Inside a quiet Eisenhower Executive Office Building — as President Donald Trump and other top administration officials were asleep in China — Vice President JD Vance stepped up to a lectern before a room of reporters.
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“I sometimes feel like Macaulay Culkin in ‘Home Alone,’” Vance said Wednesday, comparing himself to the character whose parents neglected to bring him on a family vacation. “I walk in the White House and it’s very quiet and no one’s there, and it takes me a second to realize exactly what’s going on.”
But unlike Culkin in “Home Alone,” Vance was quick to clarify he wasn’t forgotten: Security protocols prevented him from traveling abroad with the president.
He made the most of the time alone in the spotlight as Trump tended to business across the globe. And Vance’s press event — preceded by a flurry of posts from White House-affiliated social media accounts — came at a time his colleague, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, has attracted growing media attention as a potential heir to Trump.
Vance had assembled the press Wednesday to announce the latest action the Trump administration is taking to crack down on suspected Medicaid fraud.
His anti-fraud announcement, made a week after Rubio held a White House press briefing, highlighted Vance’s domestic policy portfolio that the White House is increasingly emphasizing as the war in Iran drags on. And it appeared to be a way to boost Vance’s standing, particularly with Trump’s conservative base, as both men‘s approval ratings have recently fallen.
The press gathered couldn’t resist, however, asking Vance what he thought of running with Rubio on a joint presidential ticket, an idea Trump has continued to float in recent days.
“Agh, man. There are few topics that I want to talk about less than what office I’m going to run for years down the road when I’m having a good time and trying to do good work in the job that the American people already elected me to do,” Vance said, as Mehmet Oz, administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, stood behind him laughing.
Vance was then asked why he thinks Trump keeps quizzing people around him — even in front of the press during a recent White House dinner — about whether his successor should be Vance or Rubio.
“Well, I just don’t think it sounds like the president of the United States to have a televised competition for who would succeed him as his apprentice,” Vance said, tongue in cheek, in a reference to Trump’s former reality show “The Apprentice.”
“It’s natural for him to joke around with us a little bit, to play around with the idea,” he added.
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Vance continues to lead across early polling of potential 2028 Republican presidential candidates, and has maintained, including on Wednesday, that he and Rubio are close friends.
Vance’s news conference, which involved him, Oz and other officials outlining their work to get states to take more responsibility for stopping Medicaid fraud, hardly prompted the rowdy laughter and jokes with reporters that Rubio enjoyed as he filled in for White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt last week.
The vice president’s gathering was about $1.3 billion of Medicaid reimbursements to California being deferred, while all 50 states, Vance said, would have to prove that they’re “aggressively prosecuting Medicaid fraud in their states” to continue to receive federal anti-fraud dollars. For states not cooperating with the audit, he said, additional funds could be withheld.
“This is very personal, because I’m not just the vice president of the United States. I come from a family, and I grew up with a family where we sometimes benefited from these programs,” Vance went on to say.
While Vance has embraced the domestic policy responsibilities Trump gave him earlier this year by naming him to lead a new multidepartment anti-fraud task force, his foray into foreign policy has been more difficult.
Trump tapped Vance to lead the U.S. delegation to Pakistan in April to engage in the highest-level talks to date with Iran. The nearly 20-hour in-person meeting did not produce an agreement to end the war. Vance, who privately advocated against war with Iran, has now spoken little publicly about the ongoing conflict.
On Wednesday, Vance was forced to defend Trump’s comments from a day earlier, when the president said, “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation” as he seeks to negotiate an end to the war. Trump said he was only concerned about preventing Iran from having a nuclear weapon. The war has worsened U.S. inflation and significantly raised energy prices.
Despite Trump reaffirming Tuesday that he meant what he said, Vance argued that Trump hadn’t used those words, and emphasized he agreed with the president’s belief that Iran can’t have a nuclear weapon. But even as Trump on Tuesday maintained that America is “in the golden age right now,” Vance said that he understood many Americans are still feeling economic pain.
“We know that we have a lot of work to do in order to deliver on the prosperity that the American people deserve,” Vance said. “The inflation over the last month was not great,” he continued, after it rose to its highest level in nearly three years, adding that it was still overall better than under President Joe Biden.
“It’s going to take us a little bit of time before we get workers in a position where we feel like we can look them in the eye and say, you are much, much better off,” the vice president went on to say. “But that’s what we’re trying to do.”
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