WASHINGTON — Vice President JD Vance said the first 100 days of the Trump administration were about making changes ‘very quickly,’ but the next 100 days will require Congress and international partners to ‘step up to the plate.’
Vance spoke about the opportunities he sees ahead to ‘juice the economy’ and end the war between Ukraine and Russia during an exclusive interview with Fox News Digital Wednesday — Day 101 of the Trump administration — in his office in the West Wing of the White House.
‘The first 100 days is — you’re almost fixing and addressing all the things that are very easy to do,’ Vance said. ‘I mean, the border crisis is a matter of presidential enforcement. You have a different president. You have different enforcement policies that happen immediately that don’t require an act of Congress. It is just something you can change immediately.
‘A lot of our energy policies are permitting policies,’ he continued. ‘We’re trying to make it easier to build things. Those are things you can change very quickly.’
But Vance cautioned that ‘the next 100 days are going to be a lot of things that don’t change as quickly.’
‘It’s the big, beautiful bill — the reconciliation bill that we think will lead to permanent tax relief for Americans, but also juice the economy a little bit,’ he said. ‘That’s going to be a major focus.’
‘Obviously, we have a lot of foreign policy issues that we’ve been working on that I think are going to come to fruition one way or another over the next 100 days,’ he said. ‘You know, the president made very clear that he doesn’t want Iran to have a bomb. He would like to bring the Russia–Ukraine conflict to a durable solution where you don’t have 5,000 people dying every single week on both sides of that conflict.’
When asked where negotiations stand with regard to Russia and Ukraine, Vance told Fox News Digital ‘the first and necessary step of getting the Russia-Ukraine conflict solved is to get each of them to make a peace proposal.
‘And that’s actually happened. The Ukrainians have said, ‘This is what we want.’ The Russians have said, ‘This is what we want,’ and now the work of diplomacy is to try to sort of bring these two sides closer together,’ Vance said. ‘Because there’s a very big gulf between what the Russians want and what the Ukrainians want.’
Vance said ‘a lot of our European friends who, in public, will say, ‘Well, you know, we didn’t necessarily agree with the president what he said, or what he’s done, or, you know, all parts of his policy.’ They will at the same time say he’s the only person who could have actually forced a peace proposal out of each side because these guys weren’t even talking — not to each other, not to anybody. They were just fighting. That was it.
‘So, we’ve got this first step,’ Vance added. ‘We’ve got the peace proposal out there and issued, and we’re going to work very hard over the next 100 days to try to bring these guys together.’
Meanwhile, the vice president will travel Thursday to Huger, South Carolina, for a factory tour at Nucor Steel Berkeley, one of the largest manufacturers of steel in the United States.
‘The message tomorrow is really just a pro-American manufacturing message,’ Vance said, adding he is going to ‘tie it back to national security.’
‘One of the things that we learned the hard way over the last, you know, 15 to 20 years in this country is that national security is downstream of economic power,’ Vance said. ‘And if there are things that your troops need or things that your critical industries need that they can only get from a hostile adversary, then you’re not nearly as strong as you thought you were.’
Vance said President Donald Trump ‘has really set about rebalancing this in a very fundamental way.’
‘This is, in my view, a once-in-a-generation change, and it was totally necessary. It has to happen,’ Vance said. ‘And we’re going to talk about the things that we’re going to do to facilitate that rebalancing of global trade.’
Vance said that because supply chains of companies ‘are so complicated, the goal is to facilitate them, moving more stuff on shore.’
‘We work with industry,’ Vance continued. ‘The president has an extremely open door, and so when he is persuaded that he has to pursue a particular policy in an effort to facilitate more American manufacturing, that’s what he’s going to do, because that’s the goal. And I think you’re going to see, certainly, that continue over the next 100 days in the same way it has over the first 100 days.
‘So, that’s kind of how I think about it. The first 100 days, you can get a lot done with just the president’s signature on a piece of paper,’ Vance said. ‘The next 100 days are going to be a lot of things where we need Congress, and, in some cases, some of our international partners, to step up to the plate.
‘I have great confidence in Congress. I have some confidence in our international partners. We’ll see how it goes.’