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Vice President JD Vance made an explicit attempt on Tuesday to bridge warring factions within the Republican Party, arguing that the “tensions” between the populist and tech wings of the conservative movement could be overcome.
Mr. Vance’s remarks, delivered at a technology conference in Washington, amounted to the most intentional effort from the administration to date to manage these groups within President Trump’s movement. Some conservatives have worried that the uneasy alliance between Mr. Trump’s populist base and his new support from Silicon Valley was destined to unravel.
That political divide is a consequence of the support Mr. Trump has won from many tech leaders, particularly that of Elon Musk. Mr. Musk has fought with populist, longstanding members of Mr. Trump’s coalition, including Steve Bannon, over issues such as the H-1B visa program, which allows skilled workers like software engineers to work in the United States and is typically embraced by the tech industry to fill their engineering ranks.
“I’d like to speak to these tensions as a proud member of both tribes,” said Mr. Vance, a former venture capitalist who is now backed by much of the populist right. “While this is a well-intentioned concern, I think it’s based on a faulty premise. This idea that tech-forward people and the populists are somehow inevitably going to come to a loggerheads is wrong.”
Mr. Vance was the headliner at the American Dynamism conference organized by the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, whose leaders, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, have embraced Mr. Trump. Mr. Vance declared himself to be a “huge fan” of the pair and said that he was “very moved” by a recent, pro-technology manifesto from Mr. Andreessen.
Mr. Andreessen, who has become the avatar of a movement that pushes for domestic technological development, has been deeply involved in the Trump administration, helping to evaluate hires during Mr. Trump’s transition and advising Mr. Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency.
“What I propose is that each group — our workers, the populists on the one hand, the tech optimists on the other — have been failed by this government. Not just the government of the last administration, but the government, in some ways, of the last 40 years,” Mr. Vance said.
The vice president argued, for example, that technology development was good for poor Americans by raising the standard of living, and that the “drug” of cheap labor that comes from globalization was bad for American companies because it kept them from innovating.
“And so I’d ask my friends, both on the tech-optimist side and on the populist side, not to see the failure of the logic of globalization as a failure of innovation,” Mr. Vance said. “Both our working people, our populists, and our innovators gathered here today have the same enemy. And the solution, I believe, is American innovation. Because in the long run, it’s technology that increases the value of labor.”
Mr. Vance pitched Mr. Trump’s accomplishments on manufacturing, immigration enforcement and artificial intelligence investments to the crowd. The vice president promised that the Trump administration would clear red tape and give them more incentives to manufacture and develop tech products in the United States.
“We can only win by doing what we always did: Protecting our workers and supporting our innovators, and doing both of those things at the same time,” he said.
Cecilia Kang contributed reporting.
