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A Conversation With Vice President Vance
00:51:47
Vice President JD Vance met with the new pope a few days ago. He then sat down with The Times to talk about faith, immigration, the law and the partisan temptation to go too far. Ross Douthat, an opinion columnist and the host of the new podcast “Interesting Times,” discusses their conversation.
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- [00:01]
Michael Balbaro
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Michael Balbaro
Saatva.Com NYT from the new York Times, I'm Michael Balbaro. This is the Daily A few days ago in rome, Vice President J.D. vance met with the new pope. And then he sat down with my colleague Ross Douthen, a Times opinion columnist and host of a new podcast called Interesting Times, for an interview about faith, immigration, the law, and the partisan temptation to go too far. Today, Ross talks us through their conversation. It's Thursday, May 22nd. Ross, thank you for being here. I know that you've had a very long couple of days, sleepless couple of days, and we appreciate you making time.
- [01:27]
Ross Douthat
Michael, it is my pleasure and it is a privilege to be with you. And I have slept two nights back at home in the United States, so I am completely rested.
- [01:36]
Michael Balbaro
Oh good.
- [01:37]
Ross Douthat
And ready.
- [01:38]
Michael Balbaro
Well, just to start, tell us how this interview, which required you to leave the country and lose a lot of sleep, how it came about.
- [01:46]
Ross Douthat
Well, so like a number of people in journalism, I have known J.D. vance, the Vice president, since long before he became the vice president, all the way back to when he was just a humble bestselling author and occasional contributor to the New York Times opinion pages, in fact. And through that connection, I convinced him to grant me an extended interview just just before he became Donald Trump's vice presidential nominee. And then a couple of months ago, I launched my own new interview podcast. And of course, I came back to him and said, hey, now I'm interviewing people all the time. Wouldn't you like to be interviewed again? And he very graciously suggested that maybe I would like to come to Rome, where he was leading the US Delegation to the inaugural Mass of Pope Leo xiv, who is of course the first American pope. And he basically said, why don't you come to Rome and you can interview me there?
- [02:49]
Michael Balbaro
I have to imagine that's a pretty tempting offer for any journalist, period. But for a religious Catholic like yourself, an especially tempting offer.
- [02:59]
Ross Douthat
Yes, it was quite a thing actually, to be able to attend the inaugural Mass. The vice president then had a private audience with Pope Leo himself and then came directly from that to our interview.
- [03:12]
J.D. Vance
Good to see You. Good to see you. Hey, guys.
- [03:15]
Ross Douthat
How are you? And we had set up shop inside the American Embassy to the Vatican in, you know, a kind of ornate space and room.
- [03:25]
J.D. Vance
My goal is to actually give you more than an hour or so.
- [03:28]
Ross Douthat
Okay.
- [03:28]
J.D. Vance
We'll just go until this conversation becomes boring or until it.
- [03:31]
Ross Douthat
Right.
- [03:31]
J.D. Vance
Until I say something really stupid.
- [03:33]
Ross Douthat
Until we hit the UFOs. And then you'll beat. You'll beat a hasty retreat.
- [03:37]
J.D. Vance
Yeah.
- [03:38]
Michael Balbaro
And just to explain, Ross, we're going to be playing large segments of your conversation with Vance in this episode because it really helps you understand how Vance thinks. But just to understand what you're doing in this interview, what, once it's beginning, is your real overriding goal for the conversation?
- [03:58]
Ross Douthat
Well, the ultimate goal for the conversation is to get a frank assessment from the vice president of what the administration is actually trying to do on some of its most controversial policies, most notably immigration and trade, what the end game is, what the actual metrics for success are, and so on. But the way into that discussion starts with the place where we are and what's just happened. The inauguration of a new pope and the fact that J.D. vance is, like myself, a convert to Catholicism. And there is this striking tension between where the Vatican, the Catholic bishops, the last pope, probably the new pope, tend to stand on immigration and Trump administration policy and generally the sort of populist attitude towards immigration in America and Europe.
- [04:51]
Michael Balbaro
And briefly, what exactly is the pope and the Catholic Church's view on immigration, in particular, on how the United States should be thinking about immigration.
- [05:03]
Ross Douthat
So the Catholic Church does not have a formal dogmatic stance on here's how many immigrants a just society has to admit. And, you know, here's how many you're allowed to deport or anything like that. Right. But then in practice, if you look at the rhetoric of Catholic bishops, the positions taken by Pope Francis and so on, the church leans, I think, pretty clearly in a more liberal direction on this issue and tends to be more critical of politicians who emphasize border security, more critical of politicians who emphasize deportations, and tends to stress pretty intensely the rights and dignity of migrants and their right to fair treatment. So even though there isn't, again, a sort of absolute position on this, there is a running tension as immigration has become this flashpoint in the Western world between where conservative politicians are, where populous politicians are, and where a lot of leaders of the church tend to be. So that's where we started with the vice president's own Catholicism and then the always interesting and difficult relationship between American Catholic politicians and Popes and the teachings of the Church.
- [06:20]
J.D. Vance
I think there are sort of three ways of thinking about it, and I tend to fall in the middle. Okay, so way number one, and you see some Catholics or some Christians say this is. They'll say, well, politics is politics, policy is policy, religion is religion, and we wish the Pope all its best, or we wish the Church all its best in its moral teachings, but we gotta focus on policy. And these are two totally separate matters. But I think that's wrong because it understates the way in which all of us are informed by our moral and religious values. So that's not the right way to do it. I think another way to do it would be to say, I'm just gonna do everything the Holy Father tells me to do. I think that would be.
- [06:59]
Ross Douthat
Some people were worried about that with John F. Kennedy, of course, as I.
- [07:03]
J.D. Vance
Recall, and I think that would be a violation of the US Constitution. But certainly I think just my obligation more broadly as a vice president to serve the American people. You've got to think about this stuff. But I think the way that I take it is on the migration question in particular, you have to think about what they've said. And when the Church says, yes, we respect the right of a country to enforce its borders, you also have to respect the rights of migrants, the dignity of migrants, when you think about questions like deportation and so forth. And so you have to be able to hold ideas in your head at the same time. And I'm not saying I'm always perfect at it, but I at least try to think about, okay, there are obligations that we have to people who in some ways are fleeing violence or at least fleeing poverty. I also have a very sacred obligation, I think, to enforce the laws and to promote the common good of my own country, defined as the people with the legal right to be here. One issue in particular, I talked to a lot of cardinals this weekend, just because there are a lot of cardinals here, here in Rome. And one of the arguments that I've made, very respectfully, I've had a lot of good, respectful conversations, including with cardinals who very strongly disagree with my views on migration, is that it's easy to get locked in sort of a left versus right. The left respects the dignity of migrants. The right is motivated by hatred. I think far too many people. Obviously, that's not my view, but I think some liberal immigration advocates get locked in that view. That the only reason why JD Vance wants to enforce the borders more stridently is because he's motivated by some kind of hatred or some kind of grievance. And the point that I've tried to make is I think a lot about this question of social cohesion in the United States. I think about how do we form the kind of society again where people can raise families, where people join in institutions together, where what I think Burke would have called the mediating layers of society are actually healthy and vibrant. And I do think that those who care about what might be called the common good, they sometimes underweight how destructive to the common good. Immigration at the levels and at the pace that we've seen over the last few years. I really do think that social solidarity is destroyed when you have too much migration too quickly. And so that's not because I hate the migrants or motivated by grievance. That's because I'm trying to preserve something in my own country, but where we are a unified nation. And I don't think that can happen if you have too much immigration too quickly.
- [09:35]
Michael Balbaro
And at that point, Ross, you ask the vice president how it is he measures whether or not the administration's immigration policies are actually working. And Vance says that they've secured the border, but that when it comes to large scale deportations, it's been more challenging. And he specifically points to two obstacles, a lack of resources for enforcement and then what he interprets as interference from the courts.
- [10:05]
J.D. Vance
Yeah, that's right. I mean, look, it's. And I'm sure that New York Times listeners are going to be scandalized by, by this line of argumentation, but I think it's really important that in some ways the deportation infrastructure that is developed in the United States is not adequate to the task, given what Joe Biden left us. Now, there are different estimates here of how many illegal immigrants came in under the Biden administration. Was it 12 million? Was it 20 million?
- [10:32]
Ross Douthat
Right. And we have a back and forth about this number specifically. But it is absolutely the case that an unprecedented number of illegal immigrants did enter the US under the Biden administration that the Trump administration inherited, and it did run, I think, very explicitly on a promise to deport a substantial number of those new arrivals and has, I think, can reasonably say it has a political mandate to do so. So the question is how?
- [11:01]
J.D. Vance
There are two things that we can do. I think one thing is a little bit easier and one thing is a little bit harder. And the first thing is you just have to have the actual law enforcement infrastructure to make this possible. And again, I think that we should treat people humanely. I think we have an obligation to treat people Humanely. But I do think that a lot of these illegal immigrants have to go back to where they came from. And that requires more law enforcement officers. It requires more beds at deportation facilities. It just requires more of the basic nuts and bolts of how you run a law enforcement regime in the context of deportation. That's one of the main things. And the big beautiful bill that is moving through Congress right now is more money for immigration enforcement. That's what that money is for, to facilitate that deportation infrastructure. There's a much more difficult question, and I think you see the President's frustration. I've obviously expressed public frustration on this, which is, yes, illegal immigrants, by virtue of being in the United States, are entitled to some due process. Okay.
- [12:00]
Ross Douthat
But the due process under a legislative stand, to be clear, this is based on legislation. Like the judges who are making these decisions are not inventing this standard. It is a legislative standard.
- [12:15]
J.D. Vance
But the amount of process that is due and how you enforce those legislative standards and how you actually bring them to bear is, I think, very much an open question.
- [12:24]
Michael Balbaro
And here Vance brings up his frustration, shared no doubt by the President, with the level of due process that immigrants in the country illegally are still entitled to.
- [12:35]
J.D. Vance
And I think that what you've seen, and I remember when I was in law school, there were all of these people who were wanting to become immigration lawyers, and there was almost a certain buzz around immigration law at the time because there was so much gray area, there was so much open space where the courts would interpret how to apply these rules. Now, in the context of the United States in 2011, 2012, 13, when I was in law school, we had significant illegal immigration, but not that much. There was this idea that you could use the asylum claim process and you could use the refugee process, and you could use all of these other tools of the immigration enforcement regime to actually make it harder to deport illegal aliens. And then what happened is a lot of very well funded NGOs went about the process of making it much harder to deport illegal aliens. And that's what we inherited in the Year of our Lord 2025, is a whole host of legal rules, and in some cases, not even legal rules as much as arguments that had made by left wing NGOs that hadn't actually been ruled on by the courts yet.
- [13:42]
Ross Douthat
Right.
- [13:43]
J.D. Vance
And what we're finding, of course, is that a small but substantial number of courts are just making it very, very hard for us to deport illegal aliens. And you know, Stephen Miller, who of course, is sort. Immigrations are in the White House, a good friend of mine, you know, he's thinking of all of these different and new statutory authorities. Right. Because there are a lot of different statutory authorities. The President has to enforce the nation's immigration laws. And there is candidly frustration on the White House side that we think that the law is very clear. We think the President has extraordinary plenary power. Yes, you have to. You need some process to confirm that these illegal aliens are, in fact, illegal aliens, not American citizens.
- [14:25]
Ross Douthat
Right.
- [14:26]
J.D. Vance
But that it's not like we're just throwing that process out. We're trying to comply with it as much as possible and actually do the job that we were left. And I. Okay, but let me just make one final sort of philosophical point here. I worry that unless the Supreme Court steps in here or unless the district courts exercise a little bit more discretion, we are running into a real conflict between two important principles in the United States. Principle one, of course, is that courts interpret the law. I think principle two is that the American people decide how they're governed. Right. That's the fundamental small d democratic principle that's at the heart of the American project. I think that you are seeing, and I know this is inflammatory, but I think you are seeing an effort by the courts to quite literally overturn the will of the American people. And to be clear, it's not most courts, but I think what the Supreme Court has to do, and I saw an interview with Chief Justice Roberts recently where he said the role of the court is to check the excesses of the executive. I thought that was a profoundly wrong sentiment. That's one half of his job. The other half of his job is to check the excesses of his own branch. And you cannot have a country where the American people keep on electing immigration enforcement and the courts tell the American people they're not allowed to have what they voted for. And that's where we are right now. We're gonna keep working it through the immigration court process, through the Supreme Court, as much as possible. And look, my hope is that when you ask what success is, success to me is not so much a number, though, obviously, I'd love to see the gross majority of the illegal immigrants who came in under Biden deported. That actually is a secondary metric of success. Success to me is that we have established a set of rules and principles that the courts are comfortable with, and that we have the infrastructure to do that allows us to deport large numbers of illegal aliens. When large numbers of illegal aliens come into the country, that, to me, is real success. But I think whether we're able to get there is a function, of course, of our efforts, but also of the courts themselves.
- [16:40]
Michael Balbaro
Ross, the vice president here seems to be arguing for a judiciary that is more responsive to the will of the people when it comes to immigration, which is not traditionally how we have seen the role of the courts. I mean, the whole point of having lifetime appointments, I'm not telling you anything you don't know, is that judges are insulated from public whims. Their job is to interpret the Constitution, interpret long standing precedent, regardless of what the public thinks. But you get the sense that what Vance really wants is, is for judges to get out of the way and get to a yes to the Trump administration, regardless of what previous interpretations of the law might be, because that's what he says the American voters want.
- [17:24]
Ross Douthat
I think the context for the vice president's argument is sort of twofold. One, there is a long standing perspective in American conservatism that judges and Supreme Court justices are too quick to interfere in democratic politics, to sort of impose their interpretations of the Constitution that are themselves quite debatable, rather than deferring to the executive and legislative branches, which do, in fact, represent public opinion more directly than the judiciary does. Absolutely. And then the other backdrop to this is that over a long period of time, especially in Western Europe, you have had this really striking dynamic where public opinion is very skeptical and critical of mass immigration. And yet in some cases, the judiciary, in some cases the bureaucracy, in some cases prime ministers and other leaders have found ways to basically ignore public sentiment. And much of European politics has been defined by voters trying to vote against mass immigration, not getting the policy they want, and then moving towards further right and populist parties like Marine Le Pen's National Rally in France, like the Alternative for Deutschland in Germany. Vance is drawing on the perspectives of European politics, this sense that the public has a desire and elites are always trying to thwart it. And judges throwing up roadblocks to the Trump administration doing deportations are part of that tradition. So there are two obvious ways that an administration frustrated by the pace of deportations could try and address those frustrations. One is to try and directly change the law that governs due process for illegal immigrants. Or you could look at judicial interpretations of that law that you think have been too favorable to illegal immigrants and present test cases to the Supreme Court, a Supreme Court that is friendly to executive power, and try and get those interpretations changed. I think the administration is doing some version of both of those things, but then they also have a third track that they're pursuing.
- [19:46]
Michael Balbaro
And we will discuss that third track which happens to be the most controversial track. After the break, we'll be right back.
- [20:12]
Paige Cowett
At Schwab, how you invest is your choice, not theirs. That's why when it comes to managing your wealth, Schwab gives you more choices. You can invest and trade on your own. Plus get advice and more comprehensive wealth solutions to help meet your unique needs. With award winning service, low costs and transparent advice, you can manage your wealth your way at Schwab. Visit schwab.com to learn more. Hi, my name's Paige Cowett. I'm an editor at the Daily and I'm one of the people who stays up very late to make the show ready for you by 6am so we get questions all the time from Daily listeners about how to support the show. And our answer has always been to support the New York Times because that's the engine that powers the Daily. And that is true. But to me, the main thing that the New York Times does is not just power the Daily, but help power a healthy democracy. It is the best group of reporters on the planet, covering every corner of the planet, telling the truth, holding power to account. And that's what you get when you support the New York Times. So if you'd like to support the times, go to nytimes.com slsubscribe and thank you.
- [21:18]
Michael Balbaro
Okay, Ross, before the break, you told us that the administration's options for speeding up the pace of deportations is first, rewrite the law, second, get the Supreme Court to reinterpret the law or to use a third option. So talk about what Vance says that third option is.
- [21:37]
Ross Douthat
So the third option, this has obviously been the zone of maximal controversy under Trump. The idea that you can claim some sort of wartime power that lets you deport illegal immigrants either without any due process at all or with a kind of extremely minimal due process. So it's sort of like the Trump administration is looking for a kind of wartime powers hack for this larger challenge of not having the legal infrastructure necessary for mass deportations. Basically, like we have this big challenge, but what if there was one neat trick in a law from the 1790s that would let us avoid having to go through all the trouble of passing new legislation or establishing new Supreme Court precedents. So I asked him about that just just to push.
- [22:35]
J.D. Vance
There's a third track too, which is using existing legal authorities that haven't been used in the past, but we think are there.
- [22:41]
Ross Douthat
And this is what I'm asking about the legal Authorities that you guys have tried to use have been. The particular one is the alien enemies. Right. Which is an extremely aggressive claim about wartime powers that, as far as I can tell, even under the most aggressive interpretation, is likely to apply only to an incredibly small number of migrants. Right. You're not. The claim is not actually that 5 million migrants here illegally are in a state of war against the United States, or is that the claim?
- [23:12]
J.D. Vance
No, it's not that 5 million are engaged in, like, military conflict, but that the. I take issue that it's an aggressive interpretation. So let me back up and take some issue with the premise. I don't think that the supposition, if you look at the history and the context of those laws, is that for something to be an invasion, you have to have like 5 million uniformed combatants. Yes, we don't have 5 million uniformed combatants. But, Ross, I mean, this is where I think I have to be careful here, because some of this information, of course, is classified. But how to put this point, I think that the courts need to be somewhat deferential. In fact, I think the design is that they should be extremely deferential to these questions of political judgment made by the people's elected president, United States. Because when you say, well, there aren't 5 million people who are waging war, okay, but are there thousands, maybe tens of thousands of people? And then when you take their extended family, their networks, is it much larger than that, who are quite dangerous people who I think very intentionally came to the United States to cause violence or to at least profit from violence, and they're fine if violence is an incidental effect of it. Yeah, I do, man. And I think the people underappreciate the level of public safety stress that we're under when the President talks about how bad crime is. The one thing I'd love for the American media to do a little bit more is really go to a migrant community where you have, say, 60% legal immigrants and 40% illegal immigrants. The level of chaos, the level of violence, the level of, I think truly pre modern brutality that some of these communities have gotten used to whatever law was written, I think it vests us with the power to take very serious action against this. It's bad. It's bad. It's worse than people appreciate. And it's not, you know, Donald Trump. I know most of your listeners probably hate the President I serve under and probably hate me. Maybe not your listeners, but a lot of New York Times readers. But we'll talk about that.
- [25:26]
Ross Douthat
We'll talk about that. Question in a minute.
- [25:27]
J.D. Vance
I would just ask them, like, do not filter this through the. I see President Trump and Vice President Vance up there and I sort of immediately assume that they're lying to me, that they're motivated by some bad value. This is not sustainable. And it's not just sustainable, like, oh, this is more immigrants than we used to have. This is a level of invasion. Invasion that I think our laws, we already have laws to help us deal with. And I wish the courts were more deferential. And we're gonna see again, this is, we're very early innings in the court process. And even some of the worst capital W, worst Supreme Court decisions that have been made on the media says, oh, this is a big blow to the administration. I mean, a lot of these things are very narrow procedural rulings. I think that we're very early innings here on what the court is going to interpret the law to mean.
- [26:17]
Ross Douthat
Right. Shouldn't this sort of barbaric medieval landscape that you're describing show up in violent crime statistics?
- [26:26]
J.D. Vance
Oh, sometimes, no. Because the people who are most victimized by this, Ross, they're not running to the FBI, they're not running to the local, local police. But certainly, I mean, if you look at, I mean, hell, look at the number of people dying of fentanyl overdoses, again, just go substantively, qualitatively, you go to these communities and you see what they're dealing with. I really think that we underappreciate just how violent these cartels are and how much they've made life, I think, pretty unbearable for frankly, a lot of native born American citizens, but also a lot of legal American migrants, especially those along the southern border.
- [27:02]
Michael Balbaro
Ross, when the Vice President refers to communities that are, in his characterization, riddled with crime from illegal immigrants, which communities do you think he's talking about?
- [27:12]
Ross Douthat
Well, as you heard, he says communities along the southern border. I suspect he also has in mind claims about, say, gang activity in an apartment complex in Aurora, Colorado. There have been a number of anecdotal cases. But, but as I said to him, I think, you know, these are anecdotes, they're not statistical evidence. And as he's describing this, reaching back and repurposing old laws for the purpose of deportations, I ask him to talk about or think about some of the moral risks involved in that. Well, so what, what you're describing is, again, you and I both lived through the Bush presidency, right. And there are elements of what you might call a kind of war on terror mentality. Yeah, that you're taking vis a vis the cartels or people associated with the cartels, or people allegedly associated with gangs and cartels. That seems to me similar to the approach taken to anyone associated with Islamic terrorism and so on in the aftermath of September 11th. And again, you remember and I remember that in more than a few cases, right, this ended up with situations where the US was taking people into custody and remanding them to black sites and so on, who turned out, unsurprisingly not to be, number one, Al Qaeda terrorists, right? Yes. And to the extent that it is possible, and it is somewhat difficult for the media to do this, but to the extent that it's possible for the media to examine the kind of figures and individuals that you guys have been trying to essentially remand to prison in El Salvador, right, without extensive legal process, it just seems like this system is ripe for war on terrorist style abuses where you are going to be sending people to prison in El Salvador that advertises itself as a terrible place. And one, some of those people are probably going to be innocent. Two, some of them are going to be people who have committed a crime, who have some kind of gang affiliation, but who under normal American law, non wartime law, would end up going to jail for six months or a year or something. And again, they're going to disappear potentially into a system for a decade or more or something like that. And that just seems like you are creating a context where injustice is inevitable, even if your intentions are just to bring peace and order to communities along the border or anything else.
- [29:43]
J.D. Vance
Well, look, first of all, I understand your point. And making these judgments, if you take the teachings of our faith seriously, they are hard. I'm not going to pretend that I haven't struggled with some of this, that I haven't thought about whether we're doing the precisely right thing. So it's a fair point. And I know that you think you've got me trapped here.
- [30:07]
Ross Douthat
I don't think I have you. All right, let me be perfectly honest, I'm not interested in having you trapped here. We're having a conversation in Rome as a journalist and a vice president, but also as two Catholics. And I'm interested in shit, Ross, trust.
- [30:20]
J.D. Vance
Me, I think it's. To be clear, I think it's a totally fair question.
- [30:23]
Ross Douthat
I'm interested in what politics does to.
- [30:25]
J.D. Vance
People, to your soul. Yes, of course. So number one, the concern that you raise is fair. Okay? The concern that you raise is fair. There has to be some way in which you're asking yourself as you go about enforcing the law, even to your point, against some very dangerous people, that you're enforcing the law consistent with the Catholic Church's moral dictates and so forth. And also, to be clear, I'm the vice.
- [30:50]
Ross Douthat
And also, I mean, after that pitch to your soul, an American law and.
- [30:55]
J.D. Vance
Basic principles, most importantly, American law. But we're talking about, you know, we're in Rome. And so that's why I brought up the Catholic.
- [31:00]
Ross Douthat
The American flag is positioned behind you.
- [31:02]
J.D. Vance
Sure. So here's the thing. So with a caveat that I'm the vice president, United States, and I am hardly an expert in every single edge case or every single case that has become a viral since or that people have criticized us over, but I am pretty well read on some of the cases. Typically what I find when I look at the worst cases, I mean, the ones that the media seems so preoccupied with, I would make a couple of observations about it. Number one, it is hard to take seriously. Now, this doesn't absolve me from doing my duty as an American leader and hopefully as a Christian leader, too. But it is hard to take seriously the extraordinarily emotive condemnations of people who don't care about the problem that I'm trying to solve and that the president is trying to solve. So when I see people who for legitimately four years told me that I was a xenophobe for thinking that what Joe Biden was doing at the border was a serious problem, I am less willing. There's a witness element to this, and I'm less willing to believe the witness of people who are now saying that this MS.13 gang member. And we'll talk about that case in a second. This guy, this guy is somehow a very sympathetic person, and you violated his civil rights, et cetera, et cetera. Okay, so that. That's number one. Number two, I still have an obligation to think about these cases. And I'll tell you, you know, a lot of times I'll read about these cases and I'll reach out to the people who are enforcing immigration law and I'll try to find out what exactly is going on. I haven't asked every question about every case, but the ones where I have asked questions and I try to get to the bottom of what's going on, I feel quite comfortable what's happened. And the one that I spent the most time understanding is the one of the, you know, the Maryland father. And.
- [33:00]
Ross Douthat
And so here as we're talking about moral risks, the vice president himself brings up the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia.
- [33:07]
Michael Balbaro
Right, The Maryland man in the United States illegally who was, by the admission of the Trump administration, mistakenly deported without due process to this prison in El Salvador.
- [33:19]
Ross Douthat
Right. And the Vice President wants to go to that controversial, much discussed case because in his mind, this is both an edge case that does raise some real moral and political questions, but also ultimately a case that vindicates the Trump administration's approach.
- [33:36]
Michael Balbaro
And how does it, in his mind, vindicate the administration's approach?
- [33:40]
Ross Douthat
His argument is that in spite of the attempts by liberals and critics of the administration's policy to portray Garcia as a law abiding, innocent victim, he is in fact, exactly the kind of person who should be liable for deportation from the United States.
- [33:57]
J.D. Vance
I think this guy was not just a gang member, but a reasonably high level gang member. In Ms. 13, I think he had engaged in some pretty ugly conduct legally. He had had multiple hearings before an immigration judge. He had a valid deportation order. What he also had was a sort of exception, what's called a withholding order, that basically said, yes, you can deport this guy. No one doubts that we could have deported this guy, but you can't deport this guy to El Salvador because of particular conditions that obtained In, I believe, 2019, when his case was adjudicated. So you Fast forward to 2025, we deport this guy, the courts hold that we've made a mistake, and then eventually it gets to the Supreme Court. And I believe, and we're getting in the weeds a little bit of the legal technicalities, but I believe the court term is you must facilitate his return. And I sat in lunch with Bukele, the leader of El Salvador, with the President of the United States and with others and talked about this case. And Bukele basically said, I don't want to send this guy back. I think he's a bad guy. I want him. He's my citizen. He's in a prison in El Salvador and I think that's where he belongs. And our attitude was, okay, what are we really going to do? Are we going to exert extraordinary diplomatic pressure to bring a guy back to the United States who is a citizen of a foreign country who we had a valid deportation order with? I understand there may be disagreements about the judgments that we made here, but there's just something that it's hard to take serious when so many of the people who are saying we made a terrible error here are the same people who made no protests about how this guy got into the country. In the first place or what Joe Biden did for four years to the American southern border.
- [35:44]
Michael Balbaro
Listening to Vance here, I was struck by how much issue he takes with those who question this approach. And really he takes issue with the fact that those who don't recognize the problem as he sees it don't really have much ground to stand on in criticizing these edge cases, as he calls them. Basically, he seems to see left leaning critics as unworthy of much engagement around this issue, which just struck me.
- [36:21]
Ross Douthat
Yeah, I think the general administration view is that a lot of the criticisms that they get from Democratic politicians and liberal activists and so on are, if not in bad faith, at least just sort of non responsive to what they see as the actual problem that they're trying to solve. That the criticisms are basically intended to set up impossible roadblocks, to establish standards of due process that would make it impossible for the Trump administration to deport anyone. And that the fact that Garcia, who. The specific claims the administration made about him are certainly debatable. I think the fact that he has a much more checkered record than a lot of liberals presented is correct. I mean, I think there's agreement that he has, you know, domestic abuse allegations and these, these kind of things right now. Personally, I think it really is true that a lot of critics of the administration's policy basically don't want to deport anyone or anyone except a few, you know, of the absolute worst cases. But it's also true that Vance was not exactly being responsive to the question of whether the system itself is going to create abuses, including abuses that could fall upon American citizens, which seems like, especially like a live issue, given that the President of the United States floated the idea of sending American criminals to an El Salvadoran prison as well. So I asked him about this in that meeting. The other thing that the President of the United States said was that he hoped or aspired to a situation where he could potentially send American citizens to El Salvador's prisons.
- [38:16]
J.D. Vance
The worst of the worst said explicitly he would follow the law and would follow American courts on this. So I don't think it's unreasonable for the President to say, here's this thing I'd like to do, so long as it's consistent with the law.
- [38:28]
Ross Douthat
I think that you should be able to see, though, why, in the context of sending illegal immigrants to an El Salvadoran prison and claiming to be unable for diplomatic reasons to bring them back, the prospect of then saying, and we'd like to send US Citizens to that prison would raise some concerns about how the administration uses the immigration powers that you think it should have understood. Arguable wartime conditions again, Right. Like, regardless of the particulars of a case, it just seems like you are setting up a machinery that people of good faith who are not hostile to your policies would reasonably regard as dangerous to particular people who are caught up in the system.
- [39:20]
J.D. Vance
So, look, I understand the point, especially as it's what the president says or what I say is refracted through the lens of an American press that I have my complaints with. But just what did the president, again, I would defend my boss here. What did he say? I'm going to think about doing this only in cases of the very, very worst people, number one, and number two, only if it's consistent with American law. I think that if that was the headline that was reproduced, the president is considering sending the very worst violent gang members in America to a foreign prison. So long as that is a legal thing to do, I don't think that would inspire so much passionate resistance. That's my understanding of the American people.
- [40:09]
Ross Douthat
In a context where the administration, by.
- [40:11]
Michael Balbaro
The time you're all done talking about this administration's approach to immigration and how Vance thinks about it, I wonder what you've concluded about the relationship between this Catholic vice president who's in Rome and clearly thinking about some of the disapproval emanating from the Vatican and this pretty aggressive policy that Vance is a part of inside the Trump administration when it comes to immigration.
- [40:36]
Ross Douthat
I raised the war on terror parallel in our conversation for a reason. I think that it is a very clear, common phenomenon for politicians with sincere religious convictions to end up in a place where they feel like they have obligations to the safety of the country. And it's common good, as certainly the George W. Bush administration felt after 9, 11, that leads them to set up systems that are designed to further a particular end, but that are exposed to abuses. This is not a novel story in American history. It's not a novel story in politics. And I think the vice president's response, he's arguing that while there may be similar risks right now, what critics and skeptics see as serious abuses aren't actually happening. And I do think that the Supreme Court has already imposed limits on the Trump administration's ability to do these kind of speedy to an El Salvador in prison deportations, that hopefully limits how much moral risk the administration's policy creates in the future. But I am also very skeptical that if we could see with X ray vision each and every case of someone who's already been sent to these prisons that the vice president's claims that there have been no abuses or no serious abuses would hold up. I think that's just not the way the world usually works.
- [42:16]
Michael Balbaro
Ross, you end this interview by asking the vice President how policies like these expedited deportations are playing out with a very specific kind of voter.
- [42:29]
Ross Douthat
So a couple times in this interview, you've said something to me to the effect of, I know New York Times readers hate me, or I know New York Times readers don't like me, and so on.
- [42:38]
Michael Balbaro
And I want you to explain what you're up to here.
- [42:41]
Ross Douthat
I'm a New York Times columnist, and this is a New York Times podcast. And at various moments in the interview, the vice president commented on the fact that he expects that most New York Times readers and listeners are not likely to agree with him and so on. And on the one hand, that's a fair characterization, probably. On the other hand, I do think that there are people who read the New York Times, listen to the daily read, read my column, and so on, who, who did end up supporting the Trump vance ticket in 2024, and many others who maybe didn't support it, but actually woke up the morning after the victory and said, you know what? I was glad in the end that they won. And I think that that constituency is, in fact, incredibly important to the political success, or lack thereof, of the Trump administration. That the ability to win over a segment of, let's say, you know, upper middle class to elite America to get them to vote for a populist administration is a pretty big political feat. And it's one that the Trump administration should not wish to see lightly squandered. And I think in lots of different ways, the aggressiveness of what the Trump administration has done on immigration, on trade policy, on a host of smaller issues related to, you know, universities and doge cuts and so on, Trump administration has sort of freaked out and alienated people in that category, especially who voted for them last November.
- [44:18]
Michael Balbaro
And you ask the vice president what he would say to that constituency.
- [44:26]
Ross Douthat
So then generally, you're gonna face the voters by proxy in the midterm. Sure, you may face the voters personally in some future. Right. But to this constituency that was pro Trump, again, maybe it's to its own surprise, but has found itself sort of shocked at various points in the first few months. What is your pitch to them right now?
- [44:47]
J.D. Vance
I guess my pitch to them would be we came into the administration with what we believed was a mandate from the American people to make government more responsive to the elected will of the people and less responsive to bureaucratic intransigence. And changing that is not perfect. And I won't even say that we've gotten every decision right. I think that sometimes even Elon has admitted we made a mistake, we corrected the mistake. So the point is not that this is perfect. The point is that it was a necessary part of making the people's government more responsive to the people. And I think that if you look over the next, in two years, you look at the past two years, or in four years, you look at the past four years. What I hope to be able to say and what I think is true today and will still be true then, is that we actually have done, with some bumps, we've done a good job at making the government more responsive and more efficient to the cabinet secretaries or the deputy secretaries in those departments. And that this sort of feeling of shock, I don't dismiss it or diminish it, but I think that the system actually needed some pretty significant reform. And I'd ask people for patience because we're on the inside of this. You elected us to do a job, and you get to make the judgment with the benefit of hindsight, whether we were just breaking stuff or whether we were actually doing something in the service of fixing things. I promise you that I believe that we're fixing things, but ultimately the American people will be the judge of that.
- [46:18]
Michael Balbaro
I'm curious what you made of the vice president's answer and what that tells us about what the next three and a half years and maybe even the future of the MAGA movement over a longer time horizon might look like.
- [46:31]
Ross Douthat
I think the vice president's answer reflects a sense that I've heard from other people associated with the Trump White House, which is something along the lines of you expect your first 100 days to be aggressive and sometimes chaotic and sometimes experimental, and you expect to generate a certain kind of backlash if you move fast and try and do big things. And over time, you hope for or expect a kind of stabilization, a stabilization in policy where you've figured out how far you can go, what the limits imposed by the Supreme Court in public opinion are, or in the case of trade policy, what the limits imposed by the bond market and the stock market are. Right. You figure out those limits and you sort of settle into a more stable governing style. And voters who were freaked out by the first 100 days and for various reasons come back to you. And I should say that if you look at the polls right now, that Donald Trump has recovered some ground in the last few weeks as his trade policy has stabilized, as the Supreme Court has both granted him some victories and also imposed some limits on his policies, as he's sort of pivoted to a kind of diplomatic offensive overseas. That that remains to be seen, what will come of it. But I think it could be popular, his quest for deals in the Middle east and so on. So I think you can tell a story like the one the vice president ends with, where the Trump administration at day 100 is much less popular than the Trump administration six months or two years from now. But I don't think that's at all guaranteed. And I think obviously there are impulses, strong impulses within the Trump White House to sort of take a breather and then go back to pushing the envelope again. And so much about the future of this administration depends on whether it's capable of sustaining a certain kind of stability and normalcy or whether any period of stabilization will always give way to some new wave of let's see how far we can go. Probably not Moscow, but Mr. Vice President, thank you so much.
- [48:59]
J.D. Vance
Good to see you. Rossa.
- [49:00]
Michael Balbaro
Play well, Ross, thank you very much.
- [49:18]
Ross Douthat
You're very welcome, Michael. I really appreciate it.
- [49:27]
Michael Balbaro
To hear Ross's entire interview with Vice President Vance, including their conversation about trade and artificial intelligence. Listen to the latest episode of Ross's show, Interesting Times. You can find it wherever you listen to podcasts. We'll be right back.
- [50:04]
Ross Douthat
I'm Kevin Roos. I'm a tech columnist at the New York Times. I'm Casey Noon from Platformer. We're the hosts of Hard Fork. Every week, we break down the biggest tech news talk with industry players in Silicon Valley and answer your most pressing questions about the future. This week, Ed Helms from the office comes to our office to talk about his new book and answer your hard questions about tech.
- [50:22]
J.D. Vance
It feels like cigarettes in the 90s, right? Everybody knows, but, but like, come on.
- [50:27]
Michael Balbaro
We'Re still doing it.
- [50:28]
J.D. Vance
You can find that conversation on this.
- [50:29]
Ross Douthat
Week'S episode of Hard Fork.
- [50:31]
J.D. Vance
Wherever you get your podcasts.
- [50:36]
Michael Balbaro
Here'S what else you need to know today. Late last night, a gunman shot and killed two staff members of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C. outside an event at a Jewish museum. The suspected gunman later chanted free Palestine while in police custody. In response, Israel's ambassador to the United nations called the shooting a, quote, depraved act of anti Semitic terrorism. And thank you very much, everyone. It's a great honor to be with the president of South Africa, President Ramaphosa On Wednesday, what started off as a polite Oval Office meeting between President Trump and the leader of South Africa became unexpectedly contentious when Trump paused the conversation to play a video of what he said was evidence of racial persecution of white South Africans. Excuse me, turn the lights down. Turn the lights down and just put this on. It's right behind you. The video, a compilation of cliffs, many of them years old, showed South African officials calling for the forceful seizure of land and violence against white farmers.
- [52:09]
J.D. Vance
Because.
- [52:09]
Ross Douthat
The killing is part of a revolutionary act.
- [52:13]
Michael Balbaro
Once the video was over, those are officials, those are people that were in office, South Africa's president tried to correct Trump.
- [52:22]
Ross Douthat
Let me clarify that because what you saw, the speeches that were being made.
- [52:27]
J.D. Vance
One that is not government policy.
- [52:30]
Ross Douthat
We have a multi party democracy in.
- [52:33]
J.D. Vance
South Africa that allows people to express themselves. Our government policy is completely, completely against what he was saying, even in the parliament.
- [52:47]
Michael Balbaro
But Trump pressed on with his inaccurate claims that South Africa allows black residents to take land from white farmers known as Afrikaners, and even to kill them with impunity. But you do allow them to take land.
- [53:04]
J.D. Vance
No, no, no, no.
- [53:05]
Michael Balbaro
You do allow them to take land nobody can take. And then when they take the land, they kill the white farmer. And when they kill the white farmer, nothing happens to them.
- [53:14]
Ross Douthat
No, there is quite nothing happens. There is criminality in our country.
- [53:25]
Michael Balbaro
Today's episode was produced by Caitlin o' Keefe and Stella Tan. It was edited by Lisa Chow, contains original music by Dan Powell and Marion Lozano and was engineered by Chris wood and Pat McCusker. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly. Special thanks to Annie Rose Strasser, Jordana Hockman, Catherine Sullivan, Andrea Batanzos, Sophia Alvarez Boyd, Alyssa Gutierrez, Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker, Jonah Kessel, Marina King and Shannon Busta. That's it for the Daily. I'm Michael Balbaro. See you tomorrow.
- [54:20]
Paige Cowett
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