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Congressional Republicans are already used to turning on their social media alerts for Donald Trump. They’ll need to do the same for JD Vance.
When Trump and Vance issued a lengthy statement on Wednesday evening that doomed the party’s short-term government spending deal, it notably did not appear first on Trump’s Truth Social account or come from his official transition team. The Trump-Vance broadside was first posted by Vance on his X account.
The vice president-elect spent the next few hours tending to Capitol Hill, meeting privately with House Speaker Mike Johnson to discuss his and Trump’s problems with the package. Vance was back on the Hill on Thursday, trying to sort out the mess his party had made of a government shutdown deadline that hits Saturday at midnight; he met with Johnson again and then briefed his Senate GOP colleagues on the state of play.
“He told us all the problems that they’re having reaching an agreement,” said Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa.
Vance’s central role in the implosion and rebuilding of the GOP spending plan is particularly striking given that he’s the youngest Republican senator in Congress and still technically one of the most junior lawmakers in the Capitol. But the 40-year-old’s quick ascension goes beyond his status as Trump’s political heir apparent — this week is a signal that he may become the president-elect’s leading emissary on Capitol Hill, too.
“He’s going to be involved in a lot of decisions that the president makes,” Sen. Shelley Moore Capito told Semafor. “It won’t be just ones that are interacting in between the Hill and the White House.”
Trump’s last vice president, Mike Pence, served as Trump’s go-to man in Congress and dined frequently with GOP senators. There’s an expectation among senators that Vance will assume a similar role, but the two men bring far different personas to the job.
Vance is a social media-savvy millennial with a populist bent that often barely resembles Pence’s old-school conservatism. He’s far more aligned ideologically with Trump, and he was doing battle online long before the similarly hyper-connected president-elect added him to the ticket.
In fact, most congressional Republicans found out about Trump’s opposition to the original GOP spending deal by reading Vance’s post.
“I did indeed,” said Sen. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyo., who was not in Congress during Trump’s first term. “From afar, it looked like this was the norm. And here we go.”
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Trump has his own deep ties to lawmakers, formed during his first term and beyond; he’s well-known for directly calling Republicans to lobby them as needed. But Vance still has plenty of opportunities to serve as a conduit between the Hill and the White House.
“You can’t have the president call for everything,” one person close to Vance told Semafor. “JD is a former colleague calling them. It’s a little bit of a softer touch … [Trump] is the hammer. JD is more like a diplomat.”
Republicans don’t seem put off about the fact that Vance, who has only been a senator for two years, will likely be playing a key role in securing party unity to enact Trump’s agenda. Sen. Kevin Cramer, R-N.D., suggested Vance’s position will be a source of pride for fellow senators, noting that it “honors the institution” and “sort of elevates all of us.”
Vance’s connections to the Trump White House’s legislative affairs go beyond the spending deal and his emerging unofficial role. He’s also playing an active part in corralling support for Trump’s Cabinet picks, and the new administration tapped a Vance aide, James Braid, to be Trump’s top legislative point man on Capitol Hill.
Incoming GOP vice chair Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., said both Vance and Braid should meet with the Senate GOP as often as possible to stay on the same page.
Those wishes were manifested Thursday as Vance showed up at Republicans’ private lunch meeting and his shuttling around the building was unmissable. Several senators said that after speaking to House GOP leaders earlier in the day, Vance reviewed their options to get out of the party’s self-inflicted jam before the government runs out of money.
Trump and Vance are both urging Republican lawmakers to take the mid-year breach of the nation’s debt limit off their plate, in addition to quashing months of work by Johnson by asking that the spending bill be slimmed down.
Late Thursday afternoon, Trump and House Republicans were touting a potential breakthrough on a spending and debt limit deal, but big hurdles remain before a shutdown can be averted — including in the Senate.
“The request by President Trump that the debt limit issue be part of this was completely unexpected,” said Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, who is set to chair the chamber’s government spending panel next Congress.
Despite his short time on Capitol Hill, a Vance adviser said the Ohioan has relationships that pre-date his time in office thanks to his popular 2016 memoir “Hillbilly Elegy.” And he’s clearly eager not to be seen as an upstart trying to dictate to senior senators.
“I think it’s how you approach your colleagues, and I don’t think he approaches his colleagues that way,” the Vance adviser said. “He’s willing to do whatever he can to help the administration with its goals, but he’s also able to talk to them on their terms too.”
Shelby and Burgess’ View
Vance will have one of the toughest jobs in Washington, managing Trump’s expectations as well as those of hundreds of congressional Republicans in the House and Senate. He’ll have to carefully balance his relationships with lawmakers against Trump’s own.
As Capito put it: “He’s also going to be very respectful of the fact that he’s not the president and that the president is the final decision-maker.”
He’s more ideologically aligned with Trump than Pence was, which helps. But Elon Musk’s pride in knifing the spending deal even before Trump spoke out illustrates the potential downside of Vance’s prominence in negotiations with Congress.
Getting out too far ahead of Trump is always risky.
Room for Disagreement
Vance’s emergence on the Hill for Trump, despite his relative youth, strikes some of his more senior colleagues as a clearly good thing. Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., aired a sense of relief that the vice president-elect got involved in the negotiations.
“It’s appropriate. Vance has two years in the Senate,” Tillis told Semafor of Vance’s role.
The duo talked Wednesday night about prioritizing disaster assistance to hurricane-hit states, like Tillis’ own.