WASHINGTON — Vice President JD Vance said he feels ‘very empowered’ by President Donald Trump, telling Fox News Digital that there is ‘complete trust across the senior team,’ and ‘good synergies’ in ‘service of a common vision.’
Vance sat for an exclusive interview with Fox News Digital Wednesday in his West Wing office inside the White House.
The vice president reflected on his role as vice president, which, notably, is not limited to a specific portfolio, but rather a broad role touching on foreign and domestic policy issues and more.
‘Obviously, the president makes decisions. And what’s so good about the team that we have, both on the economic side, but also on the foreign policy side, is the president gives directives, and each person has their role in fulfilling those directives, and there is complete trust across the senior team,’ Vance explained to Fox News Digital. ‘It’s kind of empowering, because you don’t have to constantly check in — you don’t have to micromanage some of these things.’
Vance told Fox News Digital that he spoke to Secretary of State Marco Rubio Tuesday, after not having spoken to him ‘for four or five days before then.’
‘It’s kind of nice to just know that you’ve got the secretary of State working on his stuff, the Department of Defense secretary who’s working on his stuff, and I’m, of course, working on my stuff,’ Vance said. ‘And then we all come back; we update the president; we go from there.’
But Vance said it is ‘a very fluid and dynamic situation.’
‘I think that will certainly continue over the next 100 days — over the next four years,’ Vance said. ‘But I think what enables it — what makes it possible — is that people actually trust one another.’
Vance told Fox News Digital that the president ‘has full faith in his team.’
‘And it just makes it very easy to actually work successfully when you’re not constantly checking in and you’re not constantly, you know, dealing with the bureaucracy,’ Vance said. ‘You can just go and do your job.’
Vance told Fox News Digital that he, as vice president, feels ‘very empowered by the president.’
‘I was talking to Secretary Rubio about this yesterday, and I think Marco Rubio feels very empowered, and there’s just this sense that the President both likes and trusts his senior team, and so he’s able to govern effectively,’ Vance explained. ‘The president is dealing with a million different things, but it’s a lot more digestible when you can give directives to your team and say, ‘Go and do this.’ And that’s what’s happening on the economic side. It’s what’s happening on the national on the national security side.’
‘And obviously, because I’m the vice president, I have a more global view of this, but it’s really an amazing thing to see, because there’s just a lot of good synergies that, you know, I don’t know if the president had the first administration — I don’t know if any president has had in prior administrations — where there was such great confidence in the team.’
‘You read stories about, you know, Kamala Harris’s portfolio, or you read stories about other vice presidents, about, even Dick Cheney’s portfolio, where there was this dynamic of, there were turf battles, and one person was trying to say, ‘This is what I work on, and this is what you work on, and don’t step on my territory,’’ Vance explained. ‘There’s just none of that.’
Vance added: ‘Because our territory is what the president has told us that we have to get done, and we don’t mind sharing that territory if it’s in service of a common vision, which it is.’
Meanwhile, when asked for highlights of the first 100 days of the Trump administration, Vance pointed to his first foreign trip in February to France to discuss artificial intelligence.
‘A lot of people were very excited about American leadership in AI, but then, of course, we gave a speech heard around the world at Munich where I thought — it’s just one of the things you can do with this office is say things that need to be said,’ Vance told Fox News Digital.
‘And I thought it needed to be said that some of our European allies have gone backward on free speech, on religious expression, on border control, and in the same way that President Trump is trying to change that dynamic in the United States of America, I think it would behoove our European friends to do the same.’
Another highlight, Vance said, was visiting Eagle Pass, Texas.
‘That was another highlight, because there was a sense of — and I don’t mean this negatively — almost boredom at Eagle Pass because the Border Patrol agents were showing me photos of these places that were just overwhelmed by illegal immigrants and now — you can’t see anybody.’
Vance reflected on ‘visualizing the drop in just a few short weeks of a 95% reduction in illegal immigration, and the fact that these guys felt like they didn’t have as much to do.’
‘But if they don’t have that much to do, that means we’re doing the American people’s business,’ Vance said. ‘And just seeing that so crystal clear — a connection between Donald Trump’s policies and the end of the border crisis — just good things for the American people.’
‘It was a very cool day,’ he said. ‘I also got to ride in a helicopter.’