Vice President JD Vance applauded in the front row of the Rose Garden as President Donald Trump announced a massive new round of tariffs on Wednesday – an economy-rattling policy he promised would bring back manufacturing jobs.
But for years before joining Trump’s ticket, Vance argued the opposite.
Between 2016 and 2019, Vance said repeatedly that American manufacturing jobs were lost for good, and that “protectionist” trade policies would do little to bring them back.
Vance’s comments are another example of his transformation from a self-described “Never Trump guy” to a full-fledged MAGA backer in the Senate and on Trump’s ticket, a change he has attributed to seeing the successes of Trump’s policies in his first term.
“Vice President Vance has been crystal clear in his unwavering support for revitalizing the American economy by bringing back manufacturing jobs and sticking up for middle class workers and families since before he launched his U.S. Senate race, and that is a large part of why he was elected to public office in the first place,” said Taylor Van Kirk, spokesperson for the vice president.
Vance is now a key messenger for Trump’s economic agenda as the administration pursues sweeping new protectionists policies announced on what they deemed “Liberation Day.”
“It’s our declaration of economic independence,” Trump said Wednesday. “Jobs and factories will come roaring back into our country, and you see it happening already.”
Starting around 2016, when Vance rose to national fame as the author of “Hillbilly Elegy,” he argued in repeated interviews, speeches and social media posts that automation and technological change were the primary forces reshaping the American economy and said he opposed “hyper protectionists” and their policies.
“So many of these jobs that have disappeared from these areas just aren’t coming back. They haven’t disappeared so much from globalization or from shipping them overseas,” Vance said in a January 2017 interview with Education Week. “They’ve largely disappeared because of automation and because of new technological change.”
Other comments and social media activity from Vance during that time directly took aim at Trump’s trade rhetoric. Shortly after Trump met with manufacturing CEOs in February 2017 and publicly railed against America’s trade deficits, Vance pushed back.
“Can’t be repeated enough: if you’re worried about America’s economic interest, focus more on automation/education than trade protectionism,” Vance wrote.
In December 2016, as then-President-elect Trump visited a Carrier plant in Indiana to tout a deal he claimed would keep manufacturing jobs from moving to Mexico, Vance liked a tweet from Republican Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse that offered a different explanation for job loss.
“Automation—even more than trade—will continue to shrink the number of manufacturing jobs,” Sasse wrote. “This trend is irreversible.”
The like, which CNN saved before X made likes private last year, underscored Vance’s alignment at the time with Republicans who doubted the effectiveness of Trump’s proposals to restore blue-collar jobs through trade pressure alone.
Even when Vance acknowledged that globalization had caused deep harm in some communities, citing research that linked increased exposure to Chinese imports with strain on local labor markets, he argued that those downsides did not justify a sweeping reversal of US trade policy.
“Now does that mean that we should be hyper-protectionists in our approach to trade? I would argue no,” Vance said at an April 2017 event. “But should we be cognizant of the fact that when you have some of those communities that are really exposed to trade, it can very often harm them or at least cause some pretty negative consequences, even as it might cause some positive ones. I think we have to.”
“I do think that trade hasn’t necessarily been in the best interests of a lot of these communities. Now, the question of whether you can go backwards in time, I think the answer is no,” he told a gatheringat the University of Chicago in February 2017.
The long-term solution, Vance argued in December 2016, was to retrain workers.
“The fundamental issue with American jobs and manufacturing right now is not that all of our jobs have gone to Mexico and China, it’s that they’ve been auto–automated. It’s that mechanization has sort of reduced the manufacturing work base,” he said. “There is a solution to that problem. It’s to train people for the next level of jobs, to train people for the 21st century workforce.”
Vance also expressed skepticism about Trump’s promises to revive traditional industries through trade policy, specifically questioning whether legacy jobs like coal and steel could ever return.
“I don’t think that there’s a simple, ‘Let’s bring the coal or steel jobs back,’” Vance said in early 2017. “But I also think that if folks are employed in next generation jobs with dignified work and good wages, that they’re not gonna be angry that Trump didn’t bring back the steel jobs.”
While recognizing the downsides of globalization, Vance also argued it was too late to reverse course while agreeing at the time that fighting over trade was “yesterday’s war.”
“Maybe you could [turn the clock back] a little bit on trade if we were in the ’80s, but we’ve already lost that battle in some ways,” Vance told CNN in February 2017. “The jobs are already gone.”
More recently, Vance has credited Trump’s first term in the White House with broadly shifting his view on his agenda. And Vance’s public statements on globalization were beginning to shift by 2019, just before he has said he fully embraced Trump, voting for him in 2020 and then running the next year for Senate as a Trump-allied Republican. In October 2019, Vance called the view that automation had taken jobs a “bad argument.”
“I’m not an economist, but I can spot a bad argument. And the argument–reproduced ad nauseum in the business press–that manufacturing jobs not keeping pace with output = automation is the main culprit is really bad,” he wrote.
But even in the final half of Trump’s first term, when Vance was more sympathetic to the Trump administration’s arguments on trade, he was not optimistic on the odds of success of protectionist policies.
“FWIW, my guess is the policy may very well fail, especially if Biden is elected president and China’s intransigence is rewarded. I’ve seen some claim that they’re explicitly betting on that fact,” he wrote.
