When then-candidate Donald Trump announced that he had selected then-Ohio Senator JD Vance as his running mate just a little over a year ago, I wasn’t immediately sold. I liked Vance fine; I just hadn’t seen enough of him at that point to feel confident he had the chops to fill that role.
He’s since proven — to me, at least — that he does. He’s repeatedly demonstrated a firm grasp on the issues and presents as an effective spokesman for the administration. (And, as Andrew Malcolm rightly notes in his Sunday column, is proving to be a solid fundraiser for the GOP as well.)
READ MORE: Trump’s Plan to Set Up Even More GOP Winning
Vance sat down with Maria Bartiromo on “Sunday Morning Futures” and spoke on a wide array of issues. In this first clip, he addressed redistricting and then some of President Trump’s foreign policy aims.
Watch Part 1 of @MariaBartiromo‘s exclusive interview with @VP @JDVance on @SundayFutures discussing the wars in Ukraine & Israel, and the future of redistricting@FoxNews pic.twitter.com/8HUL7DO7z1
— SundayMorningFutures (@SundayFutures) August 10, 2025
In the first portion of that clip, Vance describes what the administration is doing to work with Indiana (and other red states) on the redistricting issue, and lays out in very stark terms why this is necessary, given the machinations of the Democrats in recent decades:
“We spoke with the governor, with the speaker of the House there in Indiana, and the Senate president, and the message I delivered is pretty straightforward: We want a unified Republican team; we want to fight together, win together, make big things happen for the American people — and obviously people the state of Indiana — together. But one of the things that you see in a lot of red states is — blue states have really aggressively gerrymandered, such that they’ve actually made it harder for the majority of the state of Indiana to have their voice heard in their federal elections. Because if California has crazy gerrymanders, Illinois has crazy gerrymanders, New York has crazy gerrymanders, what it does is it actually suppresses the will of the people in states like Indiana.
“And the other thing that we talked about — and I didn’t realize this, Maria, until a couple of years ago — that you know for apportioning representatives, you actually count illegal aliens. So even though illegal aliens, theoretically, are not supposed to vote — we know sometimes they do — you still count illegal aliens for congressional apportionment. So California has way more House seats than it should because they have such a high population of illegal aliens — so they get rewarded for welcoming illegal aliens in their state, giving them federal benefits, actually asking the taxpayers states like Ohio to subsidize them, and then those same taxpayers in Ohio, in Indiana, and elsewhere, they have fewer congressional representatives because of what California has allowed to happen. That’s ridiculously unfair, and the only real way to fight back against it is for us to redistrict in some ways as aggressively as these hard blue states have done.”
Bartiromo then brought up President Trump’s push for a new census and asked about what impact that might have on the GOP makeup and electoral votes. Vance responded:
“Yeah, so, another crazy thing I had no idea about but everybody — even Democrats — actually admit this: that the census in 2020 had a major statistical error, and what that meant is that you actually undercounted a few states that are Republican, like Florida and Ohio; you overcounted some blue states. And so, what I understand: If you actually did the census anew, right now, you would have 10 additional Republican seats and nine fewer Democrat seats. And really, what we’re living with, Maria, is the consequence of 40 years of institutional control of the Democratic Party — these guys have fought very dirty for a very long time. And they haven’t just won elections and enacted laws that we may not agree with; they have tried to rig the game for Democrats and against Republicans.
“And thankfully, under President Trump‘s leadership, you finally see some spine; you finally see some backbone in the Republican Party to fight back against these very aggressive Democratic dirty tricks. But the only way for us to do it is to actually go and do the hard work to reset the scales a little bit. What we want to do is redo the census, but importantly, we want to redistrict some of these red states, and we want to make the congressional apportionment fair in this country again. You cannot do it unless Republicans actually take some very decisive action in the months to come. We think they will, and we’re obviously supporting them every step of the way.”
Bartiromo asked whether that raises the concern that Democrats will simply fight back by further redistricting in blue states like Illinois and New Jersey. But Vance pointed out a critical distinction:
“You know, Maria, there’s just not a whole lot of juice left out of that lemon. The Democrats have already gone as far as they possibly can. Let me give you a crazy statistic: I believe it is in New Jersey, Illinois, New York, California, and there’s one other Democrat state, where you take those five states — you have a large number of Democrat representatives. But here’s the craziest statistic: President Trump won 43 percent of those five states, and Democrats have something like 85 percent of the representatives out of those states. You cannot gerrymander these far-left states anymore — and that’s the whole point: We have unilaterally disarmed the Republican Party. We have said to the Democrats: If you wanna rig the game in your favor in blue states, go ahead, we’re gonna do nothing to fight back against it. That’s crazy. It makes it harder for us to pass our agenda, it makes it harder for us to win elections, and most importantly, it gives Democrats this ability to run roughshod over the country without any pushback from the American people. The democratic system in this country is broken because who you vote for doesn’t necessarily get reflected in who your representatives are. We’re just trying to rebalance the scales and, frankly, push back against a very unfair system created by the Democrats.”
Bartiromo then moved on to foreign policy, and in particular, the Russian-Ukrainian war and upcoming talks aimed at securing an end to it, asking Vance what he expects to come of that.
“Well, first of all, I’ve got to give the president a huge amount of credit here, Maria, because this is a major breakthrough for American diplomacy. If you go back — this has been going on for over three years at this point, well over a million Russians and Ukrainian dead soldiers, and, as the president says, the numbers are probably much higher than the official tally indicates — there has been no substantial breakthrough. And for six months, the president himself — he has asked me, he’s asked Secretary Rubio, of course, Steve Witkoff — we have been aggressively working, trying to break the logjam. One of the most important logjams is that Vladimir Putin said that he would never sit down with Zelensky, the head of Ukraine, and the president has now got that to change. We’re at a point now — we’re now trying to figure out, frankly, scheduling and things like that, around when these three leaders could sit down and discuss an end to this conflict. Now, what do I think is ultimately going to come out of this? Look, it’s actually very simple: If you take where the current line of contact between Russia and Ukraine is, we’re going to try to find some negotiated settlement that the Ukrainians and the Russians can live with — where they can live in relative peace, where the killing stops. It’s not going to make anybody super happy — both the Russians and the Ukrainians, probably, at the end of the day, are going to be unhappy with it. But I don’t think you could actually sit down and have this negotiation absent the leadership of Donald J. Trump. And the president said this to me today privately, he said, ‘Maybe this works out, maybe it doesn’t.’ But it’s worth the effort, it’s worth trying, and we’re going to keep on using the diplomatic influence of the President of the United States to accomplish an end to this conflict.
“And, Maria, you know this, but other other people may not: If you look at the president’s foreign policy accomplishments, if you look at Congo-Rwanda, a war that went on for 30 years, killed six million people; if you look at the number of hostages in Israel — in Gaza — who’ve been released and have gone back to their families; if you look at Malaysia, Cambodia; you look at all of these terrible conflicts. The president has shown a willingness to be the president of peace. It’s a big, big testament to the quality of American leadership. And it’s an amazing thing to have a president who’s working to stop the killing, when you’ve had, for so many generations, presidents who didn’t care about bringing peace to these very conflict-torn regions of the world. It’s something I think all Americans should be proud of, whatever their political party.”
Bartiromo asked about the possibility of Putin and Zelensky meeting before Putin is set to meet with President Trump, but Vance explained why he doesn’t believe that is necessary or will work:
“I actually don’t think it would be that productive. I think fundamentally the President of the United States has to be the one to bring these two together. We’re, of course, going to talk to the Ukrainians — I actually spoke with the Ukrainians this morning. Marco has been talking to them quite a bit. We’re gonna keep that dialogue open, but fundamentally, this is something where the president needs to force President Putin and President Zelensky really to sit down to figure out their differences. We, of course, condemn the invasion that happened. We don’t like that this is where things are. But you’ve gotta make peace here. And the only way to make peace is to sit down and talk. You can’t finger-point; you can’t, you know, wag your finger at somebody and say, ‘You’re wrong, we’re right.’ The way to peace is to have a decisive leader to sit down and force people to come together.”
Bartiromo then asked about Vance’s opposition to continuing to fund the war. He explained his rationale thusly:
“Well, two things on that. First of all, I think the reason that we reached this decisive moment — a real change in where we were — is because the president was willing to apply some significant pressure, and actually say, ‘If you don’t come to the table, the American people, we’re not gonna get involved in this war directly.’ We have a lot of economic points of leverage, and we’re willing to use those to bring about peace, and that was a big thing that happened. To your point about weapons, what we said to the Europeans is simply: First of all, this is in your neck of the woods. This is in your back door. You guys have gotta step up and take a bigger role in this thing. And if you care so much about this conflict, you should be willing to play a more direct and a more substantial way in funding this war yourself. I think the president and I certainly think that America we’re done with the funding of Ukraine war business. We want to bring about a peaceful settlement to this thing. We want to stop the killing. But Americans, I think, are sick of continuing to send their money, their tax dollars, to this particular conflict. But if the Europeans want to step up and actually buy the weapons from American producers, we’re okay with that, but we’re not going to fund it ourselves anymore.”
Lastly, Bartiromo asked about the recent assertion by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that they intend to take control of Gaza and asked if that is the right move. Vance summed up the administration’s stance:
“Well, ultimately, that’s up to Benjamin Netanyahu, obviously. There are a lot of downsides, a lot of upsides to that, but I think fundamentally what we’re trying to accomplish for America’s perspective is: Number one — we want to make this so that Hamas cannot kill innocent people — Israelis, Americans, or anybody else. Number two — we want the hostages to come home. And number three — the president’s been very clear that you do have a humanitarian crisis there, where you have a lot of innocent people who are really struggling, and we want to make sure that the people of Gaza are able to get food, able to get medicine, and so forth. And so we’re trying to accomplish all three of those things. And what the president said is he wants to be, again, the president of peace. He is encouraging, through every diplomatic method possible, a rapid end to the conflict, the hostages get to come home, the people of Gaza get a free flow of humanitarian aid. That’s what we’re working towards, and we’re going to keep on working with our allies in the region to make that happen.
That’s a good deal of information and insight shared by Vance — and that was only the first portion of the interview. What it demonstrates, in my view, is that even with the myriad distractions being thrown its way, this administration remains focused on enacting its agenda, both at home and abroad.
And yes, this is absolutely what I voted for.
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