Vice President JD Vance dismissed the suggestion that traditional conservative Republicans would “wrest control” of the GOP from supporters of the MAGA movement after President Donald Trump leaves office and “go back to the Republican Party of 20 years ago.”

Vance made the comments during a conversation with Breitbart News’ Washington bureau chief Matt Boyle on Thursday, in which the two broadly discussed the divisions within the MAGA movement on foreign and economic policy. Both argued that the U.S. was experiencing a “political realignment,” with the Republican Party becoming the party of the working class and Democrats now more aligned with wealthier voters. 

“Part of what you see as division in the Republican Party is a consequence of this realignment. We have a new governing coalition. We have a new political coalition. We have people who didn’t used to vote Republican,” Vance said. “Frankly, they have different preferences, sometimes on certain issues, than maybe the Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush Republican Party did. I think the Donald Trump party is a fundamentally new phenomenon in American politics.”

“Some of those divisions you talk about are just the natural outgrowth of the fact that we’ve got a lot of working-class voters who, frankly, don’t care what was Republican orthodoxy 25 years ago, and so they’re pushing the party in a different direction,” the vice president continued. 

Boyle pointed out Vance’s mention of former President George W. Bush, and noted that the funeral of former Vice President Dick Cheney, who served under Bush, was taking place that morning. 

The vice president replied by offering his condolences to the Cheney family and praised his service to the country, but predicted that such an effort to return the Republican Party to the Bush-Cheney era would fail.

“Whether intentional or not, that was the legacy of the Republican Party that came before Donald J. Trump. I’m glad the president got us away from that Republican Party. It lost. It was also a disaster for the United States of America,” Vance said. 

Asked for his thoughts on “how to reunify” the conservative movement amid “some divisions” on domestic and foreign policy matters, Vance said he welcomed the ongoing debates while urging Republicans to not lose sight of the fact that their true opponent is the Democratic Party. 

“I think these debates should happen. They should happen on podcasts. They should happen in the media. They should happen on the op-ed pages. It’s totally reasonable for the people who make up this coalition to argue about what our foreign policy should be, what our specific tax policy should be, what our housing policy should be,” Vance explained, adding that the “disagreements that animated” the GOP were “important.”

Still, Vance encouraged conservatives “to remember that we have a lot more in common than we do not in common.” 

“My attitude is: Let these debates play out, but don’t let the debates that we’re having internally blind us to the fact that we are up against a radical leftist movement that murdered my friend [Charlie Kirk] a couple of months ago, and that would throw many people in the Trump administration in prison, not for doing anything illegal, but for not following the far-left’s agenda,” Vance said.

“That is the real opponent here: a political movement in this country that has no enemy in principle, that has no agenda for the American people. Their sole obsession is to take down Donald Trump and anybody who’d help Donald Trump govern,” he added. “Focus on the enemy. Have our debates, but focus on the enemy so that we can win in victories that matter to the American people.”