# JD Vance — "there's no law, there's just power" > [!quote] "The thing that I kept thinking about liberalism in 2019 and 2020 is that these guys have all read Carl Schmitt — there's no law, there's just power." > — JD Vance, interview with Ross Douthat, *The New York Times*, published June 13, 2024 ## Context Said in Vance's long interview with NYT columnist Ross Douthat (conducted May 2024, published that June, weeks before Vance became Trump's running mate). Note the structure: Vance is *accusing liberals* of operating on [[Carl Schmitt]]'s no-law-just-power principle — citing pandemic measures and the prosecutions of Trump — not announcing the doctrine as his own. The quote nonetheless became the standard one-line gloss for Schmitt's influence on the New Right, and is frequently quoted in compressed form as Vance simply "describing Schmitt's ideas" (Heather Cox Richardson's letter of July 26, 2026 uses it this way while arguing the administration governs by Schmittian emergency). ## Why this matters A receipt for two things at once. First, that the vice president of the United States reaches for Schmitt — the Nazi-era theorist of the friend-enemy distinction and the sovereign exception — as his reference point for how politics works. Second, the projection structure: the accusation that opponents have abandoned law for power, made by the movement whose own governing practice (emergency tariffs, emergency deployments, the "I have the right to do anything I want to do" formulation) is the vault's leading example of the exception swallowing the norm. Accusing the other side of Schmittianism is itself a Schmittian move — it defines the enemy. ## Verification - **Reporting + provenance:** [NYT — the Douthat interview](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/13/opinion/jd-vance-interview.html); [NYT Books — Schmitt and Vance](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/13/books/review/carl-schmitt-jd-vance.html). - **Status:** Verbatim, undisputed. Widely re-quoted in compressed form — the full sentence carries the "these guys have all read" framing that the compressed version drops. ## Related quotes - [[Donald Trump - I have the right to do anything I want to do]] — the same doctrine, stated as practice rather than accusation.