VP Vance Defends Trump: ‘Necessary Tool to Protect Our Jobs’
Vice President JD Vance expressed strong backing for President Donald Trump’s trade policies this week, emphasizing their long-term benefits for the United States.
Speaking at the American Dynamism Summit, Vance criticized globalism and the outsourcing of American manufacturing jobs.
“But first, President Trump is starting with and is dead serious about rearranging our trade and tariff regime internationally. It must happen. We believe that tariffs are a necessary tool to protect our jobs and our industries from other countries, as well as the labor value of our workers in a globalized market. In fact, combined with the right technology, they allow us to bring jobs back to the United States of America and create the jobs of the future,” Vance asserted.
He pointed to the auto industry as a prime example of how tariffs can help revitalize domestic production. “Just look in the past few months at the auto industry as an important example. When you erect a tariff wall around a critical industry like auto manufacturing, and you combine that with advanced robotics and lower energy costs and other tools that increase the productivity of you as labor, you give American workers a multiplying effect. Now that, in turn, allows firms to make things here at a price-competitive basis,” he explained.
“Our president gets that, which is why last month we posted 9,000 new auto jobs after many many years of stagnation or even decline in the auto sector. It’s why, just weeks in, we already have new plant or production announcements from Honda, from Hyundai and Stellantis worth billions of dollars and thousands of additional jobs on top the ones that were already created,” he continued.
Vance urged both technology advocates and populists to avoid conflating globalization’s shortcomings with a lack of innovation. “I’d ask my friends both on the tech optimist side and on the populist side not to see the failure of the logic of globalization as a failure of innovation. Indeed, I’d say that globalization’s hunger for cheap labor is a problem precisely because it’s been bad for innovation. Both our working people, our populists, and our innovators gathered here today have the same enemy, and the solution, I believe, is American innovation, because in the long run it’s technology that increases the value of labor.”
“Innovations like the American system and the interchangeable parts revolution it sparked or Ford’s moving assembly line that skyrocketed the productivity of our workers — that’s how American industry became the envy of the world. And that’s what I really want to talk about today, why innovation is key to winning the worldwide manufacturing competition, to giving our workers a fair deal and to reclaiming our heritage via America’s great industrial come back, and I believe that’s what we’re on the cusp of, a great American industrial come back,” he concluded.
Earlier this month, the Republican-led House voted to prevent Congress from swiftly challenging tariffs imposed by Trump.
The 216-214 vote, largely along party lines, delays lawmakers' ability to force a vote to revoke Trump’s tariffs and immigration actions for the remainder of the year.
Since assuming office, Trump has introduced a series of tariffs that have strained relations with major trade partners like Mexico and China. This week, he intensified a trade conflict with Canada—moves that have unsettled markets and led business leaders to caution against weakening consumer demand.
Trump has defended the tariffs, stating they aim to correct trade imbalances, bring jobs back to the U.S., and curb the inflow of illegal drugs from abroad, according to Reuters.
The vote effectively stalled efforts to challenge his tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico.
“Every House Republican who voted for this measure is voting to give Trump expanded powers to raise taxes on American households through tariffs with full knowledge of how he is using those powers, and every Republican will own the economic consequences of that vote,” Representatives Suzan DelBene and Don Beyer, both Democrats, stated.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) defended the decision, saying, “This is an appropriate balance of powers and we trust this White House to do the right thing, and I think that was the right vote and it was reflected in the vote count,” when asked by Reuters about granting more trade authority to the Executive Branch.