WASHINGTON, D.C. —Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Tuesday night detailed how the America First movement is inspired by pursuing the national interest and empowering everyday Americans.
Vance and Rubio were the special guests for the evening celebrating the fifth anniversary of American Compass — a right-of-center think tank that challenges conventional conservative orthodoxies — and they each delivered remarks explaining how the leadership classes’ failure to deliver for Americans in recent decades motivates the Trump administration’s policy agenda. In a sit-down talk with American Compass founder Oren Cass, Rubio focused his speech on the connections between geopolitics and domestic economic strength. Vance, meanwhile, explained his view that American leaders violated the social contract with millions of Americans.
“I just want normal people who work hard and play by the rules to have a good life. And I think that was very, very possible in the United States of America that I was growing up in, but you started to see some signs that was fraying, and I think it got a lot worse over the course of the nineties and the 2000s,” said Vance. “And that has got to change, and I think that’s fundamentally why Donald Trump is the president of the United States, is because he was the first mainstream American politician to come along and say, ‘This isn’t working. These trade deals are not working for the normal people who power our economy.’”
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Vance argued that American institutions and the American government must return their focus to serving the interests of the millions of people who power the country. Moreover, Vance explained that many of the Washington elites he considers responsible for negative outcomes tend to lack the inherent wisdom and common sense of everyday Americans.
“They’re not hyper-ideological. They’re not reading, like, conservative intellectual periodicals, because they have day jobs and families to take care of, but they’re much, much wiser about these things than intellectuals give them credit for,” Vance said of ordinary Americans. “And I take a lot of inspiration from that, but I also take a lot of willingness to kind of test the outer limits, because most of our fellow Americans, they’re not nearly as dumb as Washington, D.C., assumes they are. They’re actually very smart, and they’re very wise.”
During his time onstage, Vance poked fun at establishment center-right dogma and organizations. His message was generally one that offered a constructive, affirmative case for the America First vision in the years to come. Vance is considered by many to currently be the political heir apparent to the America First movement once President Donald Trump is termed out in 2028.
Rubio himself is considered a political figure with the potential to advance the MAGA movement in the post-Trump world. He angled his remarks to the crowd around the intimate relationship that exists between U.S. foreign policy and America’s ability to produce what it needs for its people to thrive in peace. Like Vance, Rubio considers the last several decades of post-Cold War U.S. policy to have been rife with mistakes that weakened the country because political and business elites lost track of fundamental truths and priorities.
Among other examples like pharmaceutical inputs, Rubio cited China’s dominance of the global rare-earth mineral supply chain as a case study demonstrating that faith in the efficacy of free markets can be misplaced when a trade partner is more interested in achieving geopolitical dominance than they are in maximizing return.
“This is one of the true challenges to a sort of pure free enterprise view of these things. You cannot compete with a nation-state who has decided they’re not interested in making money. They’re not interested in making money in this field, they’re interested, in the short term, in dominating the market, being the sole source provider for the world of a certain product. Because once you establish industry dominance in any one of these fields, you can charge the world whatever you want,” said Rubio. “Now, one thing is if we said, ‘Well, this happened because they’re just better than us.’ But that’s not why it happened. It happened because we literally gave it away. Because we made the decision, we made the policy decision, that it was OK, that we were OK with eighty-something percent of the active ingredients in most of our generic pharmaceuticals coming from another country. We were OK with giving that away. We were OK with giving all kinds of things like that. And now, now, we are in a crunch.”
“You can never be secure as a nation unless you’re able to feed your people, and unless you’re able to make the things that your economy needs in order to function and ultimately to defend yourself,” said Rubio.
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