Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
All this has really important implications for how our country can move forward and get past Trump. So we’re talking about all of it with Nick Grossman, who has a good piece discussing the centrality of Trump’s illegal war to the epic midterm loss. Nick, good to have you on.
Sargent: So let’s start with JD Vance. He put out a long statement on X that’s pretty remarkable. He admitted that the main problem in the election was that a whole lot of voters who had backed Trump and Vance in 2024 voted Democratic. And Vance said this: “The reason we lost is the war.”
Grossman: I’ve never seen a vice president do this before, of break with the administration. And I think he’s probably right, in that the Iran war was a major factor in Republicans’ loss. Another major one was corruption, and JD didn’t mention that at all.
Sargent: He understands that it’s an utter catastrophe for his 2028 chances. That’s what this really shows as well, doesn’t it?
Sargent: That is a really good point. There was a really interesting moment as well where Trump was asked about JD Vance and the war, apparently in the context of these massive electoral losses. Listen to what Trump said.
Sargent: I read that as a serious warning that Vance has to be extremely careful about how he interprets these election results. What did you think of it?
He’s suggesting, at minimum, that maybe Trump did something that was wrong. And I don’t expect Trump to—well, if he did take that and kind of let it go, or take it to heart, this would be the first time.
Grossman: Yeah, and it could be a lot of different people that are jockeying for a post-Trump Republican Party. And with these midterm results, that became something that now looks a lot sooner than it used to.
And Vance also mentioned being less supportive of Israel, which I noted was something that Trump said in the very last moments before the campaign, that he was going to reduce aid to Israel. And I doubt that would actually happen.
Sargent: You’re referring to Vance’s statement, in which he said that one way forward for Republicans to repair the breach with MAGA voters is to, “put America first and change our relationship to Israel.”
Grossman: The Republicans seem to be splitting on the question. There are still a lot of the hawks, the strong supporters of Benjamin Netanyahu. The white evangelical Christian support of Israel is in part tied up in prophecy and in part tied up in racism. And a decent amount of that is probably going to stay around.
Both Vance and Carlson have pushed that. So I think on the substance of it, Republicans will have this split. I don’t know which way it’s going to go, but people like Vance are going to try to do that.
Sargent: Nick, what exactly is the America First vision? You’ve been pretty good on this. I think we should talk a little bit about what utter bullshit it is, in a certain way, in the sense that there’s a tendency out there to interpret it as isolationist or even anti-war, but it’s not anything like that. It’s hyper-militaristic.
And it’s also a shrugging off of international alliances and commitments, human rights commitments, basically. It’s a declaration that we’ll just blow people up in the Caribbean with no due process if we decide it’s good for us. But so, what is this kind of foreign policy vision that fuses that with this anti-Israel ideology? What is it?
And at times it seems like it just means somewhat similar to Trumpism: easy bullying victories, and not screw-ups or not hard things. So America First doesn’t seem to really object to, say, the boat bombings in the Caribbean, or the takeover of Venezuela and stealing of oil from Venezuela, and didn’t really object to the Iran war at the very start either. It was only once it turned bad that they ended up doing that.
And that had some political appeal. But as an actual action, it’s just been internationalist bullying, nobody can tell me what to do, lined up with authoritarianism, and in some attitudes pretty fascist.
Grossman: The Israel piece is weird, because it depends on whether an American kind of sees them as us or them. There are some American hawks that really, especially on the right, that really see Israel as kind of an us—for example, us against the Muslims or something together. And there are some that see Israel as, like, the white evangelical Christians have seen it as sort of an us, in terms of in part biblical prophecy and in part things like racial or cultural or theocratic links between the two, or appeal between the two.
Sargent: Vance seems to think that he can actually find a way forward here by allying himself with the Tucker wing. He’s going to run into some trouble with the evangelicals and the hawks, who are, I think, maybe going to be—at least the hawks will be—somewhat emboldened by Trump’s failures, right?
And so I have trouble seeing how Vance goes forward here and represents the whole Republican Party, when there are going to be big-time knives out for the “America First” vision among some of these Republican hawks, and the white evangelicals may not even be on board either. What do you think of that?
So that as long as Vance can get the far right on his side, and get kind of the white nationalists and the racists and the bigots, and get that on his side, get the nomination, then the rest will come along.
Sargent: So a lot of this is coming as Republican anger at Donald Trump is really mounting big time. Politico reports that Republicans are really starting to point fingers at Donald Trump over what happened here. There was a really striking quote from the failed Maine Republican gubernatorial candidate Bobby Charles, who said this: “I’m optimistic for the future, because Trump’s going to be gone in two years.”
So it seems like the tension here is not really resolvable in some fundamental sense. It’s just going to have to crack up. And I have trouble seeing how Vance manages that, because if Vance goes too far in pulling away from Trump, then Trump will just sink his political ambitions by saying, you can’t be the nominee. How do you see this unfolding?
And given how bad this loss was for them, and how far we are into the Trump era, and how exhausted some people are from it, and also how strong the argument is that it really is his fault that they lost—I don’t know how that one would happen either. So it seems like they’re headed for a split.
And so this idea of Vance coming out and saying sort of it was him, or a governor candidate that lost saying it was him—that he and some of his people are going to push back on that, that they don’t want to, otherwise he’s a total lame duck and just slinks away, and it would be out of character. And so both hopefully, and it sure looks to me like this is the path for it, Republicans are going to react to this by splitting. And if the midterm was closer, they might have been able to better hold together.
But here’s a situation where JD Vance very clearly placed a bet on the idea that MAGA was a culturally dominant force. He was going to ride that all the way to the presidency himself. And now that idea’s just been blown to smithereens. And it’s a little hard to see how he gets back on track after that. What do you think?
He’s tied to a lot of Silicon Valley stuff, and the opposition in this election also was to tech oligarchs, data centers, and AI was a component in it. And so that is who got him in the vice presidency in the first place. The only reason how he became a senator in Ohio and then the vice president was, Peter Thiel threw tons of money at the primary.
And so when you add his personal lack of charisma, his name is in the administration that is very unpopular and doing unpopular things, where he’s going to have to pick a lane in a Republican Party that seems to be splitting, and he’s tied to the tech oligarchs—I mean, I think that he might end up running anyway, because one is the delusion of, hey, maybe it’ll work. And two, because if it doesn’t work now, this is probably his best shot. Or at least he could think that. So I think he’ll take a shot at it.
Like, the economy is really good and he manages to squeak by as sort of a Trump legacy person. But no, I think his political career is in quite a bit of trouble. And if anything, it’s possible to read his statement as an element of desperation, in that, about how, I better quickly get distance from this or I’m screwed.
Grossman: Mm-hmm. And Vance should know that, given who he’s been around this whole time and who he’s kissed up to this whole time. He could either run as Trump’s successor, or he has to take on Trump directly. And if he’s going to pick something big, like, your signature foreign policy is why we lost, then that means taking him on.
Sargent: A hundred percent. I think we’re only seeing the very beginning of the bloodletting, man. Nick Grossman, always awesome to talk to you. Great stuff today. Thank you so much.
Grossman: Yeah, it was a pleasure. Thanks for having me.
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