Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Tuesday night detailed how the America First movement is inspired by pursuing the national interest and empowering everyday Americans.
Vance and Rubio were the special guests for the evening celebrating the fifth anniversary of American Compass — a right-of-center think tank that challenges conventional conservative orthodoxies — and they each delivered remarks explaining how the leadership classes’ failure to deliver for Americans in recent decades motivates the Trump administration’s policy agenda. In a sit-down talk with American Compass founder Oren Cass, Rubio focused his speech on the connections between geopolitics and domestic economic strength. Vance, meanwhile, explained his view that American leaders violated the social contract with millions of Americans.
“I just want normal people who work hard and play by the rules to have a good life. And I think that was very, very possible in the United States of America that I was growing up in, but you started to see some signs that was fraying, and I think it got a lot worse over the course of the nineties and the 2000s,” said Vance. “And that has got to change, and I think that’s fundamentally why Donald Trump is the president of the United States, is because he was the first mainstream American politician to come along and say, ‘This isn’t working. These trade deals are not working for the normal people who power our economy.’”
Vance argued that American institutions and the American government must return their focus to serving the interests of the millions of people who power the country. Moreover, Vance explained that many of the Washington elites he considers responsible for negative outcomes tend to lack the inherent wisdom and common sense of everyday Americans.
“They’re not hyper-ideological. They’re not reading, like, conservative intellectual periodicals, because they have day jobs and families to take care of, but they’re much, much wiser about these things than intellectuals give them credit for,” Vance said of ordinary Americans. “And I take a lot of inspiration from that, but I also take a lot of willingness to kind of test the outer limits, because most of our fellow Americans, they’re not nearly as dumb as Washington, D.C., assumes they are. They’re actually very smart, and they’re very wise.”
During his time onstage, Vance poked fun at establishment center-right dogma and organizations. His message was generally one that offered a constructive, affirmative case for the America First vision in the years to come. Vance is considered by many to currently be the political heir apparent to the America First movement once President Donald Trump is termed out in 2028.