Vice President JD Vance told Breitbart News exclusively in his West Wing office in the White House on Tuesday that while he’s “superstitious,” he does believe all of President Donald Trump’s cabinet nominations will be confirmed by the U.S. Senate.
Vance’s interview came just as there were several major breakthroughs for the president’s remaining cabinet picks, with key senators announcing support for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary and for former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard for Director of National Intelligence (DNI). Meanwhile, Kash Patel’s nomination for FBI director is moving forward smoothly, as are the remaining Trump Cabinet picks. Vance, of course, also cast the tie-breaking vote in the U.S. Senate as Vice President for now Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth late last month. These breakthroughs have all come after a months-long battle for each to win confirmation, and if these remaining nominees make it, as it appears at this stage they will, they will have weathered some really nasty storms since their nominations were announced by Trump during the transition. Just after this interview on Tuesday morning at the White House, key senate committees voted to advance RFK’s and Gabbard’s nominations and they will be heading to the U.S. Senate floor soon.
“Knock on wood, as you know I’m very superstitious,” Vance told Breitbart News. “Looking at this from sort of the perspective in December at the nominations that we had—we had Kash Patel, we had Tulsi, we had Bobby, we had Hegseth. You had a lot of people where we saw this sort of immune response from the swamp to a lot of these nominations and I definitely thought to myself okay, how many of these guys are we going to be able to get across the finish line, and if you told me we would have been able to get all of them across, I would have been happy. So, it’s been a lot of work. We’ve definitely had to have a lot of I think tough conversations with some of my former Republican colleagues in the Senate. But I think sitting here right now I think we get every single one of our nominations through, which is a really, really big testament frankly to the president’s political influence. I mean, if you had a garden variety Republican president do I think we would have been able to get all of these nominations through? No, I don’t. It’s us working the process, it’s the president’s political influence, and it’s the nominees working hard to get through.”
Establishment and legacy media outlets have been ruthless in their attacks on these Trump nominees, starting with Hegseth and continuing now even with Gabbard, Kennedy, and Patel. Vance told Breitbart News that he believes the reason the legacy media and their allies in the Democratic Party and throughout official Washington have been so brutal in their thus-far failed efforts to tank Trump’s nominees is because these nominees are “change-makers.”
“It’s because they’re people who don’t plan to go along to get along—they actually plan to meaningfully change how the government operates,” Vance said. “If you look at Pete Hegseth, this is a guy who believes, rightly in my opinion, that the Pentagon has become too focused on bureaucrats and too focused on process and not focused enough on giving the warfighter what they need. That includes a procurement process that has become bloated and inefficient. So you’ve got a lot of powerful people and frankly a lot of people who have made a lot of money off of the Pentagon’s brokenness, and Pete Hegseth wants to fix that. If you look at a person like Bobby Kennedy, where obviously he has a lot of non-conventional views and a lot of views about how to solve the chronic disease epidemic in this country that are threatening to a lot of people. So it took a lot of pressure but a lot of good conversation with some of my former Republican colleagues to get them comfortable with Bobby Kennedy at HHS. I think this is just what happens when you have a guy like Trump coming in, and he’s not saying here’s some things we want to tinker around the edges with. He wants to fundamentally transform the people’s government to make it more responsive to the interests of the American people, to make it more responsive to the interests of citizens as opposed to non-citizens, and that is not an easy challenge, and you have some backlash to it, but you work the process and make it happen.”
More from Vance’s first exclusive interview with Breitbart News as Vice President is forthcoming.
