Trump chose war. Vance gets the fallout.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu lobbied to go to war with Iran for months. President Trump eventually agreed. But it’s Vice President JD Vance who is left holding the bag.
Ever since the White House announced a deal on Sunday, it’s Vance who has been on a nonstop media tour to try to sell it as a good thing. He has been the face of a so-far unreleased deal, but from the way Vance talks about it, it doesn’t accomplish any of the central goals of the war in the first place.
The Iranian regime is still in place. Nothing has changed with Iran’s nuclear program. While the country’s missile program is depleted, it’s still kicking. Iran’s proxy terrorist groups in Lebanon, Gaza, and Yemen are still there.
At first, putting Vance out there made practical sense. Trump was headed to Europe for the G7 conference. But now it doesn’t. Trump will fly out of Switzerland on Wednesday, instead of staying there to sign the cease-fire agreement on Friday. Instead, Vance will travel there, sign it, and get his picture taken.
Consider this, if the deal was amazing, would Trump let anyone else have the spotlight? This is, after all, someone who will apparently be allowed to raise the World Cup trophy with the team who actually did the work.
Which begs the question: What does this all mean for Vance? Vice presidents are asked to do less than ideal things all the time, and this appears to be no different.
But what is unique is that it comes at a time when there were already cracks emerging in the wall of inevitability that Vance is obviously the 2028 Republican nominee and the heir to the MAGA movement.
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After all, this was the plan. In selecting Vance as his vice president, Trump plucked someone smart and young and totally in political debt to Trump, given that his political career was less than two years old.
Immediately in office Vance did all the things anyone logically should in his position. He took over fund-raising for the Republican National Committee, he found excuses to visit early primary states, he would create even deeper ties with activist groups important to the Republican primary like Turning Point USA.
Along the way, however, came Secretary of State and human Swiss Army knife Marco Rubio. Trump’s confidence with Rubio has been on display for over a year, as Rubio’s portfolio has grown so much it has become a meme. Rubio was the one who took center stage during the successful operation in Venezuela.
Now, Vance gets the crap sandwich that is Iran.
The irony to all of this is that reporting suggests that Vance thought the whole war in Iran was a bad idea from the start. Now there is reason to believe it could be the anchor on his 2028 presidential ambitions. The knives against this deal are coming from all over the Republican coalition. There is the American First, growing Israeli government skeptical crowd, who didn’t want the war at all. There are the pro-Israel voices who think the Trump administration capitulated before completing the job. There is the obvious inflation and affordability angle. (One could also see a fiscal conservative argument in next year’s campaign season about what it all added to the national debt.) Vance will be forced to defend all of it somehow. And once Rubio or any other candidate makes a good run at Vance in polling, that could encourage all kinds of new candidates to enter the race with a fresh prospective.
Yes, politics is messy. Yes, the role of vice president requires a certain level of humiliation that goes along with it. But rarely can we see in real time how a decision by a president so easily sunk a vice president’s political future. Then again maybe it isn’t so rare under Trump. Just look at Mike Pence.
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