‘Political Athlete’: JD Vance Is Emerging As Most Active VP In Decades

Vice President JD Vance is distinguishing himself as the most active vice president since former Vice President Dick Cheney in the early days of the second Trump presidency, taking charge on matters ranging from finding a deal to save TikTok to castigating European elites and leveraging Senate relationships to help advance key cabinet nominees.

In addition to taking on policy and working behind-the-scenes on Capitol Hill, Vance is aggressively pushing the Trump administration’s interests across the board and defending the Trump agenda as a chief spokesman of the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement. Vance is showing himself to be a visible, committed and versatile enforcer of the Trump agenda with just a few weeks on the job under his belt.

“Vance carries credibility with so many of these senators, and at a minimum, can be a radar for how they’re viewing things and inform the White House in terms of its own legislative strategy. So yeah, he definitely plays multiple parts for Trump,” Scott Jennings, an on-air conservative pundit for CNN, told the Daily Caller news Foundation. “Obviously, communications is public-facing, and there’s also behind-the-scenes legislative strategy. It was a great pick for Trump. And Trump had an embarrassment of riches, I think, when it came to picking this number two slot, but in Vance, they’ve got somebody who can do multiple things and do them well, and has a lot of credibility in numerous venues.”

On the policy front, the vice president is keeping himself busy. For example, Trump tasked Vance to take point on finding a deal to save TikTok in the U.S. and make use of his connections to Silicon Valley and the tech industry to help that process along, sources close to the vice president told the DNCF.

Former President Joe Biden signed the TikTok divest-or-ban bill into law in April 2024 with the help of congressional Republicans who supported the bill out of concern that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) manipulates the platform to serve its own interests and undermine those of the U.S.

Trump attempted to implement a similar policy in his first term, but he later came out against the law on the 2024 campaign trail and signaled he supports finding a way to keep the app accessible in the U.S. under the right conditions.

Given that many China-hawk Republicans in Congress supported banning Chinese-owned TikTok from the U.S. market, Vance could be navigating a somewhat fraught environment as he works to find a satisfactory deal. Trump signed a day-one executive order that paused enforcement of the TikTok law for a 75-day period for a deal to be reached, so Vance will have until early April to settle the issue.

If Vance’s experience helping Trump cabinet picks clear the Senate is any indication, he could leverage his existing relationships on Capitol Hill — forged over the period of two years before Vance hopped aboard the Trump campaign in July 2024 — to find an acceptable resolution to TikTok’s complicated situation.

‘The Most Active Vice President Since Dick Cheney’

Vance played a leading role in assuaging the concerns that holdout Republican Sens. Todd Young of Indiana and Bill Cassidy of Louisiana had about signing off on the since-confirmed Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, the Daily Caller reported on Friday. Vance was able to successfully whip the key votes for two of Trump’s most controversial cabinet picks from the two senators in part because the three men established and maintained good relations through Vance’s time in the Senate. 

Christopher Bedford, senior politics editor and Washington correspondent for Blaze Media, told the DCNF he does not think Gabbard or Kennedy Jr. would have cleared the Senate confirmation process without Vance’s substantial behind-the-scenes efforts. Bedford is the former editor-in-chief of the DCNF and currently sits on its board of directors.

“From everyone I’ve spoken to who spends time with them, they have a legitimate warmth between them, a friendship which gives some cover to be more outspoken,” Bedford said of Vance and the vice president’s relationship with Trump. “He’s been an ideological enforcer, the ‘stick’ part of negotiations with the Senate, but he’s also been the ‘carrot’ part, where he’s at White House meetings past midnight with senators working to get them over the line on different nominations. I strongly suspect that if it was not for JD Vance, you would not have seen Tulsi Gabbard, RFK Jr. or Pete Hegseth confirmed.”

Biden did not make policy news often during his time as vice president, with rare exceptions like coming out in favor of legalizing gay marriage before his boss, Bedford explained, and former Vice President Kamala Harris was not widely considered to be an effective vice president for much of her tenure before she took Biden’s spot atop the presidential ticket in 2024. Compared to the two Democrats and former Vice President Mike Pence, Vance “is the most active vice president since Dick Cheney,” Bedford wrote in a Monday newsletter.

Cheney may not see today’s key policy issues the same way as Vance, but he was indeed a highly active vice president. Cheney is considered — including by his critics — to be one of the most powerful and engaged vice presidents in American history; he influenced policy related to the war on terror, worked to corral his former colleagues on Capitol Hill and played a major role in helping get Bush administration personnel in place, among other important undertakings.

Senators who have seen Vance at work in his new role also describe the vice president as an asset to Trump as he takes on the status quo in D.C.

Republican Wyoming Sen. John Barrasso highlighted Vance’s “strong, personal relationships across the Senate Conference” that make him “a key member of our team” in a statement to the DCNF. In a statement of his own, Republican Indiana Sen. Jim Banks described Vance as “a big strategic asset” to Trump who “believes in the president’s agenda, can articulate it clearly and concisely” and knows how to navigate Capitol Hill.

‘He Suffers No Fools’

Vance has been a fixture on legacy media Sunday news shows since being nominated to be Trump’s vice president in July 2024, consistently sparring with liberal hosts asking aggressive questions about the impacts and causes of Trump administration policy while often rejecting the premises underlying the hosts’ inquiries.

These exchanges have produced many viral moments, including his famous “I don’t really care, Margaret” retort in a discussion with CBS News’ Margaret Brennan about whether an Afghan migrant arrested while planning a terror attack in Oklahoma had been “properly vetted.” 

WATCH: VP Vance SHUTS DOWN CBS reporter on illegal immigration.

BRENNAN: “It wasn’t clear if he was radicalized when he got here…”

VANCE: “I don’t really care, Margaret. I don’t want that person in my country.” pic.twitter.com/swgockPnj6

— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) January 26, 2025

“He is unapologetic. He suffers no fools,” CNN’s Jennings told the DCNF. “That is the sort of pugnacious, in-your-face communication style that I think they greatly value at the White House, and he is not going to shrink in the face of some of this lunacy that Trump faces from the media and from some audiences on a daily basis.”

Vance displayed some of the traits Jennings described to the DCNF during the televised portion of Trump’s first cabinet meeting in the second term on Wednesday. The vice president made a point to push back on media criticisms of the administration for its willingness to negotiate with Russia over the end of the Ukraine war, stating that Trump has not “conceded anything to anyone,” but is instead doing his job as a diplomat by moving to end a bloody war.

“I mean, that’s the value of Vance’s skillset. He is not a shrinking violet. He will stand right up against lunatic questions or misinformed vectors in some of these interviews. And not only does he stand up to it, he sets the record straight,” Jennings said.

While he has proven himself an effective communicator and attack dog for the MAGA agenda within the confines of cable news interviews, Vance has also demonstrated that he can aggressively drive home the administration’s message from behind the podium in longer-form speeches addressing abortion, foreign relations, artificial intelligence and many things in between. He has cemented himself as one of the preeminent spokesmen of the MAGA movement, driving the America First message at home and abroad in high-visibility public appearances.

Perhaps most notably of all his speeches, Vance chided the European and Transatlantic elites gathered before him at the Munich Security Conference earlier in February for refusing to respond to voters’ concerns about mass migration and escalating censorship of alternative views that challenge the European establishment’s consensus. As the crowd sat stone-faced, Vance warned that “the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values” poses a threat to the continent and its longstanding special relationship with the U.S., reminding Europe that its bond with America only works best when the two powers base their relationship in upholding the shared values of the West.

Additionally, Vance ventured to Damascus, Virginia, in January to publicly criticize the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) for its “bureaucratic inadequacy” under former President Joe Biden’s watch as it responded to 2024 hurricanes that decimated huge swaths of Appalachia and the Southeast. Vance then headed to East Palestine, Ohio, to mark the third anniversary of the Norfolk Southern train derailment disaster in that community.

The vice president also extolled the virtues of having children during a major speech at the 52nd March for Life in Washington, D.C., in January and kicked off the 2025 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) this month with remarks on a wide array of policy issues after he drove home the need for America to win the artificial intelligence race at February’s Artificial Intelligence Action Summit in Paris, France.

“He’s a political athlete, and when you’re the head coach, you want to put your best athletes in the game as often as possible,” Jennings said of Vance.