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.Guest: Ross Douthat, an Opinion columnist and the host of the “Interesting Times” podcast.Background reading: Ross’s conversation with JD Vance.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.Photo: The New York Times 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: What was the context of J.D. Vance's meeting with the Pope?
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.
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Chapter 2: How did Ross Douthat secure the interview with J.D. Vance?
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.
Ha ha ha! 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 endgame 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 jd 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.
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Chapter 3: What are the Catholic Church's views on immigration?
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. You have to be able to hold two ideas in your head at the same time.
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, 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. 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 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 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.
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Chapter 4: What challenges does the Trump administration face with immigration enforcement?
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.
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. 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, 2013, 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.
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 OK, 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?
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Chapter 5: How does J.D. Vance measure the success of immigration policies?
One, there is a longstanding 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.
Thank you.
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.
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Chapter 6: What is the role of the judiciary in immigration policy?
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 – 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.
We'll talk about that. We'll talk about that.
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. 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.
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.
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Chapter 7: What controversial powers is the Trump administration considering for deportation?
Yeah, I think the general administration view is that a lot of the criticisms that they get from critics 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 El Salvador's prison.
And he's also said explicitly he would follow the law and 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 Salvador in 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 going to think about doing this. only in cases of the very, very worst people, number one.
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Chapter 8: How do public safety concerns relate to immigration policy?
The ability to win over a segment of, let's say, 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 missed.
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.
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, 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, 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.
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