Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Indeed, there are several other signs that Trump world is setting up Vance to take the eventual fall on Iran in a number of different ways. New leaks from inside the administration are making Trump’s Iran deal look even worse, and they’re also shedding light on what this shivving of Vance really entails.
Virginia Heffernan: Hey, Greg, same here. I like being on the show.
JD Vance (voiceover): We’re doing a lot to make it better. It’s going to take a little bit of time. There’s a lot more work to do. But the president knows that a lot of Americans are struggling. In fact, he ran on that, he talked about it, and we’ve done some things and made some good progress on that point.
Vance (voiceover): What he said, Anna, what he said is that he loves the fact that the inflation is going to come down when this war is over. That’s what he said.
Vance (voiceover): Well, look, look—what the president said, people were asking about the inflation, they were asking about the affordability problem, which again is very real. And what he said is, I love the inflation because it’s going to come down when the war is over.
Heffernan: Well, I mean, I think—I don’t know, do people still say mogged? I do think that JD Vance got mogged by the women of The View. They were all on top of him. I know he had said on Fox News the day before, or maybe earlier this morning, that he was trying to prepare for a civil conversation, but he knew he was going into the lion’s den.
So he wasn’t going into the lion’s den for no reason. He was going into it to promote a book. And indeed they gave the QR code so you could buy the book at the end. They did their part. And they gave him a onesie for his forthcoming newborn that says The View on it. But—
Heffernan: I was wondering about that. I thought, maybe that’s just another mogg moment. Like, we’ll brand your baby with The View. I mean, we don’t want to get too symbolic about it, but there was a lot going on and it’s a lot to watch.
Sargent: JD was really on his best behavior, though. We should point that out. Now, what do you think of the inflation exchange? Because I want to clarify for people that the inflation exchange is really about inflation from the war.
Heffernan: So what Vance says is he didn’t mean he loves the inflation, he meant I love that the inflation is going to go down after the war. And for some reason, everything these days is reminding me of this moment in The Simpsons. I can’t remember what season it is, but I think that Sideshow Bob or someone who’s trying to kill Bart has “Die Bart Die” tattooed on his chest. And when it’s revealed—”Die Bart Die”—he says, no, this is just German. “Die Bart Die.”
Sargent: I want to add something about that exchange as well. As you say, it’s a stretch, as Vance said, that Trump was claiming that he loves the fact that inflation will come down after the war. I think Trump was more saying, I don’t give a shit about the inflation because the problem’s going to magically go away because I say it is, and that’s it, and you should make it go away in your head. That’s what he actually meant.
So Vance has kind of been maneuvered into a position where he’s tied to defending that—essentially that big, big, big thing about the Trump term, which is a very, very tough thing to defend.
So we don’t even have a narrative about why we’re in Iran. They weren’t building nukes—or were they? Nobody is following this enriched uranium conversation or whatever JD Vance is saying this new Iran deal is, which sounds like the last, or good, Iran deal, except worse.
And I think it reads to the American people as, we’ve gone to war for Israel and we don’t know why. And nobody has a stake in figuring out this nuclearized Iran because we keep not understanding it. The only thing we understand is we’re paying more, something about the Strait of Hormuz, and this is all Trump’s fault. And we have then no faith in him. There’s not even a strong base that’s trying to spin up support for it. What they just say back is, it’s a hoax, or, you’re nasty for asking questions about it.
And this is a really key thing. I want to read it. “In internal discussions, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth both expressed concerns and raised questions about the memorandum of understanding announced Sunday, while Vance and U.S. envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner advocated for it, according to two of the sources.”
Heffernan: As you said before, I think he’s being shivved. I think that the person who is least confident in Trump’s decisions around foreign policy—as we’ve seen from his past disputes with Trump and Hegseth, and pretty aggressive, meaningful isolationism—is having to defend those things and then just babble about how bad Obama was, about whatever comes into his head, because the details of the deal have never been fully exposed. We don’t know what they are.
But now, are we trying to prevent breakout capacity? What’s the time horizon? What are the things that an ordinary diplomat would ask about with this deal? No, it’s just Trump trying to humiliate people or be humiliated himself.
And this isn’t a question of Democrats saying he is crazy. This is a question of, if you are negotiating with this person, how do you talk to an actually insane person? Like, how do you say, flatter his ego, do XYZ? And Iran is very likely to get away with some pretty hideous things with JD Vance scrambling to defend him, being shivved by the president, and the president himself insane. And Hegseth pretty insane.
Everybody knows that vice presidents are on the hook for that as a general matter. They’re supposed to go out and take a lot of shit for the president, and that’s just sort of part of the role. Everyone knows that. And now he’s got to go out there and defend this deal when everyone knows it’s a complete joke and nobody else has to be as frontal as him.
And also speak for something that he doesn’t know about, because nobody has seen this deal. This deal is like Pam Bondi’s “I have the list of Epstein’s people on my desk.” There may be a piece of yellow paper with some Sharpie scribbles on it, but we don’t know what this piece of disposable diplomacy is.
Sargent: Exactly. Very well put. And there are more signs of Vance getting set up here. Joe Perticone of The Bulwark highlighted a number of statements from Trump-friendly people. For instance, Senator Lindsey Graham, who’s a staunch Trump ally, described Vance as “the architect of the deal.” Very, very clear. This is Vance’s deal, says Senator Lindsey Graham, who probably hates the deal and thinks it’s going to fall apart later. That’s a key point, right?
And Trump himself recently said that JD Vance will probably be at the signing ceremony instead of him. We’ll see how that pans out, but it’s really obvious where all the arrows are pointing.
And so he wants a way to back out of it, but he doesn’t want to make something called “the Iran deal,” because an Iran deal is supposedly what made Obama seem weak, seem like a globalist, seem like he didn’t understand hard power. And so here he is making an Iran deal in order to back out of the optional war of choice that he started for no reason to get attention.
Heffernan: He wants an Iran surrender and they are not—there is no white flag from Iran. I mean, the other thing is we haven’t had this kind of open collision with Iran ever. And we’re starting to see their cards. And they have played the propaganda war very well. I mean, the Lego videos have mostly been taken down, but those were really influential. And “Your Government Is Run by Pedophiles,” their hit song of the summer—you can still find that. It was on Spotify and rising up the ranks.
Sargent: You raise a really interesting point there. And there’s the global economy as well, which is going to continue to be in a really ailing state because of all this.
And so we start to get into next year, and then that’s when the presidential race starts. And at that point, Trump is really checked out. He’s passing from the scene. And so next year you’ve got JD Vance as the frontman to defend all of the legacy of the Iran war.
Heffernan: I mean, as you point out, there are Republicans who hate the Iran deal—or want to see it fail, like Lindsey Graham—because they’re hawks, because they are really invested in this idea of Iran as a rogue state in opposition to Israel as a democracy and an ally in the region, which has also shifted in popular imagination, and yet that’s something that a Lindsey Graham is going to hold on to. So you have old-school Republican hawks who are going to hate that there’s a deal at all.
There’s absolutely no way that an Iran deal of any kind is going to play as a success with the American people. The only way that this could come to a soft landing for them is if prices go steeply down, if affordability goes up, if the strait is completely open and free, and if we have a complete surrender by Iran. And none of that is possible either.
So this is an impossible position. JD Vance is so in a corner. I don’t know—it’s impossible for him to make a friend. Tucker Carlson is just going to hold him responsible. Tucker Carlson, who hates this war, who broke with Trump over this war, who begged Trump not to go to war, and now opposes Trump and is sort of the leader of this particular—and maybe running for office himself, right? We shouldn’t rule that out.
Sargent: Right. Just to really boil this down, basically every major element of the MAGA coalition will dislike whatever emerges here, so they’ll dislike Vance for it. And all the constituencies that Republicans, especially Trumpy Republicans like JD Vance, need to win majorities—young people, working-class non-white—they’ll also hate it. So that’s where Vance is.
Sargent: I don’t either. Virginia Heffernan, awesome to talk to you. Thank you so much.
Heffernan: Thank you.
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