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Vice President JD Vance Delivers Remarks at the 250th Anniversary of the United States Marine Corps, Oct. 18, 2025

October 18, 2025 · The White House · 0:32:43

Embedded from the source channel — never re-uploaded. Watch on YouTube

What happened

Vice President JD Vance delivered the anniversary remarks at the 250th Anniversary celebration for the United States Marine Corps at Camp Pendleton, California, on October 18, 2025, following a live-fire amphibious demonstration by the I Marine Expeditionary Force and the Navy’s Third Fleet. Vance opened by thanking Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, who had spoken earlier in the program, and Secretary of the Navy John Phelan, and noted his own place in the Corps’ history: “the very first vice president to have been a United States Marine,” as he put it. He brought greetings from President Trump and a pay pledge tied to the ongoing shutdown: the President, he said, “is going to do everything he can to make sure you get paid exactly as you deserve” despite what he called the “Schumer shutdown.”

The Vice President traced the Corps from November 10, 1775 — Captain Samuel Nicholas’s recruiting drive at Tun Tavern in Philadelphia — through Tripoli, Belleau Wood, Iwo Jima, the Chosin Reservoir and Khe Sanh, and the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit’s post-9/11 amphibious assault. He argued that officials who “shift focus to mandating diversity quotas or they try to inject partisan politics into the American armed forces” impede the Corps’ work, and said the administration is refocusing the military “on those timeless values of discipline, readiness, and faith in one another”: “it is not our diversity that makes us stronger. It is our common purpose.” He closed with personal stories from his own enlisted service, including the gunnery sergeant who steered him away from a 22-percent-interest car loan to Navy Federal Credit Union.

Why it matters

This is the Vice President’s signature military address of the fall: a former enlisted Marine, now second in the chain of command, speaking to the Corps on its 250th birthday at its largest West Coast base. It is also the administration’s clearest statement, in Vance’s own voice, of the Hegseth-era personnel doctrine — common purpose over diversity mandates — delivered to the service that produced him.

Scoreboard watch

Scoreboard watch: the pay pledge Vance carried from the President on October 18, 2025 — that Marines would be paid on time despite the shutdown — as stated at Camp Pendleton. Flagged for the scoreboard editor; no entry is published from this page.

Sources: The White House, “Vice President JD Vance Delivers Remarks at the 250th Anniversary for the United States Marine Corps” (official upload, embedded above; Camp Pendleton, CA). Remarks as delivered. The full celebration, including the amphibious demonstration and Secretary Hegseth’s remarks, is the alternate White House upload recorded with this page.