Vice President JD Vance said the United States was “governed by complete morons” before President Donald Trump took office at a Tuesday night event during which he previewed the administration’s economic vision.
“If I on Jan. 21 — in fact I did ask this question — ‘where are the biggest deficiencies in our supply chains? What are the 100 products that we’re completely reliant on some other entity to make for us?’” Vance said in a conversation with American Compass founder Oren Cass.
He continued by saying the answer was “we don’t know” because the prior administration didn’t ask.
“What was so crazy about the hyper-globalized era is that you had these basic questions about the brittleness of our supply chains that were completely uninvestigated by the very people who supported globalizing those supply chains,” he said. “We were actually governed by complete morons, and we didn’t even realize it until the Trump administration started to get underneath the hood.”
"You had these basic questions about the brittleness of our supply chains that were completely uninvestigated by the very people who supported globalizing those supply chains," says @VP.
"We were actually governed by complete morons." pic.twitter.com/rqvU4RupCr
— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) June 4, 2025
Vance made the remarks at a fifth anniversary event for American Compass, a Washington think tank with just 12 employees that counts Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio among its biggest fans.
Held at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., the gala featured Vance and Rubio as key speakers. Both outlined how economic thinking on the Right has changed since American Compass was founded five years ago.
Rubio shared the story of growing up in the 1980s amid the threat of nuclear war with the Soviet Union and the effect it had when that threat vanished in 1991.
“Literally the entire world was transformed before my very eyes,” Rubio said. “We believed the Cold War was over, we won, and now the entire world was going to be just like us.”
That hasn’t happened, both men agreed, and now the U.S. must focus on rebuilding its manufacturing base to shore up national security and to provide better employment for more workers.
The federal government’s focus for years was on what would be best for the global economy, according to Rubio, which has now changed under Trump’s “America First” policy.
“The number one foreign policy of the United States needs to be the United States and what’s in the best interests of the United States,” he said, saying that reversing course will be one of the great challenges of the 21st century. “This is going to be the work of a generation.”
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Vance, in a conversation with Cass, focused more on the domestic effects of the project.
“I just want normal people who work hard and play by the rules to have a good life,” he said.
He credited Trump with being the first politician of the post-Cold War era to realize that globalization was not working well for most people. He credited the American electorate with knowing better than D.C.-based economists on what would be suitable for them.
"I just want normal people who work hard and play by the rules to have a good life," says @VP.
"That's fundamentally why Donald Trump is the President … He was the first mainstream American politician to come along and say, 'This isn't working.'" pic.twitter.com/vpjmlgXawO
— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) June 4, 2025
Hitting on themes that have become common for him, Vance said the places that make products tend to become good at designing them, making the case that more things need to be built in the U.S.
However, he predicted that getting the country back to a commonsense economic policy will be a 20-year project.
“That’s fundamentally why Donald Trump is the President of the United States. He was the first mainstream American politician to come along and say, ‘This isn’t working,’” Vance said. “These trade deals are not working for the normal people who power our economy … I think the best way to summarize it is we just want normal people to have a good life.”
