the first quarter before the first ball. And I think it was either right after the second or the third ball, Notre Dame started to come back a little bit. And so I sat in a room with like a 19-inch TV and just sort of watched the Buckeyes put it away. So, I got to see a little bit of it, man. But yeah, it’s on the one hand, like what a cool day for Ohio State fan to be inaugurated as a vice president and have your team with a national championship. On the other hand, was sad to miss most of the game, but, you know, official duties come first.
CLAY: That’s awesome.
BUCK: JD, I was also happy to see — Vice President Vance — very happy to see beloved Buckeyes do so well. I want to ask you, I want to ask you about the border, if I can, and what’s going on with the administration on, well, let’s get to the next steps. The good news is you can sit here and tell us, but Clay and I have been telling everybody about this so far. The border is secure, 95 % drop. The stats speak for themselves. Biden kicked the border wide open. It was a choice. Trump has actually secured the border. Fantastic. We still have millions and millions of illegals who came in under Biden. What should we expect from the perspective of building on the border successes so far in the next six to 12 months?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Yeah, well, obviously, we know we have to ramp up deportations. And the president talks about this all the time, both in public and private. It’s something that I’m very focused on. And a lot of this comes down to, I mean, it turns out we’ve got to do some battle with some really crazy far left judges in order to allow the administration to do what it actually needs to do. And I will say to great credit, the president expected this. When we came in, he said, you know, we’re gonna start deporting people and a lot of these far left judges are gonna stop us and there’s no way out of it, but through it. And we’re just gonna have to battle, we’re gonna have to win the court cases, we’re gonna have to take some of this stuff all the way to the Supreme Court and we’re gonna have to find alternative ways to deport people when the judges say, you can’t do this method, we’re gonna have to find another method. So, we recognize that we’re doing battle with basically a massive bureaucracy that has decided that it rules the country rather than the American people.
And I think one of the biggest takeaways of the 100 days is, yes, we’ve got a lot of successes. We’ve also revealed ways in which this deeply entrenched bureaucracy tries to fight the will of the American people. And thank God we’ve got a vice president and a president who are pushing back against it. And that’s exactly what we told the American people we would do, that’s exactly what we’re doing. But I think that is really the biggest focal point of immigration policy over the next six to 12 months to empower all of the people in the administration, from Tom Homan and Kristi Noem, to the Border Patrol agents on the ground to do their job and to get a lot of these people out of our country. Now, that said, we have had great success, but we’re not resting on our laurels here. We’re shutting down the border traffic coming into the country and we’re dealing with what Biden left us simultaneously. That’s exactly what we have to do.
CLAY: You’re not only an Ohio State grad, you’re also a Yale law grad. And you just talked about where the resistance 2 .0, I would say, is coming from. Largely the 600 some-odd district court judges who are regularly putting in place nationwide injunctions. What’s a fix to that? And are even you surprised by how aggressive the judiciary has been to try to strip the president’s executive authority?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: I’m not surprised by it because, again, the president actually expected this. He told us this would happen. He felt, and I think he was right about this, that the left felt defeated in a certain way, that a lot of, you know, grassroots activists that just weren’t nearly as fired up in 2024 as they were in 2016.
And he’s talking about people on the far left, but he said that, look, the courts are going to try to stop everything that we do. And it’s actually not just immigration. I mean, the courts have tried to stop Pete Hegseth from not allowing, you know, transgender military personnel to continue serving. They’ve done a lot, I mean, which goes to the heart of military readiness, right? The Secretary of Defense saying that, you know, if you’re dealing with a serious mental health issue, our compassion goes with you, but you can’t be deployed to the battlefield. Like that is the heart of the president and the Secretary of Defense’s authorities. And so you have these district courts who really want to run the country and have decided that they are actually in charge of the United States of America. The district courts have tried to take upon themselves powers that belong to the president of the United States. And there’s this very funny, I think, headline from the Babylon Bee that was, you know, something like Donald Trump considers resigning to become a very powerful district court judge.
But it’s one of these jokes with a kernel of truth, which is that the district courts in this country have tried to take upon themselves powers that belong to the president of the United States. And it’s funny, guys, you know, you hear the media and they’ll say, well, this is a constitutional crisis. And the constitutional crisis is not Donald Trump refusing to allow the district courts to govern the country. The crisis is the district courts trying to govern the country. And our approach is we’re fighting it legally. Of course, we’re taking some of these cases to the Supreme Court, and we think we’re going to get success there. We’re finding alternative methods to do what we need to do in compliance with the law. And we’re just going to have to keep on fighting this, you know, day by day, figuring out where the district courts, and, to be clear, it’s not all district courts, it’s the far-left crazies, but when these far-left crazies stop and try to prevent the president from doing his job, we’ve got to do it through alternative means, and that’s what we’re trying to do.
BUCK: We’re speaking to Vice President Vance and, Mr. Vice President, let me ask you about how things are going at this stage with not just identifying the waste, fraud and abuse within the government, a big mission that DOGE has taken upon itself, but what we can expect now. How much of this do you think has been completed when you look at Elon and DOGE’s mission? Does Congress have to play a major role with decisions? Essentially, we know there’s a lot of shenanigans going on, but how do we actually get the shenanigans in government spending to stop? How are we on that?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Yeah, I think we’re making a lot of progress. I wouldn’t say that it’s done by any means, and yes, Congress has a role, because here’s what happens. If DOGE and Elon find $10 billion of spending that’s just ridiculous, that’s not consistent with the law, or with the administration’s policy priorities, that money just kind of sits there. And so it’s still been taxed from the American people, and if we want to use it to pay down debt or to give it back to the American people through tax relief, then that does require an act of Congress, and I think Congress is very willing to do it. But I don’t know if you saw, I think it was today or maybe yesterday, a report came out that Treasury actually is borrowing less money than they expected to borrow, and I think that’s because of the success of DOGE. You’re seeing them make meaningful cuts in some of these crazy foreign aid programs, but I also think they’re finding a lot of fraud in programs that are meant for American citizens that are going either to illegal aliens or to complete fraudsters. And so I think DOGE is making a lot of progress, but it’s not done. And I don’t think it’s ever gonna be truly done, right?
This is one of these problems that we have to continually fight against. And the reason why it was such a shock to the system is we had allowed the waste and the fraud to become so endemic in the way that we did government in this country. And I don’t think we should ever go back. And I actually do think, and maybe this is too optimistic, that when all the political controversy is cleared, we look back on this a few years from now, we’re gonna realize that DOGE saved the American people a lot of money, that it cut a lot of fraud out of our government, and that even some Democrats are going to say, well, we have to keep doing this because we can’t just let hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud every single year become part of how the U.S. government functions.
CLAY: We’re talking to Vice President JD Vance. You guys have made tremendous strides with young men. The data continues to reflect that young men are breaking for both you and Donald Trump in big numbers. I think a big part of that is because young men are over this idea of men being able to play women’s sports. I can’t believe this is even a thing. Nike, you may have seen, recently paid for a study on minors to study trans drugs and how it might impact athletics. How did the world get so broken here? What are companies like Nike even trying to accomplish? And this feels like an 80 /20 /90 /10 issue for Americans. Do you feel that when you’re out and about?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: I do feel that. I definitely think it’s a winning political issue for the Republican Party because it’s just basic common sense, right? I mean, people don’t want women competing against grown men in sports, especially in some of these contact sports where the women could get injured. You know, I’m the father of a 3-year-old daughter… I think it teaches valuable life lessons, but I don’t want her competing against grown men when she does it. This is just, again, it’s basic common sense. I think It’s the basic masculine instinct to protect young women. And one of the ways you do that is to not let, you know, a male boxer in the room with a female boxer, just things like that I think have turned it into a 90-ten issue, that basic common sense.
But, man, I think that so many of these companies, Nike or otherwise, they got caught up in this cultural zeitgeist of 2020, 2021. And it’s like, I don’t know, maybe they just thought the progressives were gonna win. And so they decided to fund this stuff to the hilt, not realizing that the American people would have a rebellion against the craziness. I think that rebellion on the trans issue in particular, I mean, think about this, giving hormonal therapies to 12-year-old kids, causing irreversible damage to their bodies, forcing young girls to compete against boys in sports, sometimes causing serious injury in the process. I think this issue is such a bad loser among the American people that even some of the true believers have dropped it as a political issue. But I think it’s our job to remind the American people, this is what they’ve tried to do. This is what they’re promising to do. The trans issue hasn’t gone away. You just had some Democrats who are smart enough to recognize it’s a political loser. But yeah, they’re going to try to force 12-year-olds to take cross-sex hormones and they’re gonna try to force young girls to compete against young boys. If we give these guys, power the craziness, in other words, hasn’t gotten away. They’ve just gotten a little bit better at hiding it.
BUCK: Mr. Vice President one more for you. Appreciate you making the time for us today. The tariffs issue is something that has gotten a lot of attention on this show across the country for obvious reasons. People are very tuned to what the Trump negotiations with these countries and his approach to China is doing to the economy, the market, prices, everything. Wall Street Journal being a little salty about it today on their front page. What do you say to anyone who is trying to steer Donald Trump away from this course because they’re a little nervous about the tariff situation?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: So, I’ve had so many conversations guys in private with the president about this. And I think his public statements, I mean, going back to the 1980s, this is an issue that he feels very deeply about. I happen to think that he’s right. He campaigned on it. The American people elected him on it. And there’s a lot of misinformation out there. There’s a lot of people saying, well, Donald Trump doesn’t know what he’s actually doing. Look, I promise you, I’ve spent many hours discussing these issues with Donald Trump. You can disagree with him, but he knows exactly what he’s doing. And here’s the fundamental problem. America doesn’t produce enough of its own stuff. That is the issue. We don’t have enough manufacturing in our own country. We’re too reliant on sometimes hostile foreign powers to make the things that we need. And that’s true in electronics. It’s true in technology. It’s true in, God forbid, we’ve had shortages of critical pharmaceuticals in this country over the last few years. We cannot have a real successful, prosperous country if we’re dependent on the communist Chinese for the drugs that we put into the bodies of our children.
And so what the president has said here is, yes, this is going to be disruptive. Yes, this is going to require some transition, but he’s fundamentally committed to the basic process of manufacturing more in the United States, creating good -paying jobs in the process, but more fundamentally making America more self-reliant. And I think the problem is that we had a bipartisan consensus in this country for 40 years that we could just ship all of our heavy industry overseas, that we could ship a lot of our good jobs overseas, a lot of our factories, and that somehow that would make the United States more prosperous. I think the reality is that it’s made us weaker, it’s made us more dependent on the communist Chinese. And when you see, for example, the Chinese respond to the president’s trade policy by saying, well, we’re going to cut off the United States from critical supplies that are necessary for the American people. Doesn’t that just prove that Donald Trump was right? How did we ever get into the position where the People’s Republic of China could threaten the American people with the loss of critical supplies. And given that we are in that position, Donald Trump is exactly right that we have to get out of it. I’m not going to tell you it’s going to be easy because it’s not, but it’s necessary. And I think the president recognizes he has a once-in-a-generation opportunity to do it.
CLAY: JD Vance, Vice President of the United States. Congratulations on the first hundred days and your Ohio State Buckeyes being the national champs. We hope to talk to you again soon. Keep up the good work.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Thanks, guys. Take care.
