A Conversation With Vice President Vance
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This message comes from Capital One. Your business requires commercial banking solutions that prioritize your long-term success. With Capital One, get a full suite of financial products and services tailored to meet your needs today and goals for tomorrow. Learn more at CapitalOne.com slash commercial. Member FDIC. From the New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. 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 Douthat, 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. 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 and ready. 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.

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. Right.

And through that connection, I convinced him to grant me an extended interview 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? Right.

And he very graciously suggested that maybe I would like to come to Rome, where he was leading the U.S. 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? 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.

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.

Good to see you. Good to see you. Hey, guys. How are you? And we have set up shop inside the American embassy to the Vatican in, you know, a kind of ornate space and room. My goal is to actually give you more than an hour or so. Okay. We'll just go until this conversation becomes boring. Right. Until I say something really stupid. Until we hit the UFOs. And then you'll beat a hasty retreat. Yeah.

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?

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.

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? 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 immigration,

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 populist 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. I think there are sort of three ways of thinking about it.

and I tend to fall in the middle. 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, you know, we wish the Pope all his best or we wish the church all its best in its moral teachings, but we got to focus on policy and these are two totally separate matters. But I think that 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 going to do everything the Holy Father tells me to do. I think that would be

Some people were worried about that with John F. Kennedy, as I recall.

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 two 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, you know, I've talked to a lot of cardinals this weekend just because there are a lot of cardinals here in Rome. And one of the arguments that I've made, you know, 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, you know, it's easy to get locked in sort of a left versus right situation.

you know, 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 J.D. Vance wants to enforce the borders more stridently is because he's motivated by some kind of hatred or some kind of grievance. And, you know, the point that I've tried to make is I think a lot about this question of,

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 society

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 I'm motivated by grievance. That's because I'm trying to preserve something in my own country where we are a unified nation. And I don't think that can happen if you have too much immigration too quickly. 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. 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 of.

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? Right. And we have a back and forth about this numbers specifically, but it is absolutely the case that an unprecedented number of illegal immigrants did enter the U.S. 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?

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 in 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. But the due process under a legislative stand, to be clear, yes, this is based on legislation, like the judges who are making these decisions are

are not inventing this standard. It is a legislative standard. 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. 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.

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 growth.

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 to

of the immigration enforcement regime to actually make it harder to deport legal 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. Right.

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 of our immigration czar 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. Right. 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're 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, you know, 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 going to 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

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.

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 longstanding precedent, regardless of what the public thinks. But you get the sense that what Vance really wants is for judges to get out of the way and get to a yes to the Trump administration, regardless of what previous interpretations of a law might be, because that's what he says the American voters want.

I think the context for the vice president's argument is sort of twofold. One, there is a longstanding perspective in American conservatism that judges and Supreme Court justices are too quick to

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 democracy.

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 a

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.

And we will discuss that third track, which happens to be the most controversial track, after the break. We'll be right back. My name is Carlos Prieto, and I'm one of the people that help make The Daily.

As part of our reporting on immigration, we heard from this woman crossing one of the most dangerous stretches of land on the whole planet to get to the United States. I knew that she was from Venezuela, which is where I'm also from. But what I found out is that not only was she from the same city that I grew up in, but she was also from the same neighborhood. She was describing parks and plazas and streets where I spent a lot of my childhood. She was a woman that I might have encountered at some point in my life.

It made me feel an extra responsibility to find a way for our listeners to feel like they understood her and her story. What makes The Daily special is that we try to understand every story with that level of closeness so that our listeners can really connect with the humans in the middle of a news event. If this is the kind of journalism that you like and that you care about, the best way to support it is by subscribing to The New York Times.

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. So the third option, this has obviously been the zone of maximal controversy, right?

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. 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. 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 Act, 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

five million migrants here illegally are in a state of war against the United States? Or is that the claim? No, it's not that five 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 I think 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 of the 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. You know, 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, you know, most of your listeners probably hate, you know, 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. We'll talk about that question in a minute. 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 and that they're motivated by some bad value issue.

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. Yeah.

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 going to see, again, this is, we're very early innings in the court process. And even, you know, some of the worst, capital W worst Supreme Court decisions that have been made on, you know, 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.

Right. Shouldn't this sort of barbaric medieval landscape that you're describing show up in violent crime statistics? 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 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. 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?

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 as I said to him, I think, you know, these are anecdotes. They're not statistical evidence. And as he's describing this case,

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 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 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 U.S. 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? 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 this,

the kind of figures and individuals that you guys have been trying to essentially remand to prison in El Salvador, right? Without, you know, extensive legal process. It just seems like this system is ripe for war on terror style abuses, where you are going to be sending people to prison in El Salvador that advertises itself as a terrible place and

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 happening.

inevitable, even if your intentions are just to bring peace and order to communities along the border or anything else? 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. I don't think I have. No, I'm not. All right. Let's go.

All right. Let me be perfectly honest. I'm not interested in having you trapped. We're having a conversation in Rome as a journalist and a vice president, but also as two Catholics, right? I'm giving you shit, Ross. Trust me. I think it's a totally fair question. I'm interested in what politics does to people. Okay. Okay.

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. And also, I mean...

After that pitch to your soul. And American law. And American law and 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 faith part of it. But the American flag is positioned behind you. Sure. So here's the thing. So.

With a caveat that I'm the vice president of the United States, and I am hardly an expert in every single edge case or every single case that has become a viral sensation 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 taking – 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'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've spent the most time understanding is the one of the, you know, the Maryland father case.

And so here, as we're talking about moral risks, the vice president himself brings up the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. 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. Right. And the vice president wants to go to that controversial, much discussed case, which

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. And how does it, in his mind, vindicate the administration's approach? His argument is that in spite of the attempts by liberalism.

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. 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 in

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 in, 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 mistake

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. 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. 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.

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 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

To El Salvador's prison. The worst of the worst.

The prospect of then saying, and we'd like to send U.S. citizens to that prison would raise some concerns about how the administration uses the immigration powers that you think it should have under arguable wartime conditions. Again, right? 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. That's all, right? So, look, I understand the point, especially as it's, you know, what the president says or what I say is refracted through the lens of an American press that, you know, I have my complaints with. But just what did the president, again, I, you know, I'm going to defend my boss here.

What do you 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. By 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

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. I raised the war on terror parallel in our conversation for a reason.

I think that it is a very 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 its common good, as certainly the George W. Bush administration felt after 9-11, that leads them to set up systems that

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. 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 Salvadoran 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 they're

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. 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. So a couple times in this interview, you've said something to me to the effect of,

You know, I know New York Times readers hate me or I know New York Times readers don't like me and so on. And I want you to explain what you're up to here.

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 news.

Read my column and so on, 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 overlooked.

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 Americans.

in that category, especially who voted for them last November. And you asked the vice president what he would say to that constituency. So then generally, you're going to 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?

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, you know, sometimes, you know, 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, you know, 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 that this sort of feeling of shock is

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.

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. 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 you expect your first 100 days to be aggressive and sometimes chaotic and sometimes experimental and

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 and 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 Democrats

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 sort of pivoted to a kind of diplomatic offensive overseas 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. Good to see you, Ross. It's a pleasure. Well, Ross, thank you very much. You're very welcome, Michael. I really appreciate it. 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.

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, quote,

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 clips, many of them years old, showed South African officials calling for the forceful seizure of land and violence against white farmers. We will never be scared to kill a revolution.

Once the video was over, South Africa's president tried to correct Trump. Let me clarify that because what you saw, the speeches that were being made, one, that is not government policy.

We have a multi-party democracy in South Africa that allows people to express themselves. Our government policy is completely, completely against what

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...

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 Marian Lozano.

and was engineered by Chris Wood and Pat McCusker. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landvork of Wonderly. Special thanks to Annie Rose Strasser, Jordana Hochman, Catherine Sullivan, Andrea Batanzos, Sofia Alvarez-Boyd, Elissa Gutierrez, Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker, Jonah Kessel, Marina King, and Shannon Busta. That's it for The Daily.

I'm Michael Bilboro. See you tomorrow.