WATCH: JD Vance Flexes Muscles, Spars With MSM on Russia Issue During Trump Cabinet Meeting

As RedState reported earlier, the first official Trump 47 administration cabinet meeting got underway Wednesday at the White House, with both confirmed and yet-to-be-confirmed cabinet members in attendance alongside President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and Trump's DOGE advisor, Elon Musk - the latter of who was conspicuously not sitting at the big table.

The mainstream media of course were also there at the beginning, peppering Trump and Musk with more questions about recent actions taken by the Dept. of Government Efficiency including the "Elon email," what Musk's responsibilities and role are, who reports to him, etc.

"The overall goal here with the DOGE team is to help address the enormous deficit. We simply cannot sustain as a country $2 trillion deficits," Musk said while noting that the process was going to be bumpy at times, with "mistakes" made. Trump also joked about how anyone at the meeting who did not like Elon Musk should leave the room.

There were other issues brought up by the press during the meeting as well, including the negotiations going on between Trump, Russian President Vladimir Putin, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in hopes of eventually ending the Russia/Ukraine war, which is now in its third year.

Previous statements made by Trump and Sec. of State Marco Rubio publicly criticizing Zelenskyy's ill-advised PR antics, and the United States' actions at the United Nations Monday, which the media described in so many words as Trump "siding" with Russia or "capitulating" to them over Ukraine, were also something that got discussed, with Vance chiming in as well and taking issue with the media/Democrat spin in the process.

Vance, who himself has had a lot to say about the issue, told the media that he was tired of hearing those descriptions being used to describe the negotiations, noting that any deals brokered would be done so directly between the parties involved and in the appropriate channels - and not in the media:

I mean, look, as the president said, we're not going to do the negotiation in public with the American media. He's going to do it in private with the president of Russia, with the president of Ukraine, and with other leaders, and I think that's how this has to go.
I just want to push back against some of the criticism I've seen of the administration on this because every single time the president engages in diplomacy, you guys preemptively accuse him of conceding to Russia. He hasn't conceded anything to anyone. He's doing the job of a diplomat, and he is of course the Diplomat in Chief as the president of the United States.

Watch:

JD Vance: "We're not going to do the negotiation in public with the American media. Every single time the president engages in diplomacy, you guys preemptively accuse him of conceding to Russia. He hasn't conceded anything to anyone. He's doing the job of a Diplomat." pic.twitter.com/jph8KF950q
— TheBlaze (@theblaze) February 26, 2025

As we've talked about before, Vance sometimes comes across as a "Trump whisperer," essentially saying what Trump did moments before but just a little more concisely. It's enjoyable to watch it happen in real time as they play off of - and complement each other - in that way. It's probably one of the reasons Trump picked him to be his running mate in the first place and one of the reasons he features so prominently in these situations.

But beyond that, I'm sure I'm not the only one who noticed how presidential Vance himself looked in that moment, as he has on other occasions since being sworn in - including in the image at the top of this piece, which was taken during a presser on the DC mid-air crash, where Vance explained exactly why Trump had zeroed in after the crash on DEI problems in the aviation industry.

Well done, sir. Well done.