JD Vance’s Big, Beautiful Task

Vice presidents always have hard jobs.

They have little practical authority. They are the face of decisions they are not empowered to make. They get assignments that are hard to ace (like Vice President Kamala Harris’s deployment to address the “root causes” of migration).

This morning, I headed to a machine shop in West Pittston, Pa., where Vice President JD Vance was stepping up to shoulder what is becoming a delicate task: selling President Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill.”

Stumping for your boss’s signature legislation might not ordinarily be an arduous assignment. But at least at this early point, the law, for which Vance cast a tiebreaking vote, is simply not very popular. Some Republicans have warned that it will cost their party seats; one is already trying to roll back the bill’s cuts to Medicaid.

Making matters worse for Vance, hints of distrust were in the air, given the furor over the administration’s decision not to release more information about the investigation into the convicted sex offender and disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.

The machine shop began filling up with devoted Trump and Vance fans, who arrived in Trump 2028 hats or T-shirts showing the moment the president survived an assassination attempt last summer. But even here, there were questions about the new law, and signs that Democrats’ efforts to highlight it as regressive and call it a giveaway for the wealthy were breaking through.

“The Democrats are saying that, I forget the number, but, like, millions of people are going to lose their health care and that kind of thing. And I just want to know if that’s true,” said Jane Mizerak, 68, a Republican from the nearby town of West Wyoming, who said she had voted for Trump each time he had run for president.