WASHINGTON — Vice President JD Vance told Breitbart News exclusively on Tuesday that President Donald Trump is “having the time of his life” as president so far, two weeks into his second term in the White House.
Vance, who sat down with Breitbart News in his West Wing office down the hall from the Oval Office, said Trump is “having the time of his life man” when asked how the president is doing two weeks into the administration. Vance said that Trump has done more in just a couple weeks than former Presidents Joe Biden or Barack Obama did in their full terms.
“I obviously think he’s doing a great job, and I think he’s done more in two weeks than frankly Biden did in four years and Obama did in eight years,” Vance said. “It really is a breakneck pace and that really does flow directly from presidential leadership. He is constantly asking us how many days do we have left? How many weeks do we have left? What have we done today? It’s a constant drive from the top and it’s why I think you see all these great things coming out of the White House. But he is having fun.”
As compared with Trump’s first term in office, where he was constantly under fire from the establishment media and radical left, Vance said this term so far is going much more smoothly. Vance said he did not know Trump personally back then, but from talking to people who did they see a much more free-wheeling president focused on action rather than one in a bunker mentality trying to fight out of defensive positions the opposition put him in.
“I honestly didn’t know him personally at all during the first term—I talked to him a couple of times but I didn’t really know him well,” Vance said. “My sense when you talk to people who have known him for a really long time is he’s having a great time. He’s enjoying himself, and he’s actually I think able to do frankly the hard work of being president but also the fun parts of being president. He really likes doing this job, but last time it was the Russia hoax and it was all of the congressional Democratic efforts to investigate him and then to impeach him. I think he’s actually kind of enjoying it now. One of the things, I’m a big fan of Constitutional history and I’m sure you guys are too, but the founders created in the president of the United States not just a head of government but also a head of state. The president was supposed to be both of those things. So in some ways the president is stronger than a European-style prime minister—not just the leader of the people’s government but also a symbolic head of the nation. I think that symbolic head of the nation stuff, the president’s able to have a little bit more fun with that because the Democrats—while they’re still crazy and still going nuts over USAID and all this other stuff—I think they recognize fundamentally that the American people just don’t buy the argument they have made about Donald Trump and it’s why he was reelected president.”
Vance said the rapid-fire actions from the president and the administration so far—every second the major story seems to change and they are making big moves quickly on what seems like hundreds of fronts—are definitely by design.
“I don’t know that it’s trying to catch the opposition off guard, but one of the things I’ll notice every time we sit in the Oval Office with the president is he’ll say ‘how many weeks do we have left?’ He’s counting down the weeks and thinking okay, we don’t have a lot of time,” Vance said. “Actually, four years is a lot of time in political life but it’s not a long time in real life. There’s a lot of damage that’s been done, but there’s also a lot of opportunity. The president I think sees this as he wants to do as much as he possibly can with every single day. There is an element of, if you go back to the first term, there was a recognition that frankly a lot of congressional Republicans were fighting his agenda as opposed to facilitating his agenda. There was a recognition that even some of the staff members weren’t necessarily on the team, and when you look at the people surrounding the president from Stephen Miller to James Blair to Susie Wiles, we’re trying to make it sort of easy for the president to do what he wants to do in government. When you have the entire team firing on all cylinders you can get a lot done.”
Vance also said this is the new normal and to expect this rapid-fire, breakneck pace to continue for four full years.
“It’s not just a first two weeks thing,” Vance said. “Of course, there are certain things that will necessarily not be the same like for example sitting here ten minutes ago we just found out that Sen. Cassidy is a yes on RFK’s nomination. Todd Young is a yes too on Tulsi, which I think gets Tulsi there. So as you get these people approved there’s just—it’s not like we’re nominating a new Director of National Intelligence every week right? So there’s a natural way in which we’ll transition from a focus on nominations to some of the president’s big legislative priorities. So I think the pace is going to be the same, it’s just the priorities are going to change.”
More from Vance’s first exclusive interview with Breitbart News as vice president from inside the West Wing at the White House is forthcoming soon.
