What do you do with a problem like a vice president? The modern conception of the office originated with Vice President Walter Mondale, an inauspicious progenitor, who in a memo to President Jimmy Carter articulated the ambitious notion that the man at Observatory Circle can act as a policy czar, enforcer, and bully-pulpiteer on behalf of the president, who tends to be administratively overcommitted, if not paralyzed. (He was addressing the famously quagmired Carter, after all.)
The Mondalean style of VP has not been an entirely happy affair. Number 2 either tends to exceed his brief—Dick Cheney’s robust activity was a blight on the Bush administration—or to be wholly ineffectual. Kamala Harris, after a hapless turn as “immigration czar” and a variety of public relations embarrassments, including a quiet war with White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain, was sidelined until her unlikely anointment to replace Joe Biden at the top of the ticket. The pathologies seem to fall into two main buckets: a powerful vice president who is not entirely aligned with the White House and operates independently of it, and a weak vice president who is a non-entity or liability.
But maybe Mondale’s active-VP idea can work.
Vice President J.D. Vance has been on a tear. He was in Paris Tuesday for the Artificial Intelligence Action Summit. (“Action summit” is a contradiction in terms if ever we saw one.) The event was notable for other diplomatic happenings—France’s President Emanuel Macron refused to shake hands with India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a striking and ominous show of hostility between the leaders of two nuclear-armed powers, presumably because of the orientation of each towards a third nuclear-armed power, Russia. These were overshadowed by Vance’s plenary address to the European and Asian leaders assembled in gay Paree. He told grandees of the European Union (the world’s “regulatory superpower”) that American economic interests were not the dog to be wagged by the tail of Europe’s will-to-power: “The Trump administration is troubled by reports that some foreign governments are considering tightening screws on U.S. tech companies with international footprints. America cannot and will not accept that, and we think it’s a terrible mistake.”
This speech, it had something for everyone. You want a working-class coalition? Dig it: “We will always center American workers in our AI policy. We refuse to view AI as a purely disruptive technology that will inevitably automate away our labour force. We believe and we will fight for policies that ensure that AI is going to make our workers more productive, and we expect that they will reap the rewards with higher wages, better benefits, and safer and more prosperous communities.”
What about China-hawking? “We will safeguard American AI and chip technologies from theft and misuse, work with our allies and partners to strengthen and extend these protections, and close pathways to adversaries attaining AI capabilities that threaten all of our people. And I would also remind our international friends here today that partnering with such regimes, it never pays off in the long term.”
Or is civil libertarianism your hat? “The Trump administration will ensure that AI systems developed in America are free from ideological bias and never restrict our citizens’ right to free speech. We can trust our people to think, to consume information, to develop their own ideas, and to debate with one another in the open marketplace of ideas.”
Hitting so many of this administration’s messaging notes while giving a speech on such an abstruse topic as AI shows that, if nothing else, the vice president can wrangle an impressive speechwriting staff; none of Kamala Harris’s chronic embarrassments here. He is now off to Munich, where he will join Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, and President Donald Trump’s Ukraine envoy, Keith Kellogg, in a powwow with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky about the prospects for wrapping up the war with Russia. (Will this columnist’s prediction of a Ukraine peace in 2025 come true? Stay tuned.)
Vance, the Global War on Terror veteran, Hillbilly Elegy memoirist, and Peter Thiel alumnus, represents in one man the new fusion of populist and tech-industrialist interests that makes the Trump coalition. He also seems to be an actually effective vice president, which almost seems an oxymoron. When Fox News’ Bret Baier asked Trump in a Sunday interview whether Vance is the dauphin for 2028, the president deferred the question. “No, but he’s very capable. I think you have a lot of very capable people. So far I think he’s doing a fantastic job. It’s too early, we’re just starting,” he said. Quite rightly, too—a lot can happen in three weeks, let alone four years. And Trump is not known for sharing the limelight. But if not Vance, who?
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