The news
Republicans in Congress are already accustomed to turning on their social media warnings for Donald Trump. They’ll have to do the same for JD Vance.
When Trump and Vance issued a lengthy statement Wednesday evening dooming the party’s short-term government spending deal, it notably did not appear first on Trump’s Truth Social account or 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, where he met privately with Speaker Mike Johnson to discuss his and Trump’s issues with the package. Vance was back on the Hill Thursday, trying to sort out the mess his party made by the government shutdown deadline that arrived at midnight Saturday; he met with Johnson again and then briefed his GOP colleagues in the Senate on the state of play.
“He told us all the problems they’re having in reaching an agreement,” said Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa.
Vance’s central role in the implosion and rebuilding of the Republican Party’s spending plan is particularly striking considering that he is the youngest Republican senator in Congress and technically still one of the youngest lawmakers in the Capitol. But the 40-year-old’s meteoric rise goes beyond his status as Trump’s political heir apparent — this week signaling that he may also become the president-elect’s top emissary on Capitol Hill.
“He will be involved in some of the decisions that the president makes,” Senator Shelley Moore Capito told Semafor. “It won’t just be those who interact between the Hill and the White House.”
Trump’s last vice president, Mike Pence, was Trump’s go-to person in Congress and regularly dined with Republican senators. There is an expectation among Senators that Vance will play a similar role, but the two men bring very different personalities to the job.
Vance is a social media-savvy millennial with a populist streak that often bears little resemblance to Pence’s old-school conservatism. He is far more aligned ideologically with Trump, and he took the fight online long before the equally hyper-connected president-elect added him to the ticket.
In fact, most Republicans in Congress found out about Trump’s opposition to the original GOP spending deal by reading Vance’s message.
“I did indeed do that,” said Sen. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyo., who was not in Congress during Trump’s first term. “From a distance it looked like this was the norm. And here we go.”
Know more
Trump has his own deep ties with lawmakers, formed during his first term and beyond; he is known for calling Republicans directly to lobby them when necessary. 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 called for everything,” a person close to Vance told Semafor. “JD is a former colleague who calls them. It’s a bit of a softer touch… [Trump] is the hammer. JD is more like a diplomat.”
Republicans appear undeterred by the fact that Vance, who has only been a senator for two years, will likely play a key role in securing party unity to implement 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 “elevates us all.”
Vance’s connections to the Trump White House’s legislative affairs extend beyond the spending deal and his emerging unofficial role. He is also taking an active role in rallying support for Trump’s Cabinet picks, and the new administration has appointed a Vance aide, James Braid, as Trump’s top legislative man on Capitol Hill.
The GOP’s incoming vice chairman, 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 came to fruition Thursday when Vance showed up at the Republicans’ private lunch meeting and his journey back and forth through the building was unmissable. Several senators said that after speaking with Republican Party leaders in the House of Representatives earlier in the day, Vance reviewed their options for getting out of the party’s self-imposed problems before the government runs out of money.
Trump and Vance are both pushing Republican lawmakers to take the debt limit violation off their plate by mid-year, in addition to destroying months of Johnson’s work by calling for spending cuts.
Late Thursday afternoon, Trump and Republicans in the House of Representatives praised a possible breakthrough on a deal on spending and debt limits, but major obstacles remain before a shutdown can be averted – including in the Senate.
“President Trump’s request to make the debt limit issue part of this was completely unexpected,” said Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, who will chair the chamber’s government spending panel next Congress.
Despite his short time on Capitol Hill, an adviser to Vance said the Ohioan has relationships that predate his time in office, thanks to his popular 2016 memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy.” And he clearly doesn’t want 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,” Vance’s adviser said. “He is willing to do whatever he can to help the government achieve its goals, but he can also talk to them on their terms.”
The view of Shelby and Burgess
Vance will have one of the toughest jobs in Washington, managing both Trump’s expectations and those of hundreds of congressional Republicans in the House of Representatives and the Senate. He will have to carefully weigh his relationships with lawmakers against Trump’s.
As Capito put it, “He will also be very respectful of the fact that he is not the president and that the president is the ultimate decision maker.”
He’s more ideologically aligned with Trump than Pence, which helps. But Elon Musk’s pride in undermining the spending deal before Trump spoke out illustrates the potential downside of Vance’s prominent role in negotiations with Congress.
Getting too far ahead of Trump is always risky.
Room for disagreement
Vance’s rise to the Hill for Trump, despite his relative youth, clearly seems like a good thing to some of his senior colleagues. Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., exuded a sense of relief that the newly elected vice president was getting involved in the negotiations.
‘It’s appropriate. Vance served two years in the Senate,” Tillis told Semafor about Vance’s role.
The duo spoke Wednesday evening about prioritizing disaster relief to hurricane-affected states like Tillis.
