Remarks: JD Vance Speaks at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library in California - June 25, 2026

Ladies and gentlemen, let's hear it again for the vice president of the United States.

Thank you.

And thank you, Robert. Mr. Vice President, welcome to the Nixon Library. It is an honor to have you here. Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith is your second book, and it has reached number one on the New York Times bestseller list, so congratulations.

Thank you. A few weeks ago, some reporter asked me what was the difference between me and Gavin Newsom as political figures, and -- [Laughter] -- one of the things I can now say is that people actually bought my book and not his. [Laughter]

And your book is incredibly candid. It's very introspective and it is largely devoid of politics. Uh, instead, you focus on faith and there are a few things more personal than someone's faith you take us through the arc of losing and rediscovering your faith, so let's jump into it. You talk about the beginnings of your crisis of faith in the earliest pages of this book.

There are a few seminal moments when you were a boy, your faith was shaken. Most notably, involving your grandmother, who you write, quote, hardly fits the stereotype of a sweater-knitting kindly old grandmother. She loved to say the F-word, and when she died, she owned 19 loaded handguns.

Correct.

But she lost her health care and then her ultimate passing helped lead you to a crisis. Let's start there. Talk about that.

Sure. So, you know, my grandmother was, in many ways, not a stereotypical grandmother. And, you know, she did have 19 loaded handguns when she died. And I remember, when my aunt and I and my sister were going through her things after she had passed away, we would find loaded revolvers all around the house, you know, in like the knife drawer and in her dresser and her wardrobe.

And we sort of were trying to think about why she had guns stashed everywhere. And we realized it was because Mamaw was a particularly -- well, let's just say she believed in the Second Amendment and she believed in the right of self-defense. And so she didn't get around that well towards the end of her life, and so she made sure that no matter where she was, if somebody walked in her door, she would have a loaded revolver within arm's reach.

And that was the kind of woman that she was. And she cussed very -- she cussed a lot. I mean, I -- you know, there are so many stories I could tell about the ways in which her language was passed on to me. And my wife, who grew up in a very middle-class Southern California family, you know, there are times where she'll be like, you can't say those things around our 9-year-old, our 6-year-old, our 4-year-old, because they repeat them.

Like, for example, I'll tell you a story that one of the earliest flights that I had after I got elected to the Senate, I was flying back from, um, from Cincinnati to DC. And because my kids were so young at the time, like sometimes I would just take a kid with me and hang out with me in DC. And that was one of the ways I made sure, you know, I stayed connected to my kids.

We eventually moved the whole family to Washington, but for those first six months, I would only see my kids on weekends and so I'd bring them to DC. And I remember I was on a plane, on a Delta flight from CVG to Washington Reagan airport and my son drops one of those Delta Biscoff cookies between his seat.

And he looks at me and he goes, well, shit. And I -- I like had this moment of sort of panic because I realized everybody around -- I mean, think about it, a flight from Cincinnati to DC, literally, every person knows that I'm a United States Senator, and also that I am apparently a terrible father because I've raised my kids, my 3-year-old, to use that language.

But anyway, that's the weave; we'll get back to the question. But there's -- the thing is, despite the fact that she was very non-conventional, in a lot of ways, my grandmother was a person of very deep religious faith. And so when she died, I'll never forget this, and I still get a little bit emotional when I think about it. She had this practice where she had a little notebook and she would say prayers and write her prayers down when she said them for each member of her family.

And so you could actually see this almost as a diary of her conversations with God through the months or even through the years, where, you know, she'd pray for my safety or she'd pray for my strength, or she'd pray, you know, that something would go right in my sister's life and you just realize that this was a woman who was constantly talking to God, despite the fact that her religion is what you might call un-churched.

She was -- she loved the Lord. She believed in Jesus Christ. She also didn't go to church that often. And looking back, I think one of the things that I realized about my own faith is that I was attached to Christianity via my grandmother. She was the anchor. She was the person who taught me about God. She was the person who constantly was encouraging me to think about God. She was the person who was encouraging me to read the Bible and to pray.

And because I didn't have a great church community myself, you know, I would bounce around to various churches. Sometimes we'd go once a month, sometimes less than that. When my grandmother died, just a couple of months before I left for Iraq in 2005, I sort of lost my faith. And I think there was a -- there was a sort of lesson in there for me, you know, and I'm sure we'll talk about this, but I came back to my faith.

And part of the thing I was trying to think through with this book is, why is it that kids who are raised in the faith fall away from it? I think most of us in this audience are probably people of faith. We raise our children to be Christians. I take my kids to church every Sunday, you know, even when they're misbehaving and they don't want to go. And I'm thinking to myself as I'm writing this book, what makes it take and what makes it not take?

Why do some kids who are raised in the faith have this very, very strong connection to Christ, whereas some kids, it just doesn't ever really take root? And that's one of the things I was trying to think of. And, you know, one of the answers I came up with myself is while it's very important to have a parent or a grandparent or somebody who raises you in your faith, I think that if that's it, if your only connection to faith is a loved one rather than something deeper and broader, then your faith is always going to be at risk, like mine was, when that person passes away.

And so that is definitely like one of the things that I write about and one of the things that motivated me to write the book in the first place.

Well, that's kind of where this debate, which you write about, between reason and science, right, versus the mystery of faith. And you say that this is playing out on Reddit threads. And, you know, we've all heard those theological debates and you're having these debates with yourself.

Sure.

So you then begin classifying yourself as an atheist. And you write, quote, I was severing myself from my roots. How and why did that happen?

Yeah. So, you know, I grew up in a working-class family in southwestern Ohio. And to lose my faith when I was, you know, 21 years old, 22 years old, so I'm in the Marine Corps, I go to Iraq, by the time that I leave the Marines, this would have been 2007, I was now calling myself an atheist. And to do that was -- it was this very sad thing, in some ways, because I was disconnecting myself from the family that made me who I was, right?

To sort of say that I wasn't a Christian anymore, was to say that I wasn't connected to my grandmother anymore, because that was one of the most important things to her. I would say it was the most important thing to her. And so there was a certain amount of tragedy there, but there also was a certain amount of arrogance.

And I think that a lot of us have went through this phase, and I certainly did, where you start to think that you know everything. And one of the ways that that reflected itself in me, is that I just assumed that anybody who had faith, anybody who was a person of deep religious roots was superstitious. And I started to think of myself as I was motivated by reason, and I was motivated by smarts.

And I was motivated by, you know, honest and open debate. And the people who believe that Jesus Christ was the Son of God, like my grandmother, yeah, it was kind of tragic that I didn't share that belief with her, but one of the ways that I expressed it was she's superstitious, she was a simpleton. And that arrogance that came from rejecting my faith, frankly, made me a much worse person.

And it made me much more open to ideas that were -- that were far crazier and far more radical than anything that I had rejected when I was a Christian. And that was one of the things that I kind of realized, is, you know, G.K. Chesterton once said that when people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing, they believe in anything.

And there was something really profound about that, because what I saw around me was a bunch of people who saw themselves as hyper rational, as motivated by science, as motivated by reason. But in reality, having discarded faith, they just adopted a whole new set of ideas that I think was, frankly, a lot crazier than anything that I had derided as superstition or as simple when I was a kid.

And that, you know, that was an interesting realization for me, that you become an atheist, in part because you assume that you're smarter than everybody else and then you realize that the people who assume that they're smarter than everybody else believe some very stupid things.

Well, that's certainly true. But during this time, you start to read CS Lewis.

I do.

And you write that you wish that God was more like Aslan from The Chronicles of Narnia. What did you mean by that? And what are you learning? What are you taking away from CS Lewis?

Well, one of the things that -- you know, I think all of us come to God in our own ways and some of us, it's through a loved one, some of us it's through a relative, some of us, it's because we belong to a church that's very meaningful to us. I think one of the ways that I always engage with my faith and was certainly true then, you know, and is definitely true now, is through ideas, is the idea that there was some truth built into the Christian faith that maybe I discarded, but was very profound and very moving, and could motivate people to do amazing and inspiring and courageous things.

But I was definitely interested in the intellectual elements of Christianity. And what CS Lewis did for me and what, you know, I talk about in the book about being, you know, really, really attracted to this Aslan figure in a child's book and encountering God in a children's book in a way that I had never encountered God when I was being raised by my grandmother in southwestern Ohio.

And what I meant by that is that there were all of these things, you know, that Aslan would say, that I later found out were basically just CS Lewis copying from the Bible and putting them in his books. I mean, it was fundamentally, if you don't know the back story of the CS Lewis's novels, what he was trying to do was imagine, what would Jesus Christ look like in the context of a children's novel?

That's who Aslan is. It's not a metaphor or an allegory of Christ. He's actually trying to say, this is what Christ would look like, would sound like were he in this, you know, very rich children's novel that he wrote. And what I found so compelling about it is that, you know, there was something deeply smart about CS Lewis's is Christianity.

And I think, by the way, that led me astray in some ways. And what I mean is there was a part -- there was a point in my life where my faith was very much of the head, but not of the heart. And so I think you can overthink these things. You can overintellectualize these things. But the way that God sort of started to pull me back in is I realized that there were a lot of really interesting ideas at the core of Christian philosophy and at the core of Christian theology, that I had cast aside, but were far richer than what I'd realized.

And that kind of -- again, that was the hook. That started to draw me back in. And there were other hooks, of course, but that was a very, very important hook for me, realizing as a kid who thought of himself as very smart and very rational, realizing that there was a brilliance to the Christian faith, there was an insight into the Christian faith that I had never really taken seriously, but was very much there.

And as you are getting reeled back in, you write that it was a Catholic saint that provided the first proverbial crack in my atheist armor. Who was that? What were the circumstances?

Well, so when I got baptized in, I guess, 2019, I took the name of Saint Augustine, because there was -- there were a couple of things that I had read when I, again, was in this sort of arrogant atheist phase. And I look back on it now and I think to myself, I'm kind of embarrassed by it. I'm -- I cringe when I think of the things that I said back then.

That's one of the great things about being a millennial as opposed to a Zoomer. All -- most of the stupid stuff that I've said is not on the internet, right? Like, I feel bad for the teenagers out there that a lot of the stupid stuff you say, guys, unfortunately, it's going to live forever. But, you know, for me, most of it was just, you know, the cringey stuff that I said was -- was interacting with my friends and talking to professors and classmates and so forth.

But, you know, Saint Augustine, first of all, there was this book that I read in a philosophy course that I took at Ohio State, right? So I'm an undergrad. It's called the City of God. And again, going back to this idea that the Christian canon, the set of ideas that laid the foundation for the Christian religion, that it was way more interesting and way smarter than anything else that I had ever been exposed to, that was very, very important for me but there were also things that Saint Augustine said where he would talk about the importance of humility and that certain ideas that maybe I had adopted when I was a Christian were actually my pathway to discarding my Christian faith.

And, you know, for example, like, I remember when I was a teenager and I would go on, like, online messaging chats and argue with scientists about this or that scientific question and how this was incompatible with the Christian faith or that was incompatible with the Christian faith. And there is actually, and I don't have the quote right in front of me, but there's this quote from Saint Augustine, literally 1,700 years old, 1,600 years old, where he talks about assuming that you're smarter than other people and taking what you believe and assigning it as Christian doctrine is actually discrediting Christian doctrine.

Because, you know, who are you to go out there as a teenager and argue with people and assume that you know more about the Christian faith than everybody else, and you're going to try to whack people over the head with the truth of the Christian faith. And having a little bit of humility and accepting that something that you assume is unchristian, maybe a Christian thinker, like Saint Augustine said 1,700 years ago, was not totally consistent.

There was this way where it sort of forced me to say, OK, I discarded a Christian faith that I had, but maybe it was a very simple Christian faith, and maybe it was a very arrogant Christian faith. And maybe the thing that I had discarded was actually arrogance. It wasn't the truth of Christianity, but it was my own arrogance and my own sense that I knew things more than other people.

Sort of keying off of that, you titled a chapter, More Money, More Problems. Why does more money sometimes cause more problems?

Well, again, I'm a millennial and so I believe that's the wisdom of the great Christian theologian, P-Diddy. [Laughter] -- who, as we found out over the last couple of years, is very much not a Christian or a theologian, but -- [Laughter] Uh, see, I'm going to get in trouble for all kinds of things. That'll be one of them.

That will be an attack ad at some point in the future. But what -- what I -- OK. So, again, to set the stage here, I was a Christian then I wasn't. And I was arrogant, and I assumed that I knew everything and I assumed that the faith of my grandmother was based on superstition. I was very arrogant about what I thought I knew.

So what -- I think all of us in our lives were searching for something, we're orienting our lives around something. And, for me, the thing that I started to orient my life around was status, was prestige, was money, was getting ahead. And, by the way, there's a legitimate basis for that impulse. Like, it's not bad if you grow up in a working-class family, to want to be able to provide your kids things that you didn't have, or to want to be able to provide your children stability that you didn't enjoy.

Those things are all totally reasonable. But I turned it almost into an obsession. I turned it into an idol. I started to care so much about where I went to school and what my credentials were, that I started to focus less on the things that actually mattered. And I realized, I mean, that probably came from somewhere deep in me. I tend to think that both our virtues and our vices are programed a little bit from the very beginning.

But I recognize that I'd become a striver. I'd become a person who cared about success, not because I was trying to achieve something important, but because I wanted to be better than other people, and that was a fundamental flaw in my character. And then something kind of crazy happened. I won the game.

I won the competition of life. I got into Yale Law School. Nobody in my family had ever known anybody who had gotten into an institution like that. And so I'm at this school and I notice a couple of things. The first thing that I notice is that in this institution where I assume that everybody is super smart and super rational, these are the best and the brightest, something kind of crazy happened.

I noticed that a lot of them had some pretty crazy ideas of their own, and that if I had dismissed the Christians in my life as being simpletons, there were things that my classmates at Yale Law School believed that were pretty crazy, like, for example, men should play in women's sports. But -- but there was a certain intellectual arrogance there.

OK? Even though most of my classmates were good people and I liked a lot of them and we're still very good friends, there was a sense that I realized that these people had beliefs that were as religious and as orthodox as anything I had ever experienced in the Christian family that raised me, but these people didn't root it in faith, they rooted it in the idea that they were smarter than everybody else.

And I realized that was dangerous. But then there was something much more personal and, frankly, much more important that happened, which is that I fell in love. And so the woman who is now the second lady of the United States and 36 weeks pregnant with baby number four, um -- Thank you.

Congratulations.

So I fall in love with this girl, and I realize she doesn't care, really, about how much money I make or what my status is. She doesn't care about whether I become vice president of the United States. She just wants the things that are good out of life. She wants to have a nice family. She wants to have a bunch of babies, and she wants to build a life with somebody that she loves that is -- that is rooted in the things that matter.

And it kind of hit me, all of the things that I've been orienting towards, all the things I've been focused on, the striving and the obsession with credentials, she doesn't care about that. She cares about whether I'm a good person. And I hadn't built my life to be a good person. I built my life to get ahead.

And the more that I started to think, how do you build your life to be a good person, to be the kind of man this woman wants me to be, it sort of hit me that that Christianity that I had discarded as a superstition was actually much wiser and much truer than what I discarded.

So you devote much of the second half of Communion to exactly that, your family.

That's right.

Uh, how you raise your children, their continued important roles in your life and along your faith journey. You write that you want to teach your sons to be virtuous men. What is it like to be both Vice President and a young father raising virtuous children simultaneously?

Well, they're not virtuous yet, I'll tell you. They're very sweet kids, they're very good kids. Uh, we're working on the virtue part. I mean, so one thing -- you know, like, one thing I love about American Christianity is that it's very dynamic. You know, you have Catholics and evangelicals arguing about this or that doctrinal question, and you have the mainline churches and you have the Orthodox Church.

You just have this very interesting, very dynamic hodgepodge. But I think it's actually -- I love it because I think it leads to a lot of interesting conversations. I had so much -- so many interesting conversations with people of different denominations. And one of the differences between the evangelical church that I grew up in and the Catholic church that we take our kids to now, and, you know, I'm a baptized Catholic, is, most of the time, Catholic churches encourage you to take your family into the mass with you.

That's a very big difference. When I was a kid, you would drop your kids off -- the little kids off at the youth group, and then you'd go into the main congregation with everybody else. Now, there are downsides to this, right, because we've got a 9-year-old, a 6-year-old and a 4-year-old. And so sometimes, you know, my like 6-year-old is blabbering on about Dog Man, which is these comic books that little kids are really into, while the priest is saying, like the most important part.

And -- and the thing that I realized is that the ritual of going to church is a very, very good thing for our family. And that's one of the things -- we talk about inculcating virtue, OK, one of the most important virtues for kids to learn is they have to learn when it's appropriate to speak or not to speak, or when it's appropriate to sort of interrupt or not to interrupt, and they're just -- but there's something also, you know, where I'll notice.

I'll look at my 9-year-old and sometimes he's daydreaming when the homily is being said, but then sometimes he's actually thinking, oh, that's really interesting, or, oh, because Christ sacrificed himself for us, maybe I should be a little bit more patient with my 6-year-old little brother who wants to steal one of my toys.

And -- and you realize there are these ways in which just a connection to the gospel is forming their minds in ways big and small, and that is the thing that I really, really love about the church, and it's the thing that I really -- again, going back to my own formation, as much as I love my grandmother and as much as she was a person of very devout faith, and as much as I believe that we will be reunited in heaven when all this is over, we didn't have that kind of church community.

I didn't have that kind of day-to-day exposure to what the gospel was saying and what it required of me. And that is a thing that I just think is very good for kids. I happen to believe it's true, but I also think completely aside from the truth of it, it's very good for my kids to be forced to reflect on this very, very ancient set of traditions and ancient set of faiths.

And I already see it having a very profound effect on them.

One of the themes that you address in communion is the value of debate --

Yes.

-- and dissent, and challenging long held perspectives, of course, your own debate in the 2024 presidential campaign helped to introduce you to most Americans.

That was fun.

It was fun to watch, too. And in Communion --

Can I tell you a story about that?

Please.

OK. So you never really know how these things are going. There's adrenaline. I mean, Robert knows this, and, you know, you're fundamentally -- you might think things are going well and they're going terribly, or you might think things are going terribly and they're actually going well. So I finished this debate, and I think things have gone pretty well, but, of course, I don't know.

And I'm sitting there on stage next to Tim Walz, and there's this point where they're kind of cutting to credits, and then my wife comes on stage, and then Tim Walz's wife comes on stage. So I look over at Usha and she's like glowing. She's got the biggest smile on her face. And I'm like, OK, that's a good sign.

And then I look over at Gwen Walz, and she looks like she's just showed up to her dog's funeral. And that was the moment where I realized, if my wife is really happy and Gwen Walz is not so happy, things must have went pretty well. [Laughter]

I think you've just answered my question, which inadvertently --

OK.

Um, talk to us about the importance of writing. Because you mentioned that, uh, the first manuscript of this book was completed when Mrs. Vance was expecting your second child, in 2019, and that was before you were elected vice president. So how do you write? Talk us through your creative process.

Yeah. So, you know, one of the things that I think is very frustrating to my speechwriter, who's an amazing guy and an amazing writer in his own right, is that I can't say something unless it's in my own words. It has to be in my own words. And I think one of the ways, you know, even when I was a young kid, one of the ways in which I think through things or I puzzle through issues, or I try to think about what do I actually -- you know, what do you actually think about something, is you almost have a debate with yourself, right?

You try to take two sides of a question and figure out which side is the right side. And I've always done that, and I've always tried to put that down on paper, again, going back to when I was very young. And, you know, one of the, the things that's kind of crazy in the, you know, the era of ChatGPT, where I just don't think that, you know, this sort of very age-old thing of writing, of actually forcing yourself to convert a thought in your brain to a thought on paper that other people will sort of absorb and respond to, whether they love it or they hate it, I think that's always just been a very important part of the way that I've done persuasion.

And, you know, when we do -- just going back to the debate. When we did debate prep, yeah, we did a sort of traditional session, Tom Emmer, a great Congressman from the Minnesota, the state of Minnesota, you know, he played Tim Walz and he did a great job. He was a lot tougher than Tim Walz, if I'm being honest.

But, you know, one of the ways that I actually did debate prep is someone would send me, here are the things you might get asked about, and then I have to write out an answer for myself. And I just think that for me, at least, that process of forcing thoughts from your head to the paper is very, very important.

And, you know, one -- one other -- one other thing about just if you look at my entire life in the public eye, a big part of it has been through writing, right? I became at least a reasonably well-known figure because I wrote Hillbilly Elegy, but I also always like to write op-eds. I always like to make arguments.

I always like to debate ideas. It's one of the ways I've always tried to find truth, is by seeking it out and engaging back and forth with it. And again, to give Christianity a lot of credit. One of the things that I sort of figured out is Christian societies are much better at absorbing dissent than highly secular societies.

And that was like, when I realized that, it's like a light bulb went off. If you go back to the really big transformative moments in 2,000 years of Western civilization, what you find is despite the stereotype that I think progressives have of Christians, is Christians are much better at tolerating dissent and absorbing dissent, and in some ways, encouraging dissent than highly secular societies.

And I think that's actually one of the secrets to why we're so dynamic. It's one of the secrets to why we've had such great technological innovation in the West, is because, yes, of course, you know, when somebody challenges the status quo, even in a Christian society, they sometimes get pushback from it. But Christians, because they're rooted in the fundamental truth that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, I think they're much -- our societies are much better able to tolerate the kind of dissent that creates scientific brilliance and advancement in philosophy and politics.

We're not afraid of people disagreeing with us, because we know that we have the real truth in our heart.

So we're here at the Nixon Library, and President Nixon was the consummate statesman. And just a few days ago, you completed a major peace negotiation. And just a few minutes ago, you paid respects at President Nixon's memorial site, where the epitaph on his marker reads the greatest honor history can bestow is the title of peacemaker.

Was that the mentality that you embraced? Were you thinking of that sentiment as you were representing our country in Switzerland?

Well, first of all, just because you brought up Nixon, I got to say, thank you to you and to Robert and to the Nixon Library folks, this is an amazing thing and I'm very proud to be here. So thank you, not just for welcoming me, but for everything you do. So we were talking about this a little bit backstage, but I'm actually fascinated by Nixon as a character in history.

I think that his historical legacy is enjoying a bit of a renaissance, but I think deservedly so. As I joked with Robert backstage, if Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be like a 12-hour news story. Like, the idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy. And, by the way, if you look at the story of how the Deep State took down Richard Nixon, it's not all that different from what the same groups of people, the same institutions tried to do to Donald Trump in the first Trump administration.

There is a parallel. I also just, at a personal level, you know, OK, young senator, vice president, writes some bestselling books, is hated by the media, it kind of sounds like JD Vance. So I'm a little -- you know, I've always liked -- I've always liked Richard Nixon, but, OK, one other thing about Richard Nixon that I think is fascinating is, OK, the two biggest historical electoral college landslides in American history are, of course, Ronald Reagan in 1984, Richard Nixon in 1972. OK. What you may not know, and, you know, some of my political data guys who are very into this, have drilled into me, is that Nixon's coalition in '72, though if you look at the top line numbers, you would say, well, that's exactly what happened in 1984. It's much different.

Nixon's coalition in '72 is actually durable and much more closely resembles the Trump coalition of 2024 than the Reagan Coalition of '84. So what Reagan did in '84 is he ran up margins, basically with White Americans. And, of course, you know, he won a historical landslide but the country is much less White today than it was in 1984. Nixon's coalition was unbelievably durable to the demographic change that we've seen in the United States of America.

So this is a guy who could -- you know, Reagan could not have won his landslide in 2024. Richard Nixon maybe could have won his landslide in 2024. And I think that there's a very important political lesson in that for all of us in the Republican Party. He was actually like a political genius, and I'm just fascinated by the guy's historical figure.

So anyway, so very, very happy to be here, but, OK. So it says that the greatest -- what is it, the greatest honor history can bestow is to call someone a peacemaker. And I think -- Thank you. And, you know, was I thinking about that quote when we were in Switzerland, no. Was I thinking about that sentiment, absolutely.

Because, you know, one of the other lessons of Richard Nixon is, it's not just that he got out of Vietnam, but that he got out of Vietnam from a position of strength, OK? It's one thing to tuck tail and run, it's another thing to clearly define an objective, to accomplish that objective, and then to ensure that you don't allow mission creep to transform a victory into a defeat.

And one of the things I've seen with the president of the United States in the last few weeks, and frankly, some of the criticism that we've gotten even from our friends, is they're constantly trying to change the mission that Donald Trump set us up to achieve and what did he say? He said, at the outset, I want to destroy their conventional military.

I want to eliminate their ability to project power and I want to ensure that they never have a nuclear weapon ever -- ever, OK? And what I've seen is some people try to say, you know, well, that's great, but you should have a different objective. And I think the reason why the president has been so successful is because he refuses to give in to that impulse.

He says, we came what we set out to do, we -- we created incredible diplomatic, economic and military leverage, let's use that leverage to go and accomplish an even bigger win for the American people. That's what he's asked us to do. It's not over yet, but so far, so good.

That's great to hear. Finally, Mr. Vice President, you are a walking, talking embodiment of the American dream. And as you write in Communion, you came from the lowest fifth income bracket and you are now only one step away from the top of American public life. How are you reflecting on America on its 250th birthday?

Yeah. You know, I guess I just can't help but look back at my life, 41 years. I'm the vice president of the United States, but most importantly, I've got three beautiful kids and a fourth on the way. I'm married to the love of my life. We're able to give our kids things that I never thought that I would be able to give my kids.

And I just can't help but feel incredible gratitude to the United States of America. Nowhere but here would this be possible. And I think that when -- when I consider -- just to make a slightly partisan point here, as we've got people waving the Palestinian flag outside and hollering at us in Spanish, by the way, the vice president can't understand what you're protesting about if you don't speak the language of everybody else here.

So if you want -- Like, note to protesters, if you want the vice president to hear what you're protesting about, you've got to use a language I actually understand. Anyway, but I -- I think that what has -- what I've noticed about politics in my lifetime is, look, I was raised by blue collar, socially conservative Democrats.

My Papaw was a Union Steel man his entire life. He voted for Republicans like once, ever. And otherwise, he was a Democrat. And whatever your politics, whether you were a Democrat or Republican, I grew up in a world where everybody, every politician, was expected to have some basic gratitude for the United States of America.

So when I think about 250 years of American history, what I think about is that the entire greatness of this country was built by all of us together. When we went to the moon in Nixon's administration, yeah, it was the astronauts, but it was also the scientists who designed the rockets. It was the janitor who was making sure that the place where they were building the rockets was a clean place to come to work.

It was every single person working together to make a great achievement possible only in the United States of America. When I think about what happened just in the last few months, yes, it's the vice president and Steve Witkoff negotiating, but it's junior-enlisted folks who signed up and didn't know what the hell they were getting themselves into, but made it possible for us to win something great for the American people.

The story of this country is that the foundation is laid by normal, common, good people, who make the great achievements of American civilization possible. And when I think about what bothers me so much about partisan politics in 2026 is, I don't hear the sense of gratitude that all of us should have. Whether you're Black or White, rich or poor, we should be grateful to the people who built this country.

We wouldn't have such a great life or a great civilization without them.

Ladies and gentlemen, the vice president of the United States.