Senator J.D. Vance On The Last Two Weeks Of Campaign 2024

The Hugh Hewitt Show

Senator J.D. Vance joined me this morning.

Audio:

10-21hhs-vance

Transcript:

HH: Good morning, Senator. How are you?

JDV: Good, Hugh. How are you?

HH: I am great. In fact, after today’s program, I will be walking over to the early voting station in Virginia and cast my ballot for Donald Trump and J.D. Vance. It’s a bit surreal, Senator. And it must be for you. Do you pinch yourself every now and then, or when you’re fishing with the Ruthless guys and say this is actually happening?

JDV: (laughing) I pinch myself every day, Hugh. And in particular when people send me their ballots with, of course, my name on it and President Trump’s name on it. It’s a pretty crazy feeling. I just try to enjoy it and do what I can to make sure we win, Hugh, which frankly right now, I feel like we’re in a very good spot.

HH: I do, too. I want to get to the politics in a moment. I want to start with breaking news, though. Last night, Reuters reported the United States is investigating the leak of a pair of highly-classified intelligence documents describing Israel’s preparations for a retaliatory strike on Iran, House Speaker Mike Johnson said on Sunday. The documents appear to have been prepared by the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency describing U.S. interpretations of Israeli Air Force and Navy planning based on satellite imagery from October 15th and 16th. Senator, that’s treason. What will be your advice to President Trump if he becomes the 47th president on pursuing the perpetrators of that?

JDV: Well, we have to investigative it aggressively, Hugh. And you’re right that it’s treason. There’s a lot that we don’t know. We don’t know how big the leak was. We don’t know, of course, you know, when you have leaks like this, and the documents that you know have been taken or have been revealed, they’re also probably documents that we don’t know about that might be included in the leak. And so we have to be very focused on understanding fully the extent of the intelligence breach. You know, you probably have across various agencies hundreds, maybe even thousands of people who have access to these documents. So it’s going to take some time, I think, to identify who did it, but we have to be really aggressive about this stuff, Hugh. I mean, some of this intelligence that gets collected, whether from ourselves or our allies, you know, it comes from painstaking work, dangerous work. I mean, sometimes, people lose their lives in order to get us this stuff. And if we don’t protect it, then we’re not going to have much national security.

HH: Jonathan Pollard spent 27 years in federal prison, rightly, because he was spying for Israel. This isn’t a question about being pro-Israel or anti. It’s a question about if you take the oath, you cannot leak our material to the world because you don’t like Israel. And I just, I want someone to really take it to the max, make sure he gets prosecuted the way that they’ve gone after Donald Trump wrongly, to the full extent of the law.

JDV: Look, Hugh, I agree with you, and I think we have to do that. And we have to identify who did it, and hopefully prosecute them to the full extent of the law. I think it also illustrates how increasingly within the bureaucracy of our government, Hugh, you have people who think of themselves as independent actors pursuing their own policy. I mean, you put it very well. Whether you’re pro-Israel, anti-Israel, pro-any country or anti-any country, you have to be pro-the United States of America. And the most important part of that is actually following the political leadership as they drive American public policy. Your job is to help implement that public policy, direct that policy, gather intelligence for that policy. Your job is not to conduct diplomacy yourself by leaking intelligence that is going to be harmful or helpful to one party or another. So it’s extremely serious.

HH: And we need to deter it. Yeah, we need to deter it.

JDV: Yes.

HH: Now Senator, I want to get to the question that you were trying to answer when either Margaret Brennan or CBS cut off your mic. Well done in the vice presidential debate, by the way. But you were talking about TPS. I honestly don’t know how 20,000 Haitians end up in Springfield. What is your understanding, and what were you trying to explain to the American people about TPS when your mic was cut off?

JDV: Well, it’s TPS and mass parole, Hugh. So first of all, the move the Democrats make when they’re talking about these mass parolees, and of course, there are a lot of Haitians in that group, but a lot of other nationalities as well, is they’ll say well, these folks are legal, right? And when you hear legal immigrant, what you think, of course, is a person who came here, paid their fees, spent 10 years getting everything processed, got a green card, and then eventually became an American citizen. And that is just not what’s going on here. In fact, courts, I think, are going to consistently find that Kamala Harris’ mass parole program is illegal. They use things like the CBP One App to grant parole at an industrial scale when really, what parole is there for is for the President to be able to make case by case exceptions to American immigration law. To say that these folks are legal immigrants because Kamala Harris violated the law to grant them legal status, it’s just preposterous. And we have to push back against what I think is an Orwellian inversion of immigration language.

HH: Now the trendline is that if we have a Kamala Harris-Tim Walz administration, the problem of the last three-and-a-half years will more than double, because that’s what happened with her and Biden following Former President Trump. Do you expect to, is that fair to say? If you don’t like what happened, expect twice as much of it in the next four years?

JDV: Yeah, twice as much or three times as much. I mean, look, on the immigration stuff, Hugh, you’re seeing this already where the media’s trying to say that illegal border crossings are down. And that’s actually not true. What’s happening is they’re shifting from illegal border crossings at the Southern border to facilitated mass parole coming in through the ports of entry, through airports, into our country. So these guys are actually taking Kamala Harris’ open border, they’re giving it technological sophistication and scale, and you think this isn’t going to get much worse during Kamala Harris’ administration? I think you’re lying to yourself. Everything that’s gone wrong is going to get so much worse, and that’s particularly true when it comes to the green energy stuff, which has caused a lot of the inflation. It’s just bad, bad news, and that’s the message that we’re trying to carry in these final two weeks.

HH: Senator Vance, I want to turn also to the Washington Post front page this morning, a story, the headline of which is “Housing Costs Are Rising Everywhere, But Especially In The Swing States.” What’s remarkable about the story is they do not do what Elon Musk did over the weekend, detail the regulatory burden on homebuilders. He was talking about the regulatory burden on SpaceX. But it’s three times as much for a homebuilder in California. Federal level, you know, you’ve got the EPA, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, Army Corps of Engineers, the state, you’ve got CalEPA, CARB, the California Air Resources Board, regional water quality control board, then the local stuff. Do you think the federal government can somehow reduce the regulatory burden to lower the cost of getting a home?

JDV: Well, I think that we can. Of course, some of these regulations cut across interstate commerce, Hugh, and that’s something the federal government has obviously very direct authority over. I think some of this stuff goes back to NEPA, various federal environmental regulations. And then of course, a lot of this is driven by energy, meaning if energy is more expensive, then the cost of building a home is going to be more expensive. That, of course, gets passed onto consumers. I think we’re all talking, of course, about supply issues, Hugh, and that is a big part of the problem, is we’re not building enough homes. I also think we have to be honest that if we’re importing millions upon millions of illegal aliens, we’ve got to put them somewhere. And that increased demand on housing is also driving the cost of American homes through the roof. So I really think we have to address both the supply and the demand side here, cut down on illegal immigration, build more homes, lower interest rates. That’s how you solve the housing crisis in this country.

HH: That is. Housing is one market from the cheapest apartment in the most dilapidated structure to the most expensive home. It’s all one market. Put pressure on any segment, you influence other segments. Senator, what’s the closing strategy for you? Where are you going in the next two weeks?

JDV: Pretty much everywhere. I’m headed to Texas for a fundraiser tonight, and then to Arizona and Nevada early this week. I think we’re going to be in North Carolina, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, all those states in the next few days. So you know, I think the President is doing a big rally in Greenville, North Carolina today. So we’re really just hitting the big seven battleground states. I think you’ll see me mostly in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan down the stretch. But look, man, we’ve got to win all these states, and I think that we will. We’ve just got to make sure that people see us and drive home the message that we could have a much more prosperous, lower inflation, more affordable country. We just have to get back to the common sense policies of Donald Trump.

HH: Senator, I want to close with the biggest missing ingredient of this election. Neither candidate has been asked about Xi Jinping and his intentions, and the Chinese Communist Party, and its ambitions. How do you assess, not the tariff policy, but generally, what do you think Xi wants? What do you think the CCP intends?

JDV: Well, it’s very important, but also a very complicated question, Hugh. And the way that I think about it is it’s of course impossible know how much they want Taiwan. They certainly want it. We don’t know how much they want it. And I think part of American policy over the next few years has to be to make it as costly as possible for them to seize it by force, right? This is why it’s important to give the Taiwanese the defensive weapon systems they need is because if we make it harder for Xi to take Taiwan, that’s going to change his calculus as much as possible. When you war game this out, Hugh, we know that once the Chinese gain a foothold in Taiwan, it becomes extremely difficult to do anything from there. So what you really have to do is make this thing as costly as possible to establish that foothold. I think that has been the main thrust of American national security policy. Unfortunately, the implementation under Joe Biden and Kamala Harris has been really lacking. So we’ve got to establish deterrence. We’ve got to get them the weapons that they need, and we’ve got to make this as costly as possible. And I think if we do all those things, we can make sure that Taiwan remains independent.

HH: Do you think Xi, though, I think, I’ll tell you what, I think he’s a Leninist, a hard-core Communist, and that he believe, I mean, he really has it in his soul, and he’s ruthless. Is that your understanding of the man?

JDV: I think he’s certainly ruthless. I don’t know that he is a Leninist as much as a sort of ultra-Chinese nationalist in some ways I think that the Nazis in the 30s and 40s are sort of a better mental frame for Xi than maybe the Soviets of the 50s and 60s. But look, man, it’s very complicated. It’s a very old civilization with a lot of historical baggage. And I think we just have to recognize that they see themselves, basically Western dominance of the last few centuries, they see as sort of a blip in the historical radar. They think Chinese civilization is meant to rule the world. And so I think that we have to recognize they have extremely ambitious plans, and we have to have our own ambitious plans to counter it.

HH: My last question, Senator, because I know you have a hard out at :46. The Defense budget will be on the table the moment you take office if you win. What will be your advice to President Trump about immediate lifts of that, and things like expanding the Philadelphia shipyard? 30 seconds, Senator.

JDV: Very simple. We’ve got to build more weapons. We have to build more ships. Part of that is spending, Hugh, but also part of it is procurement. I think we have to fix the procurement process in this country, make it much more efficient. That would be my advice.

HH: Senator J.D. Vance, thank you for stopping by. Good luck in your last two weeks. It’s going to be an honor to vote for you later today and President Trump. I appreciate it, and keep talking to me throughout the vice presidential years. J.D. Vance, Senator from Ohio, future vice president.

End of interview.

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