For this week's episode of "Interesting Times," I interview the vice president of the United States, JD Vance. The context is notable: He offered me an interview while he was in Rome leading an American delegation to the inaugural mass of Pope Leo XIV, and our conversation took place on Monday in the United States Embassy to the Vatican, immediately after the vice president's private audience with the first American pope. Vance had spent the weekend inside what felt like a religious and political superconductor, with Rome as the point of convergence for different carriers of high-voltage energy: not just the Pope, but also world leaders such as Volodymyr Zelensky and the pontiff of Americanism herself, Oprah Winfrey. Vance and I started our conversation where he had started the morning: with his encounter with the pope. We moved from there to his thoughts on Catholicism and politics: how his Catholic conversion has influenced his political convictions and how a Catholic politician should think about navigating points of disagreement with the Vatican, with the tension over the Trump White House's immigration policy echoing prior conflicts under both Republican and Democratic presidents. He was at his most combative as I asked him about the immigration debate, especially when he tried to justify the Trump administration's deportations to a Salvadoran prison of alleged gang members — a policy that to my mind all but guarantees imprisonments that fall afoul of both American and Catholic principles. He seemed more serenely confident on other issues: the trade wars especially, and also the impact of DOGE cuts, which have unsettled both markets and the voting public — a reaction he believes will be fleeting, for reasons he explains in the interview. He was least reassuring, perhaps, when I asked about the subject of last week's episode of "Interesting Times," the risks of an artificial intelligence arms race, and specifically whether he thought America and China could pause their competition if it seemed like the technology might slip from their control. But there his answer was, at least, appropriately Catholic, expressing hope that God had already supplied the right man to address some of those risks — a new pope who has already cited the challenges of A.I. as crucial to his mission. No word yet on when Leo XIV will be a guest on "Interesting Times," but rest assured, we've put in the request. Here's what we're focusing on today:
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