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Home » Transcript: VP JD Vance Briefs Members of the Media, May 19, 2026

Transcript: VP JD Vance Briefs Members of the Media, May 19, 2026

Editor’s Notes: On May 19, 2026, Vice President JD Vance stepped in for White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt to brief members of the media. He opened the session by announcing his upcoming address at the Air Force Academy commencement ceremony and highlighting the recent multi-billion-dollar success of the administration’s anti-fraud task force. Most notably, the Vice President provided an active update on the ongoing diplomatic negotiations with Iran, emphasizing that preventing the nation from obtaining a nuclear weapon remains a non-negotiable red line for the United States.

TRANSCRIPT:

Opening Remarks

VP VANCE: All right. Good afternoon, everybody. How you guys doing? Good. Good. Okay. I’ve got my cheat sheet here. So I know who to call on. Most importantly, who not to call on.

Air Force Academy Commencement

Let me start out with a few things. So first of all, proud to announce that next week I will be speaking at the Air Force Academy Commencement Ceremony. Last year, I spoke at the Naval Academy Commencement Ceremony, and it was one of the great honors and privileges of my life. So I’m excited to go out there to Colorado and participate in that ceremony.

Anti-Fraud Task Force Update

The second thing is I want to highlight a little bit some of the work that we’ve been doing, the great work our team has been doing on the Anti-Fraud Task Force, where we have caught just the last couple of months billions upon billions of dollars of fraud in our hospice system, in our Medicaid system, in our Medicare system, in our immigration system. We’ve seen hundreds of millions of dollars of fraudulent loans that were being handed out through the Small Business Administration that we’ve identified and stopped. We’ve also started investigating some of the fraudulent criminal activity and also prosecuting some of the fraudulent criminal activity.

So the thing that I say to the American people, and I’ll repeat here to all of you, is fraud is a crime that has two victims. It has, first of all, the American taxpayer, people who pay their taxes, who out of their generosity and because they have to, of course, they pay their taxes expecting that it’s going to go to pay our troops and ensure that low-income children have access to food and ensure that people get medical benefits even if they’re not able to afford a doctor.

I think that’s a great thing about our country is that we have this generosity of spirit where we take care of one another, but fraud takes that away from us because it steals money from the taxpayer when they pay their taxes, and it also steals money from innocent people who are meant to benefit from these programs but can’t when the money runs dry because it’s gone to fraudsters instead of the people who benefit from it or should benefit from it.

So we’re going to keep that work up. The President of the United States has been very clear that he wants us to focus on fraud. He wants us to prosecute the fraudsters, and he wants us to save the American people as much money as we possibly can. So we’re going to keep at it. We’re very proud of that work and, importantly, very proud of the team who have done an incredible job.

Iran Nuclear Negotiations Update

And then finally, just to give an update on the Iran negotiation, the Iran situation, I just talked to the President very briefly before I came out here. It’s actually a very simple proposition here. There are two options, two pathways we can go down when it comes to the Iran situation.

So step back for a little bit. What the President of the United States has said is, number one, Iran can never have a nuclear weapon, and I think it’s important for the American people and all of you to appreciate that when we say that, it’s not just that Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. It’s what would happen if the Iranians did get a nuclear weapon. We know that a lot of nations all across the Gulf would then want their own nuclear weapon, and a lot of nations all across the world, and what has been a very effective bright spot of American foreign policy, really, for the last 20 or so years, would disappear overnight.

If you have every country in the world scrambling to try to get a nuclear weapon, it would make us all much less safe. And Iran would really be the first domino in what would set off a nuclear arms race all over the world. That’s very, very bad for the safety of our country.

On Iran’s Nuclear Ambitions and Military Options

As the father of three young kids, I don’t want them to inherit a world where 20 additional regimes, half of them very dangerous and very sympathetic to terrorists, have nuclear weapons. We want to keep the number of countries that have nuclear weapons small, and that’s why Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon, on top of all the other things that we might be worried about, that they themselves could use it, that they could use it in leverage and economic control or economic negotiations. We just don’t want them to have a nuclear weapon.

Now, what we did here is that we effectively degraded their conventional military capability. That has been done. That has been successfully done. You could always do a little bit more, but where we are now is the president has asked us, has told us, to aggressively negotiate with the Iranians.

On Negotiations in Islamabad

Why did I go to Islamabad, Pakistan? Why did I spend, I think, probably 22 hours on a plane going there, 24 hours coming back, and then 21 hours on the ground negotiating with the Iranians is because we wanted to show a sign of good faith. The vice president of the United States is willing to cut a deal so long as the Iranians are willing to meet us, again, on that core issue of never having a nuclear weapon.

We think that we’ve made a lot of progress.