Vance takes on visible transition role, trying to boost Trump job picks

Men in suits, white shirts and light-colored ties walk in a hallway.

By Jill Colvin and Stephen Groves

Nov. 23, 2024 12:25 PM PT

WASHINGTON — After working mostly behind closed doors since the election, Vice President-elect JD Vance returned to Capitol Hill last week in a new, more visible role: helping Donald Trump try to get his most contentious Cabinet picks through confirmation in the Senate, where Vance has served for two years.

Vance arrived at the Capitol last Wednesday with former Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, who was then Trump’s choice for attorney general, and spent the morning sitting in on the nominee’s meetings with key Republicans, including members of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

The effort was for naught: A day later Gaetz withdrew his name amid scrutiny over sex trafficking allegations and the reality that he was unlikely to be confirmed.

Vance was back Thursday morning, accompanying Pete Hegseth, the “Fox & Friends Weekend” host whom Trump has tapped to be the next secretary of Defense. Hegseth has faced allegations of sexual assault, which he denies.

Vance is expected to accompany other nominees for meetings in coming weeks as he tries to leverage the two years he has spent in the Senate to help push through Trump’s picks.

Vance takes on an atypical role

The role of introducing nominees around Capitol Hill is an unusual one for a vice president-elect. Usually the job goes to a former senator who has close relationships on the Hill, or to a more junior aide.

But this time the role fits Vance, said Marc Short, who was Trump’s first director of legislative affairs as well as chief of staff to Trump’s first vice president, Mike Pence, who had spent more than a decade in Congress and led the former president’s transition ahead of his first term.

“JD probably has a lot of current allies in the Senate, and so it makes sense to have him utilized in that capacity,” Short said.

Unlike the first Trump transition, which played out before cameras at Trump Tower in New York and at the president-elect’s golf club in Bedminster, N.J., this one has largely happened behind closed doors in Palm Beach, Fla.

There, a small group of officials and aides meet daily at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort to run through possible contenders and interview job candidates. The group includes Elon Musk, the billionaire who has spent so much time at the club that Trump has joked he can’t get rid of him.

Vance has been a constant presence even as he’s kept a lower profile. The senator from Ohio has spent much of the last two weeks in Palm Beach, according to people familiar with his plans, playing an active role in the transition, on which he serves as honorary chair.

Vance staying at cottage at Mar-a-Lago

Vance has been staying at a cottage on the property of the club, where rooms are adorned with cherubs and intricate golden inlays. It’s a world away from the famously hardscrabble upbringing that Vance recounted in “Hillbilly Elegy,” the memoir that made him famous.

His young children have joined him at Mar-a-Lago at times. Vance was photographed in shorts and a polo shirt playing with his kids on the property’s seawall, with a U.S. Secret Service robotic security dog in the distance.

When he is not in Palm Beach, Vance has been joining the sessions remotely via Zoom.

Though he has taken a break from TV interviews after months of appearances, Vance has been active in the meetings, which began immediately after the election and include interviews as well as presentations on potential nominees’ pluses and minuses.

Among those interviewed: contenders to replace FBI Director Christopher A. Wray, as Vance wrote in a since-deleted social media post.

Defending himself from criticism that he’d missed a Senate vote in which one of President Biden’s judicial nominees was confirmed, Vance wrote that he was meeting at the time “with President Trump to interview multiple positions for our government, including for FBI Director.”

“I tend to think it’s more important to get an FBI director who will dismantle the deep state than it is for Republicans to lose a vote 49-46 rather than 49-45,” Vance added on X. “But that’s just me.”

Vance is making his voice heard as Trump picks Cabinet

While Vance did not come into the transition with a list of people he wanted to see in specific roles, he and Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., a friend and fellow member of the transition team, were eager to see former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. find roles in the administration.

Trump ended up selecting Gabbard — who left the Democratic Party in 2022 and became a Republican this year — as the next director of national intelligence, a powerful post atop the nation’s spy agencies and as the president’s top intelligence advisor. And he chose Kennedy, an anti-vaccine activist, to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, a massive agency that oversees drug and food safety, Medicare and Medicaid, and more.

Vance was also a big booster of Tom Homan, the former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, who will serve as Trump’s “border czar.”

In another sign of Vance’s influence, James Braid, a top aide to the senator, is expected to be Trump’s legislative affairs director.

Allies say it’s too soon to discuss what portfolio Vance might take on in the White House. While he gravitates to issues such as trade, immigration and technology, Vance sees his role as doing whatever Trump needs.

Vance was spotted days after the election giving his son’s Boy Scout troop a tour of the Capitol, and he was there for the recent Senate leadership votes. He returned in earnest last week, first with Gaetz — arguably Trump’s most divisive pick — and then Hegseth, who is accused in an investigative report released last week of sexually assaulting a woman in 2017. Hegseth told police at the time that the encounter had been consensual and denied any wrongdoing.

Vance hosted Hegseth in his Senate office as GOP senators, including those on the Senate Armed Services Committee, filtered in to meet with the nominee.

A president’s nominees usually visit individual senators’ offices, meeting them on their own turf, but the freshman senator is accompanied by a large Secret Service detail that makes moving around more unwieldy — so he instead brought Gaetz to a room in the Capitol on Wednesday and Hegseth to his office on Thursday. Senators came to them.

Vance made it to votes on Wednesday and part of Thursday, but missed others on Thursday afternoon.

Vance expected to draw on his Senate background

Vance is expected to continue to leverage his relationships in the Senate after Trump takes office. But many Republicans there have longer relationships with Trump himself.

Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) said that Trump was often the first person to call him back when he was trying to reach high-level White House officials during his previous term.

“He has the most active Rolodex of just about anybody I’ve ever known,” Cramer said, adding that Vance would make a good addition.

“They’ll divide names up by who has the most persuasion here,” he said, but added of Trump: “Whoever his liaison is will not work as hard at it as he will.”

Cramer complimented Vance, saying he was “pleasant” and “interesting” to be around.

“He doesn’t have the long relationships,” he said. “But we all like people that have done what we’ve done. I mean, that’s sort of a natural kinship.”

Under the Constitution, Vance will also preside over the Senate, where he can break tie votes. But he’s not likely to be needed for that as often as Vice President Kamala Harris was: She broke a record number of ties for Democrats in her role, but Republicans will have a bigger cushion in the chamber next year.

Associated Press writers Groves and Colvin reported from Washington and New York, respectively. AP writer Mary Clare Jalonick contributed to this report.