JD's war: Vance fights the blame game over Iran and the midterms
The U.S. vice president is trying to run from the war that his boss started. Good luck to him.
Maybe it was not such a good idea to repeatedly hit the "gas prices: go up" button ahead of an election, especially after winning the last one on a promise to make them go down.
"The reason we lost is the war," Vice President JD Vance posted on X after his Republican Party lost the 2026 midterms by a double-digit landslide. "If you'd like to argue it was worth it, that losing the Senate for the next 6 years was worth it, then do so. Argue it was a worthwhile cost to pay. Agree or disagree, that's at least honest."
Honesty, according to the man who lied about Haitians eating white America's pets, demands admitting what "everyone knows": that President Donald Trump's decision to bomb Iran earlier this year — along with "our relationship to Israel" — is why the reddest parts of America are turning shades of purple and blue.
Charles R. Davis
The vice president's analysis is written as if he were a critic, not a star of the show, and many have interpreted it as the opening shot in the 2028 campaign. Vance is smartly trying to distance himself from an unpopular president's unpopular war, while still affirming his commitment to the MAGA domestic agenda of ethnic cleansing via mass deportation ("establishment politicians," the sitting U.S. vice president warned, "say the solution to our woes is amnesty").
An anti-Trump centrist from Yale turned far-right soldier for MAGA, Vance is nothing if not an opportunist. Eventually, anyone with higher political aspirations and access to polling data will have to decide when and how to break from a man who turns 81 in June. But Vance's post-election missive is not that inevitable betrayal.
"I think it's largely true," Trump himself told reporters when asked about it. "It drove the gasoline up a little bit."
Like Vance, Trump has sought to reconcile the campaign rhetoric of isolationism with "the Iran thing" and his special military operations for oil. Before Americans headed to the polls, the White House ran taxpayer-funded ads in which the president of the United States pledged to evict the "warmongers" from Washington.
Starting a war sounds bad, Trump knows, so when he does it — well, no, he doesn't.
"I mean, what's a war?" Trump asked in an appearance on Fox News. "A war is — a war is fighting. Take a look at World War I, World War II," he said, insisting Iran isn't like any of that. "We're not fighting a war."
In the weeks before the election, Vance also made the rounds of right-wing media and positioned the president as standing up to "neocons" who would have him "send hundreds of thousands of ground troops into Iran."
That's just not going to happen, Vance told a right-wing podcaster, "because Donald Trump is just not George W. Bush."
In this way, Trump, a man who said a "whole civilization will die tonight" (and dropped the bombs that George W. Bush would not), is placed in a familiar role: enemy of a sprawling and indefatigable conspiracy known as "the establishment." There are others, "like John Podhoretz," who want even more war, Vance explained; compared to some guy, the most powerful man in the world actually wants less.
Opposed to the war wholeheartedly and from the start? Vance and others, from Tucker Carlson to White House aides, have offered a means for three-time Trump voters to square their anger over another conflict in the Middle East with their past or present support for the man responsible: once again — this comes easy — find someone else to blame.
Charles R. Davis
Vance tried this out over the summer, telling Megyn Kelly that he recognized "folks are frustrated with the role that Israel has in all this." And he returned to it after the midterms, claiming that "one of the smartest people I know in politics" had told him Trump 2024 voters wanted four things, all of which were effectively the same: "1) End the war 2) Focus on cost of living/inflation 3) Put America First 4) Change our relationship to Israel."
Vance isn't saying Israel made Trump do it, but that's exactly the narrative he gets from the far-right extremists he follows on X, where Israeli lobbying for war with Iran — a fact, and something prior administrations did not heed — is reduced to antisemitic conspiracy theories about Tel Aviv ruling Washington.
"There's thinking in and around the administration that the politics are a lot better if the Israelis go first," one person familiar with the discussions told Politico, which reported that "Trump's team is considering the optics."
The optics haven't changed, and both Vance and the president again appear to be on the same page. Trump, sensitive to perceptions of him as a weak and declining old man, is unlikely to ever come out and say that his big war is Israel's fault. But on the eve of the election, certainly aware of the discourse, Trump asserted that billions of dollars in aid to Israel would be "cut off at the end of the year." That claim remains to be verified, but he did not make it because his followers are mad about Gaza.
In the months ahead, it is not hard to imagine the vice president and others getting more explicit, perhaps claiming the White House's bombing campaign of choice was no choice at all, but something forced upon a gullible old man who thought it would be easy. But the people responsible for an illegal American war will always be Americans — folks like Vance who helped elect, and continue to serve, the only American president willing to start it.
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