HUGER, S.C. — There was no mention of Mike Waltz’s departure Thursday on Air Force Two.
Vice President JD Vance, dressed in a construction jacket and a hard hat at a Nucor steel plant in South Carolina, was attempting to conduct business as usual: touting the administration’s first 100 days and hailing the return of manufacturing.
But Vance couldn’t shield himself from every headline. Looming over his visit with South Carolina steel workers was the reality that the White House is in the midst of juggling hundreds of trade negotiations, as economic uncertainty over the threat of President Donald Trump’s tariffs deepens.
“I’m sure you’ve heard some criticism of the president’s trade policies,” Vance said, addressing the workers. “Because if you listen to the American media or you listen to a lot of politicians in our own country … they attack us when we implement trade policies that do a very simple thing: rebalance trade in favor of American workers and American businesses instead of foreign workers and foreign corporations.”
Nucor’s CEO endorsed Trump’s proposed tariffs. The mill’s workers are not unionized, though United Steelworkers was largely in support of Trump’s “Liberation Day” agenda, too. In a statement in early April, the union said Trump’s announcement “helps send the message to our trading partners that they must earn that right.”
The union has previously balked at some of the president’s tariffs, like the ones Trump threatened against Canada. The administration has since had to cool some of its trade agenda, as industries across the country have felt the impact. And Trump himself warned this week there could be more supply chain disruptions and that prices could increase on consumer goods.
“Well, maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls, and maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more than they would normally,” Trump said this week.
But in South Carolina on Thursday, workers appeared excited to see Vance throughout the facility and employees angled for the best position to shake his hand. The vice president saw the steel mill’s scrap yard, then went to the melt shop and sent a charge into the machine that melts the steel.
Upon entering, he shook the hand of a NOTUS reporter, thinking they were an employee of the factory.
“Oh, you guys are just reporters,” Vance said with a laugh. “You got all the shit on, I couldn’t tell.”
He followed that up with a tour of the machine that turns the melted metal into sheets.
“Does it tell you how many coils are in each order here?” Vance asked one employee as he pointed at a spreadsheet on the screen. “Like a big customer, how many coils are they going to order?”
During a rally following the tour, Vance, joined by the Environmental Protection Agency’s administrator, Lee Zeldin, touted a comeback through Trump’s trade policies. “America is back,” Zeldin said.
Vance took the stage to his walk-up song, the anti-Iraq war anthem “America First” by Merle Haggard. “I believe that a golden age of American manufacturing started 100 days ago, and we’re building it right here at Nucor steel in South Carolina,” he said to the crowd.
Back in Washington, Trump’s top national security advisers were out the door, and the rest of the Trump agenda was being dealt some blows. Still, Vance’s message was bullish.
“I think that the great American manufacturing comeback has come and the world has started to take notice,” he said to applause.
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Reese Gorman is a reporter at NOTUS.