Vice President JD Vance, reflecting Thursday on his first year in office, said that he disagrees with fellow Republicans who have warned of a rise in antisemitism in their party.
“Judging anybody based on their skin color or immutable characteristics, I think, is fundamentally anti-American and anti-Christian,” Vance said in an interview with NBC News. “I do think it’s important to call this stuff out when I see it. I also, when I talk to young conservatives, I don’t see some simmering antisemitism that’s exploding.”
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, has positioned himself as a potential Vance rival in the 2028 presidential race, raising his profile in part by condemning what he sees as an escalation of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish sentiment. Cruz has singled out young conservatives who pressed Vance with questions about Israel at a recent political event, while also criticizing Tucker Carlson, a Vance ally who hosted a Holocaust denier on his podcast.
“Do I think that the Republican Party is substantially more antisemitic than it was 10 or 15 years ago? Absolutely not,” Vance said. “In any bunch of apples, you have bad people. But my attitude on this is we should be firm in saying antisemitism and racism is wrong. … I think it’s kind of slanderous to say that the Republican Party, the conservative movement, is extremely antisemitic.”
Vance offered the comments — his first on the subject since Cruz began raising it — during an interview inside his West Wing office, wading into an issue that has roiled his party in recent weeks amid a broader focus on antisemitism by the Trump administration.
Sipping from a cup of coffee while a fireplace crackled behind him, he also volunteered the names of three progressives he said he has come to appreciate, for various reasons: Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., and New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani.
And the vice president talked about what he views as key areas of progress and disappointment since he and President Donald Trump were inaugurated in January, including recognizing that voters are “impatient” to see more progress on prices and the economy. Increased deportations and the sharp decline in illegal border crossings, Vance said, stand among the administration’s early victories.
“I think Kristi’s done a good job. I think Stephen Miller, Tom Homan, all these people have done a very good job,” said Vance, referring to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and other officials involved in U.S. border and immigration policy. “That’s where you see the clearest numbers and the most immediate return on all of our time and all of our hard work, and so that’s what I’m proudest of.”
Vance, who has played a role in Middle East diplomacy and efforts to negotiate a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine, said he feels he was most effective this year in helping Trump get his signature “big beautiful bill” through Congress. Vance helped whip support for the legislation and cast the tie-breaking vote to clinch passage of the tax and spending bill in the Senate.
“I spent hours at the Capitol with a bunch of United States senators, late into the night on the first vote, and I frankly didn’t know whether we were going to be able to get it passed, and we did,” Vance said. “And we did because the president was making phone calls, and we did because I was there encouraging people to vote the right way. That’s probably where I see the most tangible connection between the hard work that I did and a good outcome for the American people.”
Asked about his biggest frustration so far as vice president, Vance cited the failure so far to broker a deal to end Russia’s war against Ukraine.
“Oh, man. I mean, look, the Russia-Ukraine thing has been a source of perennial frustration, I think, for the entire White House,” Vance said. “I think that we really thought — and you’ve heard the president say this a million times — that that would be the easiest war to solve. And if you would put, you know, peace in the Middle East as easier to achieve than peace in Eastern Europe, I would have told you you were crazy.”
Vance added that he remained optimistic.
“I do think, for what it’s worth, that we have made a lot of progress, but we’re not yet quite across the finish line there,” he said. “I think there’s hope — should hopefully be some good news the next few weeks on that front.”
The vice president also expressed frustration that prices have not come down as fast as he and Trump promised on the campaign trail last year, while deflecting the blame onto former President Joe Biden. He cited several metrics, including a four-month drop in rent, as signs of better days to come. Trump, meanwhile, has chosen a different message, arguing in recent days that Americans’ affordability concerns are part of a “fake narrative.”
“I think the president certainly understands that prices got way too high,” Vance said when asked about Trump’s remarks. “But I think what the president’s saying is the idea that, 11 months into the administration, that we could solve all of the affordability problems created by Democrats — I mean, that’s the hoax. The hoax is the idea that it’s our fault and not the Democrats’ fault. And I do think that’s a totally bulls— narrative.”
Recent polls have shown Americans are unhappy with Trump’s management of the economy. In an NBC News poll conducted in late October, 63% of registered voters, including 30% of Republicans, said they felt Trump had fallen short of their expectations on the economy.
“I think the voters will ultimately have to make that choice,” Vance said. “I certainly see some of the polling that you’ve seen. But I think that the reason why we have elections every two years and not every year, at least for Congress, thank God, is you’ve got to give a little bit of time for this stuff to work.”
“I think I would certainly say voters are impatient. I think voters have every right to be impatient,” Vance continued. “We are impatient, too, and we’re going to see if what we do and what we think we have to do converges with what the voters think we should be doing.”
Next year’s midterm elections will help answer that question, Vance added.
“We’ll find that out in about a year,” he said, “and we’re just going to keep on working as hard as we can until then.”
The midterms also are a key waypoint for Vance as he weighs a campaign to succeed the term-limited Trump in 2028.
Vance has routinely sidestepped questions about his political future by saying “the politics will sort themselves out” if he and Trump do a good job. He jokingly repeated that talking point when reminded of it Thursday and asked under what circumstances he would not seek the presidency.
“We’re going to find out a lot in the midterms and afterwards — what we got right, what we got wrong, what we could have done better on, what we did very well on,” he said. “I try to not wake up and ever think, ‘What does this mean for my future?’ I always try to think, ‘How can I do a good job right now,’ right? And that’s one of the reasons why I’ve tried to steer away from the 2028 conversation. … I never want the focus on the future to come at the expense of this job.”
Vance steered away again when pressed with the same question that haunted then-Vice President Kamala Harris while running for president last year. Vance and other Republicans ridiculed Harris when, during an appearance on ABC’s “The View,” she said she could not think of anything she would have done differently than Biden. Vance at the time cast it as Harris whiffing on a “softball” question, but he asserted Thursday that it was too soon to lob it at him.
“The president really needs a vice president who is loyal to him and doesn’t use the media to backstab or to set himself up well for 2028,” Vance said. “So what you will never hear me do in this job is attack the president of the United States. Of course, if I run for another office in the future, it’s going to be reasonable for people to ask me, ‘Would you have done this thing? Would you have done that thing?’ And if that time ever comes, let’s have that conversation. But I am never going to attack the president of the United States.”
While Vance said there’s no Democrat who greatly worries him as a potentially strong 2028 presidential contender, he singled out Sanders, Khanna and Mamdani.
“I’ve always been fascinated by Bernie,” Vance said. “I will one day tell you what Bernie said to me, like the second day that I was in the United States Senate. It’s one of the funniest things that I’ve ever heard, and it’s actually a pretty good summary of my politics, but it would probably really hurt me on both the left and the right. If I told you what Bernie told me, it would probably hurt Bernie, too.”
Khanna, Vance noted, has sparred with him on social media. “I think sometimes he’s very annoying, but he also — he occasionally will say something interesting, which is more than I could say for most politicians,” Vance said.
And Vance described Mamdani, the democratic socialist mayor-elect who recently had a friendly Oval Office visit with Trump, as “fascinating.”
“Obviously, I’m not a communist, and I think he is,” Vance added, “but the fact that he focuses so aggressively on the affordability question in New York City, which does have one of the worst affordability crises anywhere in the world, is smart, and he’s at least listening to people.
He continued: “Most politicians, it’s a very low bar, but they don’t even listen to people. I would put Mamdani, Bernie and Ro Khanna in the category of those who, at least sometimes, they are.”