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Vice President Advance, gas prices are one cost of this war. They're also human costs as well. And with us in the audience tonight is Joey Amore, whose wife, a US soldier, Master Sergeant Nicole Amore, was killed in March in an Iranian air strike. Uh Joey, the floor is yours. God bless you, Joey, and thank you for your service. Thank you, sir. And her. Mr. Vice President, my wife, Master Sart Nicole Ammer, gave her life on March 1st, 2026. I am damn proud of my wife, as you should be. and the five soldiers that stood next to her had that died along with alongside with her. Um, excuse me.
Take your time, man. Take your time. They raised their right hand and they gave an oath. They understood what they were doing. They understood the sacrifice they were potentially giving. You understand that oath? I understand that oath. There are now six families living in a nightmare. That is it is a hard price to pay. Though the Iranian drone was the weapon that killed my wife, there were a lot of mistakes and a lot of fundamental failures that led up to that. Um, I believe CBS has reported on that. My wife has told me things before she passed. There are other soldiers that know things that are being quiet about certain aspects of this.
There's a failure in the leadership and I want to know how this administration is going to start holding those leaders accountable for the actions and the deaths of the soldiers that we honor and that we love. So Joey, first of all, look, I owe and the whole country owes your family a debt of gratitude that is quite literally impossible to repay. I won't pretend that anything that I say is going to make it better or easier, but I hope it helps a little bit to know that your wife was a precious human being who served her country honorably, and I'm never going to forget about her. And I'm never going to forget this conversation and I want to continue this conversation offline because that raises the second
point when you talk about failures that were that we were implicated. The administration, the Department of War, whoever you want to say was implicated in, I want to know about that stuff because if there were failures and I don't doubt there were, I just this literally the first time I've heard of this is this conversation and I want to fix that stuff. I do not want this stuff to happen. Now, I will say, Joey, we have tried to learn because warfare has changed. Drones are cheap. They're very deadly. They're easy to manufacture. And we have changed a lot of our tactics to try to suppress that drone fire, to try to protect our troops, to make it so that more people don't have to pay the ultimate sacrifice. But I want to understand what we can do better and what those
soldiers are seeing. Because the part of the problem with this job, this job is an amazing honor, but you live in a bit of a bubble and sometimes information doesn't filter up to me. This is an opportunity for it to filter right directly to me. And I promise you, I will take every single failure extremely seriously and we'll work on it. And I promise you that one of the ways that I'm going to show gratitude to your wife is by taking this seriously and trying to figure out what exactly happened and what exactly we can do better. Now, it may be that some of the things that you're talking about are things where our tactics have already improved. I know that there's some issues with, for example, just to get into the
nitty-gritty a little bit, there were issues with how where troops were located that we realized was a huge mistake and that we could do better on and we have changed that. Now, I'm going to not get into the details because, God forbid, I don't want the Iranians to learn something else where they're going to use to target somebody else's wife or somebody else's mother. But man, I promise you this is not something I'm gonna forget and I want to talk to those soldiers and I want to talk to you to better understand what we can do. It sounds like he's resolved to look into this for you. Does his answer satisfy you for the purpose of this conversation? You'll continue it offline or do you and you guys you're going to continue talking?
I promise you I'll work on it. Okay. God bless you. I want to move on to immigration. Another topic that stirs passionate opinion in this country. And we have a voter here tonight, Nancy Sylvester. Sister Nancy Sylvester from Sister Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary Congregation in Monroe. She's got a question for you. A sister Nancy right here. Thank you. Mr. Vice President, we have sisters who minister at the southern border in United States as well as here around Detroit and they are constantly seeing families who are affected by our immigration policies. They see the trauma of children who are separated from their parents. Sometimes on a moment's notice, they go to school
and they come back and they're not there and they have to sort of fend for themselves. And so they, the sisters see the kind of effect, the fear and violence of the ICE behavior. We know the complexity of this issue, but what really pains us is how it's being implemented in such ways. And so I'm going to um sort of know that both of us share the same faith. We may not always agree because I understand you don't always even agree with our pope sometimes. And so I want to though wonder what would you say? How would you justify to people of faith, especially those of us who fry to follow the gospel how the behavior of the ICE men and women can constantly be justified to in terms of the kind of values we live want
to live by and also what policies would you advocate to try to promote more compassionate and respective behavior toward our immigrant sisters and brothers? Sure. Well, Sister Nancy, I uh I appreciate you and uh hopefully I'll be in your prayers as you'll certainly be in mine. And so let me say one, we're trying to strike the right balance. And when you have a country where approximately 25 million illegal aliens have come in over the past 30 or so years, many of them completely unchecked and unvetted. We're trying to strike a balance between how do we do law enforcement, but how do we also do it humanely and how do we not do so
little law enforcement that you actually empower some of the worst people in the world. And so, are you not striking that balance? Well, I think that it is constantly a work in progress, Tony, when you're talking about millions and millions of people and hundreds of thousands of law enforcement officers. You know, we've even just in the past year or so increased training protocols because I do think the men and women of ICE, by the way, it's it's like the men and women of law enforcement. Most of them are amazing people who are patriots
and they want to do a good job protecting their country. Sometimes you have some people who make mistakes. Sometimes you have some people who really screw up and obviously we have a responsibility to prosecute, investigate when people do screw up. What are some of those times? I think it's important. She's seen the things that we've all seen online. Uh these incidents that come up a lot of times people talk about them before they're investigated. You just mentioned times where there have been mistakes and there have been investigations, but I actually haven't heard you talk about those. What comes to mind for you as the biggest mistakes ICE policy and roll out?
There are a number of cases where we've investigated it and either provided further training or sometimes even provided disciplinary situations within ICE. We don't always advertise that stuff as you know Tony because we believe that people have to be judged in a court of law and through a normal investigatory process. we don't jump in and try to accuse people just again because of what we've seen in a news media article. But I think sister NY's point because I'm sure sister that you're the people working with you I'm sure they're doing amazing ministry work and I'm very grateful for it. What I would say is that what we saw over the last 5 years before we came in I mean is
we have to talk about the fact that drug cartels were sex trafficking thousands and thousands of children. thousands of girls who were sold into sex slavery. Of course, the fentanyl trade which killed a lot of people in Michigan. So, I do think despite what some people say in the press, I promise you that we wake up every day and we try to balance law enforcement with humane law enforcement. And of course, when you're dealing with hundreds of thousands of law enforcement officials, you're never going to get everything perfect. But I think the men and women of ICE by and large have done a good job. And where there are people who have screwed up, of course they should suffer consequences.
We got more questions on the topic of data centers than anything else. Sure. Uh and a lot of the questions came in from selfidentified Trump voters. I guess they're part of this 70% of Americans who do not want data centers built near their homes. And we have one such voter tonight. Lindy Valenuela is here. Lindy, the floor is yours. Mr. vice president. Um, I live in Dwajjak, Michigan. My family and I live directly across the street from a data center. For years, we had been exposed to the constant noise from this company's daily operations. Being outdoors for any amount of time became unbearable, resulting in our yard becoming a useless patch of grass that we could look at but not enjoy.
Opening our windows to let in a breeze became a luxury that we could no longer enjoy. Even with our windows closed, the buzzing could be heard throughout our home day and night 24/7. Our children's room faces the data center. And our two small boys had to sleep through this constant noise. It was like having a vacuum in our living room. It has taken a class action lawsuit, of which I am a plaintiff, for this nuisance, to finally be addressed. You claim to care about communities like mine. What are you doing about this problem?
Well, it's a great question and uh I want to assure you that we do very much care about communities like yours. How old are your kids? Can I ask? Yeah, sure. Um my youngest is three months and my oldest is 21 months. I really do care about this and I care about it not just because, you know, I can tell you as I'm sure you could tell everybody else that when you have a three-month-old who's exposed to constant noise, it can be a problem for everybody, especially mom's sleep. And so, uh, very mindful of that. And I guess the way that I think about it is data centers can be good. They can also, as in your case, cause real problems.
And I think there's some basic principles that we've tried to apply in the Trump administration. I think that we have to make sure that these things are good community members. And there are a couple of examples of this where I think it's worked very well for the local communities. So there's an example in Louisiana of a data center where the local community, the local teachers are going to be getting $50,000 bonuses per teacher because of the revenue that's been generated by the data centers, which I'm sure is going to make the school system a lot better, make the teachers a lot happier and get them some of the money that they've earned. At the same time, that data center is
going to feed electricity back into the grid. And your complaint is about noise. One of the biggest complaints I've heard with data centers, even from friends of mine who are typically pro- innovation, pro technology, is a data center went up and my power bill went up by $300. And that's totally unacceptable. And what we've done, it's called the rateayer protection pledge. Is that we've effectively required the data centers to say before they go into community, they're going to make sure that they're good community citizens. They're going to be giving teachers bonuses rather than making it impossible for your three-month-old to sleep. And I think that basic principle has to apply because there is a good that comes from
data centers too. And what I mean is you know that whenever we use AI on our phone like the actual work the computation is actually being done at a data center whether it's in Michigan or anywhere else across the country. And we do know and I've seen the intelligence reports that our biggest competitor internationally, the People's Republic of China, they really want to beat us in this arms race of technology. And so I think that so long as we follow a simple principle that data centers have to be good citizens, they have to not build in a way that's going to make it impossible for your kids to sleep. They have to feed power back into the community. They have to maybe some of the economic benefits they're generating, they can't
just go to a few tech billionaires. It has to go to the community at large. For voters here who are wondering when are the benefits of their vote in 2024 going to show up in their bank accounts. Uh and we do have one uh voter here like that. It's Sandy Johnson. She's from Wood Haven, Michigan. Sandy, uh could you There she is. Sandy, the floor is yours. You've got a question. I'm so nervous. Don't be nervous. It's all right. Don't worry, Sandy. I'm I'm nervous, too. You just got to power through it.
Thank you for this opportunity. I really appreciate it. Um, President Trump, when he was campaigning, he promised a golden age of economy if he got elected. Ever since the president has been elected, our business, an amusement center, restaurant, and bar has struggled. We're barely making ends meet. um you your administration has done um many good positive things that we're very grateful for, but none of it has really trickled down to our business. What is being done to change the economy so that the normal American has money to spend on small businesses like ours? We understand these things take time, but when can we expect to see a change?
Sure. First of all, there are some things that we've done that I'm very, very proud of. No taxes on overtime, no taxes on tips, no taxes uh on people who are earning social security income, which my attitude is, you paid into this your entire life. Why is it being taxed on the way out when it comes back into your pocket? We've eliminated those taxes, and that hopefully is going to create more money. I think it already has created more money. this tax season, we had the best tax season in American history in terms of refunds for Americans, and that's going to put more money into your pockets. But I take your point that this hasn't flown down to your business entirely. And I want to just be honest about this because
Tony, you made a point. You said we didn't campaign on Rome wasn't built in a day. But I think fundamentally if you go back to the speeches that I was making and that President Trump was making, what broke the United States, as much as I might like to criticize Joe Biden, but it was a bipartisan multigenerational failure to underinvest in American workers, to underinvest in American manufacturing, to ship all of our good jobs overseas. And of course, if all the good jobs are overseas, then people here in Michigan can't spend money at your family business. and what we have tried to do and I think that we've already seen some significant signs of progress. We've seen over a
million jobs created since Donald Trump was president. By the way, those jobs unlike in the last administration, all of the net job growth went to American citizens rather than under the B administration went to the foreign born. We and let me just there you're seeing 11 trillion of new investment coming to the United States of America. Now where you see that in the jobs numbers right now and think about it kind of makes sense. I was like, why are we seeing more in construction than manufacturing? And somebody said, well, you got to build the factories first. That's the construction. And then the manufacturing jobs come online. And in Michigan, GM, Ford, we've seen massive Stellantis,
massive new investments in Michigan auto factories. And so what I really believe, and I grew up in a town where it's like every other year or maybe every other month, you would see some new factory close down. you find out that some friend of yours lost their job or their dad lost their job, their mom lost their gainful employment. And as you know, it's not just a wage. It's also your sense of dignity and purpose is that mistake happened over my entire life. Closing down factories rather than reinvesting in America and American workers. We are turning the tide on this. And I think there are all these things I pointed to that show signs of progress. But Sandy, I'll be the first
person to tell you that just as this country wasn't broken in one presidential term, it's going to take more than 18 months to fix things and turn them around. So, Vice President Vance, that's a big difference between what you're saying right now and what President Trump says when he's out on the trail. He says it's an A+ economy. You say it's going to take time. You say you're frustrated at times. Which is it? Well, I think that what the president is saying is that we are seeing all of these massive new investments come into our country. But he would be the first person to tell you that you got to build the factories first before you can
employ the workers working in those factories. But to her point, you see that it's it's not an A+ economy if you hear stories like this. Well, I think what we're doing is we're turning the ship around, Sandy. That's what I would say. And by the way, Sandy, there are things that we look, we need to do more and we can certainly do better. One of the things I'm proudest of is that we at the Small Business Administration, I'm sure an agency that is very close to your heart, we've uncovered tens of billions of dollars of fraud so that we can make better small business loans to businesses like yours.
I'm glad you brought up fraud because while we hear from people like this and others around the country who are not feeling like they're getting richer themselves, they see others that they feel are getting richer and that includes people inside the Trump administration. There was a Fox News poll that came out. You did a great job. Yeah. Well done. Bravo. Um, just moments ago before we came out, uh, that found that corruption was the number one issue on voters minds, even more than gas prices that Keshan was talking about. Another poll found that even half of Republicans believe that Donald Trump's personal business interests are affecting his decision as president. And what that all comes back to, I think, is
the question of, have you seen anything inside the White House when it comes to corruption that makes you squeamish? You're asking, has Donald Trump's decision-m been influenced by his No, I'm asking business. I've never seen anything like that from anybody inside the White House. I've never seen anything like that from the president. Certainly. I mean, look, in Washington DC, people are constantly trying to get an edge. It's something that I've complained about in Washington DC for a long time. You see K Street lobbyists who have tried to get meetings with me to advocate for a particular issue and I won't take the meeting or the president won't take the meeting. So
yeah, you certainly see evidence of corruption in Washington DC. Do I see evidence of corruption from the president of the United States from the administration is taking? No, Tony. I just don't. I think that there's a lot of allegation out there and there's a lot of stuff where frankly I've read these articles and I've read the superficial summary and I say, "Oh, that doesn't sound right." And then I go and do the investigation myself and I say, "Wait a second. What they're saying the president did or what they're saying the president's son did, he didn't actually do." So I think it's important in these things, let's not convict people in a court of law because look, two things
I'll say about United States is that one, it's not really about the president. He hates No, it is. It's a broader point. Well, you're you're you're implicitly, I think, saying that there's a corruption problem that if he's not involved in, I think you're accusing him of at least sanctioning a voter. Donald Trump hates when people make money off of them. He hates the idea that somebody would come in and say, "I'm going to give you a meeting with the president and I'm going to get rich because I gave you access to the president." The president would never tolerate that behavior, Tony. Now, just one more question here. Go ahead.
Vice President Vance, I appreciate it. the issue that voters see and that gets on their mind and that I hear when I'm out there is the president is making a lot of money off of crypto. Uh his own IRS has barred itself from looking into his tax returns. You have this recent issue with the ambassador to Greece seeming to sell access to the White House. That's why people are concerned and if there's nothing to hide, you say you've seen nothing. First of all, somebody's selling access to the White House. That's disgusting and despicable and they should suffer consequences. What I'm saying is that's an isolated incident though.
I want to make those judgments based on the facts and not based on a random news media report that I read. Fair enough. So, when the facts are being investigated, let's say in January, if there's a Democratic uh controlled Congress, will you comply and honor subpoenas? Of course. Of course I will. Look, I mean, we follow the law. I follow the law. I'm a law-abiding guy outside of speeding, uh, which luckily, thanks to the Secret Service and the generosity of the American people, I don't drive anymore. Probably good for the insurance rates in southwestern Ohio. But look, man, I think that I've seen these media reports and I have the same reaction I imagine a lot of people in this room have, which it makes me uneasy when I read about my public
officials potentially getting wealthy off of my public trust. And I'm telling you that while yes, DC is a corrupt town. Tony, you know this is as well as anybody, Donald Trump, I have not seen a single shred of evidence that he participates or sanctions in that corruption. You're making the argument here uh in the state of Michigan and this is one of those races that could decide the outcome, who controls the Senate. And it's closer than I think a lot of people expected. It's close in part because there are some Trump voters from 2024 who have now switched to say, I'm going to vote for a Democrat this time around. I'm going to vote for Abdul El Say Siad. In fact, we have one of
those voters here tonight, Keshan Weaten. He's a 43-year-old barber. Keshan, where are you? He's got a question for the vice president. Go ahead. Greetings, Mr. Vice President. My name is Keshan Weeden from Detroit. And I voted for Trump in 2020 and 2024 because I saw the gas prices fall during his first term, as low as 117 a gallon in Detroit. And now I'm paying 433 a gallon for gas. And I wanted to know what aren't we doing that we could be doing to obtain the previous Trump administration's gas prices? And also, I plan on voting for El Say in this upcoming election, and I wanted to know why should I vote for Mike Rogers instead.
Okay. Well, I really appreciate that, man, and uh appreciate the question, and obviously the support in 2024. I'm vice president because of it. But I think that first of all, I recognize that gas prices are too high right now. And I think it's important to be honest about why they are so elevated. And there are a few different things going on. So the first thing that's going on obviously is what's happening in the Middle East, particularly the fact that the Iranians are shooting at every commercial ship that they can. It's a global energy market, so that's pushing up the price of fuel everywhere. But there are also a lot of things that we've done already to lower fuel prices and frankly to keep
them from going even higher. We've never had a situation like this where you have effectively the largest state sponsor of terrorism that's trying to completely choke off world energy supply. The fact is that if we just like left and we let the Iranians control shipping out of the straight of Hormuse, uh what that would mean is you would pay a lot more for gasoline. There are also other things that we frankly should have been doing years ago and we are now doing quite affirmatively. So, a couple days ago, I was in Texas and we announced that we're going to use what's called the Defense Production Act to massively increase the amount of refining capacity uh that we have in the United States of America. That's actually the biggest reason why gas
prices are so high is because when Joe Biden was president, we had about 20% of American refining capacity that went offline. We're slowly bringing that online, but it does take a little bit of time. And because we shut down so much refining capacity, we were more susceptible to this shock that we've seen in the Middle Eastern energy prices. So there's a lot that we are doing. It's just we also are working against an Iranian regime that's shooting at commercial shipping. And President Vance, if I may, Keshan's talking about this increase in gas prices just since you guys took office. Uh it's almost been two years. At a certain point, it becomes your economy, not Joe Biden's economy. Also, back in
March, right here in Michigan, you said it was just a temporary blip in gas prices. How long is temporary? Well, look, um I don't think that when this conflict is over, we are going to see gas prices come down. But it takes two to tango. And what's happening right now in the Middle East is that you have these terrorists who are shooting at all these ships. They're blowing up the ships. They're blowing up world energy markets in the process. And what we've tried to do, we've actually gotten more oil and gas out of the Middle East than we've had in a very long time. That's because, frankly, our troops are doing incredibly brave work. And we're the only people in the world
that could actually do it. And I guess that Keshan, what I would argue to you is yes, I'm very aware. And look, you know, you probably know my story. I grew up in a working-class family. When gas prices were high, I know that it made my grandmother suffer. And I'm sure that you're struggling with it in a variety of ways. But what I would say is what is Abdul Elsed saying about it and what is Mike Rogers saying about it and what are their actual ideas to fix the problem? And what I'd say is we drew down way too much oil and gas capacity and we drew down way too much refining capacity. We are bringing that stuff online, but it does take a little bit of time. Is there a chance you don't run for president in 2028? Of course there's a chance. Yeah, man.
We've got four little kids. Um my wife has never loved politics. She loves public service. I think, you know, you can do a lot of good in this job and I've tried to do as much good as possible. But I really people ask me this question all the time and I think they assume because I'm a politician. Of course, she's going to run for president in 2028. The way that I think about life, big life decisions. My wife will tell you this is I'm a procrastinator. I hate thinking about it. And what will happen is that first of all, after all of these fine people elect Mike Rogers, United States senator for the state of Michigan, what's going to happen is then I'll have to think about it. and then I will actually have to make a decision.
But you know, anything could happen, man. Wow. Thank you to our questioners. Thank you to our audience. Thank you to the vice president. You can watch the town hall on cbsnews.com and also on our YouTube page. And CBS News will have many more conversations on the things that matter, topics that are important to Americans across the political divide. So, please stay tuned. I'm Tony Dopal for CBS News. Good night.
