Vice President JD Vance, introduced warmly by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, addressed what previously would have been described as an unusual group of Republicans.
The pair attended the black-tie gala of the American Compass institute to celebrate the five-year anniversary of the think tank that best encapsulates, and has most advanced, the New Right, a kind of conservatism defined by skepticism of corporate capital, adoration of union labor, wariness of foreign entanglements, a belief in a more muscular America, and an appetite for bigger government.
None of this was Republican orthodoxy a few short years ago, but now the apostates are ascendent.
Vance was interviewed Tuesday by Oren Cass, the former Mitt Romney advisor now despised by the business-friendly Wall Street Journal editorial board, a fact the American Compass founder proudly referenced throughout the evening. From the main stage of the National Building Museum, a center devoted to American architecture, Cass surveyed the movement he helped built.
And the vice president agreed.
“This is a 20-year project to actually get America back to commonsense economic policy,” Vance told a crowd decidedly on the younger side. How should this project, the one the Trump administration is pursuing, be judged? The working-class standard he offered: “I just want normal people who work hard and play by the rules to have a good life.”
What “worries the hell out of” Vance is the fact that life expectancy has dropped in the United States over the last 40 years when at the same time, at least in his estimation, the same sort of people “have been calling the shots.” Read that: a cabal of global elites. They are the ones, these new conservatives complain, who pursued market efficiency overall, even if it meant gutting and offshoring domestic industry at the expense of national interest. “We were governed by complete morons,” said the VP.
Hence the need to move on from some of the old conservative ideas.
Abigail Ball summarized the general idea. Said the executive director of the organization, “This country was built with an understanding that markets are for people, not ends in themselves.” The populism of the last five years, defined by the first and second Trump seasons, represented “a paradigm shift” and “a rediscovery of that core conservative principle.”
It is also a kind of revolution. So said Vance. “I’ve given up hope that we can persuade most of the think-tank intellectuals in Washington, D.C., to change,” he told the crowd. “We can't change them. What we can do is replace them with all of you. And that’s exactly what we aim to do.”
A new kind of elite listened to intellectualized MAGA boilerplate from Vance about the need to achieve fairer trade, reorient higher education to the national interest, and reshore manufacturing. They were the same themes of any Trump rally. But like the president, they are also ascendent in influence across normally crossways interests.
The American Iron and Steel Institute sponsored the event featuring a heavy dose of protectionism. So did the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, a somewhat unusual development considering previous Republican suspicion of labor. The corporate money was similarly ironic; BlackRock, Google, and Walmart all underwrote the evening.
Fresh from a fight with the Wall Street Journal, Vance was the undeniable draw of the evening. Referencing the memory of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in a recent op-ed, the vice president had defended calling the markets “a tool” for government ends, something that more libertarian conservatives find anathema and was music to American Compass ears.
Vance is different than the rest of the political class, Cass previously told RCP. The vice president, he said of his longtime friend, was “a founding member” of the New Right, he said, recalling late-night online debates from before his time in politics. “Vance brings a depth of understanding and eagerness to fight and win on the issues,” he said, “that goes far beyond what you get from a typical politician.”
The same goes for Secretary of State Marco Rubio who pioneered much of the populism that now dominates the GOP. President Trump governs by gut. While in the Senate, Rubio tried to categorize and intellectualize MAGA. He called it “common good conservatism.” He was first, not Vance, a genealogy the diplomat referenced playfully onstage.
Rubio recalled meeting Vance “back when he was only a best-selling author and not even a political figure.” Since joining the administration, his respect for the vice president has only grown, he added, saying that Vance was “doing a phenomenal job” and “my admiration for him has grown tremendously.” The vice president later gushed that “Marco is, if anything, more impressive privately than he is publicly.” More than just niceties, senior administration officials tell RCP that the friendship is genuine.
Unspoken was the fact that there can only be one Republican presidential nominee in 2028. Both men have expressed interest in the job previously. But life after Trump will arrive at some point, and Republicans will have to have answer for what Trumpism means without Trump. Some conservatives, like Ben Shapiro, said that question is akin to saying “What’s compassionate conservatism outside of George W. Bush.” The answer, that conservative once told RCP, was “not much.”
Vance, Rubio, and the ascendent GOP apostates say otherwise.
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