The day after the midterm election wipeout, Vice President JD Vance made his assessment known: The war in Iran cost Republicans the election. A week later, President Donald Trump reassigned Vance. Is this Leftmedia churn to drive conflict in the Trump administration, or is something more important happening?
I’ll make the case for the latter.
First, here’s Trump’s full Truth Social post yesterday:
I have asked Vice President Vance to focus his complete and total attention on the Massive Corruption and Crime taking place in Democrat run Cities and States throughout the U.S. The Blue States, such as Minnesota, California, Illinois, and many more, are all poorly run, corrupt disasters. Billions of Dollars is being stolen each and every month. Our Budget could be quickly BALANCED with the correction of this large scale criminal activity. CORRUPTION is in the Democrat Leadership’s blood! We don’t need a deal with Iran. Those days have long since passed. We’ve got their money, Hundreds of Billions of Dollars, and we’ve got their Strait! Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DJT
First, Vance is already doing good work leading the administration’s Task Force to Eliminate Fraud, so it makes sense that Trump wants to increase focus on that. That’s even more true when Democrats are about to take control of the purse strings and launch a myriad of investigations into Trump administration corruption.
“If the Democrats want to ‘root out corruption,’” Trump taunted in a follow-up post, “they should start with investigating Blue States, perhaps the most CORRUPT governmental structures and entities anywhere on Earth.”
Second, it is significant that Vance and Trump disagree on Iran because the commander-in-chief can’t have a number two negotiating for a deal when he isn’t on board with the boss’s policy. The Wall Street Journal reports, “The move comes as Vance had opened a communications channel with Mohsen Rezaei, the hard-line secretary of Iran’s top security body, and considered face-to-face talks with him.” It seems Trump has put a stop to that.
The problem is, as National Review’s Dan McLaughlin put it, Vance “always thought that a deal with Iran, any deal at any price, was preferable to war, any war under any conditions.”
Instead, Trump has concluded that Iran has no leverage for a deal, so it’s not worth pursuing one with its dishonest and vengeful leaders. The U.S. military crushed Iran, leaving the mullahs with little but terrorist attacks and assassination plots, which certainly isn’t nothing, but neither is it a nuclear weapon. At home, Trump has already paid the political price for his necessary decision, so he has little left to lose.
“We won,” Trump said on Wednesday. “Now the question is when we want to end. We must have a total victory, not a 93% victory. It’s going to be total.”
Sure, this may be an ideological wedge between the two men, but I suspect that neither one of them minds it. Trump can easily make a shift like this to accommodate it, which he did without saying anything negative about his veep. And Vance probably prefers some distance from the president — and especially an unpopular policy — as he ponders a 2028 presidential run.
In my way-too-early estimation, a Republican will only win in 2028 by creating distance from Donald Trump, and this helps Vance do so.
Ultimately, though, I wouldn’t make a big deal out of this as some kind of major rift between Trump and Vance or overstate its effect on two very long political years from now. The truth is, Trump delivered the biggest message to Iran: You have no leverage, and we’re done negotiating.
