Establishment elites have begun seeding the narrative that Vice President JD Vance and the GOP are locked in an internecine battle over artificial intelligence, one that could derail Vance’s ascent as the heir apparent to carry President Donald Trump’s MAGA mantle forward.
“Vance Is Handcuffed: The Tech Fight Bedeviling 2028 Republicans,” declared a recent Politico headline. “How an AI Bust Could Blow Up the 2028 Race,” warned another.
The increasing emphasis on AI as a potential lightning rod election issue is not without merit. A new NBC poll finds that just 26 percent of Americans hold a positive view of artificial intelligence, crystallizing a high-stakes electoral reality: AI now touches virtually every kitchen-table concern voters hold. As I explain in my new book, Code Red: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI, energy prices, jobs, education, child safety, privacy, and national security are all undergoing seismic shifts as AI rapidly rewires daily life.
Put another way, AI is fast becoming the populist prism through which voters will judge which leaders are truly fighting for them.
That is good news for Vice President JD Vance and the broad MAGA coalition that supports him. The Hillbilly Elegy author’s background as both a working class populist and former Silicon Valley investor uniquely positions him to help lead conservatives through the AI revolution’s Code Red moment precisely because Vance understands the impulses of the Big Tech elites building the machine, as well as the working class Americans who worry that they and their children could be steamrolled by it.
Listen closely to Vance’s public statements and the design logic of his AI framing becomes unmistakable: defuse AI’s “landmines” for working class families while maximizing its “roses” for American strength.
Among the AI landmines that concern Vance most? “I worry about companies using artificial intelligence to surveil Americans,” the vice president recently told Fox News host Martha MacCallum. “I worry about invasions of privacy. I worry a lot about political bias. If you go back to 2020, 2021, Google search was so biased in the left wing direction that I think it actually changed America’s political system. I don’t want that to happen with artificial intelligence. So there are a lot of things we are worried about.”
In addition to anti-conservative bias, Vance, a self-described “Grok guy” and devout Catholic, has reportedly condemned as “entirely unacceptable” AI-generated sexualized images on platforms like X. What’s more, he sees the rise of AI companions and technology-driven isolation fueled by social media-induced dopamine loops as potentially corrosive forces for young people finding their way through courtship and relationships. “This is where I think AI could be profoundly dark and negative,” said Vance. “What I really worry about is does it mean that there are millions of American teenagers talking to chatbots who don’t have their best interests at heart?”
Despite the myriad landmines, Vance has also emphasized the need for America to win the AI race and seize the many roses of opportunity, including economic growth, innovation, and strengthened national security. Indeed, in the annals of vice-presidential oratory, few speeches will eclipse in consequence or global impact the address Vice President JD Vance delivered last year at the AI Action Summit in Paris, a rhetorical tour de force that heralded “the extraordinary prospect of a new industrial revolution, one on par with the invention of the steam engine or Bessemer steel.”
Vance framed four core pillars on which U.S. political leadership should rest in the AI era:
- Strengthen American technological dominance and make America the AI gold standard worldwide
- Avoid excessive AI regulation that would kneecap growth or kill innovation
- Strongly oppose ideologically biased AI, political weaponization, or authoritarian censorship
- Pursue a “pro-worker growth path for AI so that it can be a potent tool for job creation in the United States” where workers “reap the rewards with higher wages, better benefits, and safer and more prosperous communities.”
Since the historic address, the AI race has accelerated dramatically and, with it, the implementation of the Trump-Vance Administration’s forward-leaning AI policy. The results? AI czar David Sacks told Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo that the AI data center construction boom—and the energy production surrounding it—has already benefited blue-collar trade workers, including electricians, plumbers, concrete pourers, drywall hangers, and others.
And last week, President Trump succeeded in getting Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Oracle, and xAI to sign his Ratepayer Protection Pledge to stop Big Tech companies from forcing local communities to pick up the tab for higher energy costs. “Under this new agreement,” President Trump said, “Big Tech companies are committing to fully cover the costs of increased electricity production required for AI data centers.” Thanks to power delivery infrastructure upgrades required for AI data centers, explained Trump, “prices for American communities will not go up, but in many cases, will actually come down, and very substantially.” Indeed, this innovative proposal, requiring accountability from AI builders in a way that not only buffers but benefits working class communities, may become a model for future solutions as Americans confront a possible push for Universal Basic Income (UBI) if the threat or reality of widespread AI job disruptions materializes.
To be sure, much can and will change as conservatives navigate through AI’s Code Red moment. Moreover, history is replete with vice presidents whose once-clear path to the presidency was upended with unforeseen plot twists.
Still, the notion that Vice President JD Vance’s presidential fate will be decided by AI forces outside his scope or beyond his policy depth gets the story exactly backwards. Under President Donald Trump’s leadership, Vance is already carving out a distinct path on AI, one that reflects the historical heft of a vice presidency perched on the fault line of generational technological transformation.
Well before he became America’s first vice president, John Adams observed the early tremors of technological innovation that would later give rise to the Industrial Revolution. “The spirit of manufacturing grows,” he wrote in his May 28, 1777, letter to Abigail Adams. “There never was a time when there was such full employment, for every man, woman and child, in this city…every tradesman is as full as possible. Industry will supply our necessities, if it is not cramped by injudicious laws, such as regulations…these discourage industry and turn that ingenuity which ought to be employed for the general good, into knavery.”
The conservative movement now faces an equally disruptive era as the intelligence age blooms unimagined roses of opportunity and spawns unforeseen landmines. What’s needed for the red political team is a “code”—a set of principles to help conservatives navigate dangers, quell emerging threat vectors, and seize AI’s upside for our children, careers, and communities. That is why JD Vance’s framing of AI is so consequential: it offers the early circuitry of a techno-populist fusion, one that could propel AI-driven innovation and growth while protecting working class Americans to ensure they share in the benefits.
Wynton Hall is the Social Media Director for Breitbart News and the author of the new book, Code Red: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI (HarperCollins). A Distinguished Fellow at the Government Accountability Institute (GAI) and former Visiting Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, Hall has authored or coauthored 27 books, including several New York Times bestsellers, for world leaders, celebrities, and tech moguls.
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