Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
JD Vance on His Faith and Trump’s Most Controversial Policies
Wed, 21 May 2025
On this episode of “Interesting Times,” Ross Douthat interviews Vice President JD Vance about the Trump administration’s deportations, the tariff backlash and how Vance’s faith influences his politics.01:49 - How faith shapes JD Vance’s politics04:26 - ‘Papal interventions in politics’14:44 - How will the Trump administration measure success on immigration?21:22 - ‘The courts are trying to overturn the will of the American people’23:55 - Are migrants really at war against the US?28:48 - The parallels between the War on Terror and Trump's deportation policies40:29 - What does a successful trade policy look like?48:10 - The "big, beautiful bill"58:57 - Does the Trump administration expect the AI revolution will take jobs?54:05 - What worries Vance about AI58:33 - JD Vance's message to shocked Trump voters(A full transcript of this episode is available on the Times website.) Thoughts? Email us at [email protected]. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Chapter 1: How does JD Vance's faith influence his politics?
How does being either a Catholic or just a Christian shape your politics? In the sense of, just to be specific, what are things that you feel like you believe or care about in politics that are specific to Christianity rather than conservatism, the Republican Party, and so on? How would your worldview be different if you weren't a Catholic Christian?
Well, I think one of the criticisms that I get from the right is that I am insufficiently committed to the capital M market. And I am a capitalist. I believe the market economy is the best way of provisioning goods and services and coordinating people across a very complex society.
But I'm not one of these people who says every intervention in the market, for example, trade, which I'm sure that we'll get into. If you apply a tariff on an import good, there are a lot of people who say, well, that is a violation of some market rule.
I think one of the things that I take from my Christian principles and Catholic social teaching specifically, whether you agree with the specific policies of our administration, is look – The market is a tool, but it is not the end state, is not the purpose of American politics. The purpose of American politics should be to encourage our citizens to live a good life.
And part of that is good, dignified work. Part of that is having a high enough wage that you can support a family. That very much flows through my Catholicism. To be clear, I'm not saying it has to flow. and that the people who don't share my faith can't worry about those things. But that is something very much that I take from Catholic social teaching.
And it certainly influences my views on economics. I mean, obviously, I'm pro-life. I care about the rights of the unborn. That very much flows from my Christian perspective. And there's a lot of stuff, right? When we talk about family policy, you know, we talked about this a little bit with the Holy Father today. But, you know, look,
American society, I think, has become way too hostile to family formation. I think it's probably true across the West. In some ways, maybe the Europeans are even worse off than we are. But Europe and America have been quite bad at supporting families over the last generation. And I think you see that in the fact that fewer people are choosing to start families.
That's something else that I think a lot about because of my faith. So it would be easier to say, what does your faith not cause you to think about? Because...
You know, when you really believe something, and I do believe it, not saying I don't have doubts, I think everybody does, but when you really believe something, it ought to influence how you think about the way that you do your job, the way that you spend time with your wife and your children. It just necessarily informs how I live my life.
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Chapter 2: What are the challenges of immigration policy under the Trump administration?
But your administration, just to push— 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?
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?
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, and I have to be careful here, because some of this information, of course, is classified, but I think I ought to put this point. I think that the courts need to be somewhat deferential
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Chapter 3: How does the Trump administration define success in immigration?
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, So 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, 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.
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. 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 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. Yeah. Right.
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Chapter 4: What is the role of the courts in immigration policy?
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 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 prison.
And he's also said explicitly he would follow the law and he 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.
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 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, you know, I'm going to defend my boss here. What do you say? I'm gonna 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. In a context where the administration is saying, Notwithstanding the Supreme Court's desire that we facilitate the return of someone who was sent there in error, we can't do it.
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Chapter 5: Are migrants really at war against the US?
And if you combine giving domestic consumers more money with making it easier and cheaper to produce in America and more expensive to produce overseas, then that is, in our view, at least a form of industrial policy. There are other things that we're doing. Number two, massive, massive changes to the regulatory regime.
Our biggest belief, or at least mine, I don't want to speak for the president because I haven't talked to him on this issue, but I think his policy is consistent with his perspective is we actually have an industrial policy in this country. The biggest industrial policy that we have is a regulatory regime that is incredibly rewarding to...
software to the world of bits, as Peter Thiel and Tyler Cowen might say, and is incredibly punitive in the world of atoms. We would like to reverse that or at least equalize it. If you look at what we're trying to do on the regulatory regime, we're trying to make it so much easier to produce things in the real world, not just to write code as important as that can be.
That is a form of industrial policy to that point. I think our energy policy is a form of industrial policy because that's the most important cost input, especially for high-value-added manufacturing. And then the final point here, give us some credit here because, you know, what our Secretary of the Army did two weeks ago didn't get a whole lot of headlines, but he's completely right.
rejiggering the Army's procurement process because we see industrial policy. We have a trillion dollar industrial policy at the Department of Defense that's rewarded slow incumbents instead of innovation and technology.
And so we've empowered our service leads in a way that no administration has in a generation to actually spend that money on tech and innovation and developing the next generation of tools. think that's what we're doing.
Is there a legislative vision after the tax bill passes?
You have to bite off so much at a time, Ross. And I think that it's not just a tax bill, of course, it's an immigration bill. There are a lot of other parts of the policy agenda that matter. There's a lot of regulatory relief in this bill. This bill is what we're focused on. Once we get this bill passed, we're going to think about other legislative priorities. But
I would be lying to you if I told you I had some detailed legislation idea for what comes next. The president probably does, but we're focused on, you know, we have to take one step at a time.
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