For months, Vice President JD Vance had publicly defended the president’s war with Iran, even as he privately opposed it. Vance routinely explained it as something President Donald Trump felt was necessary, and a conflict that would not drag on indefinitely.
On Wednesday, after Republicans suffered a stunning defeat at the ballot box, Vance didn’t mince words about what caused the shellacking.
“The reason we lost is the war,” Vance said.
In a lengthy social media post, Vance, who is considering a presidential run, acknowledged the failures of some of the administration’s policies, a sharp contrast with Trump’s reaction. His response to the election results, which surprised and irked some of Trump’s advisers, signaled an awareness of the deep distrust among voters who put him and Trump in office — and whose support he will need should he choose to run in 2028.
While Trump and his top White House advisers blamed Republican candidates and tried to wash their hands of any responsibility for the GOP’s massive losses, Vance pinned the blame on the administration’s decisions.
Vance said that while mixed data had given the White House some hope of avoiding the worst going into Election Day, a trusted pollster had warned him earlier Tuesday that “a lot of Trump 2024 voters were angry and planning to vote for Democrats.”
Those voters wanted Trump to end the war, focus on the cost of living and inflation, put America first and “change our relationship to Israel,” Vance wrote.
“Our voters showed up,” Vance wrote. “And the above four reasons are why many of them voted for Democrats.”
Asked Wednesday about Vance’s 600-word postmortem analysis of Republicans’ losses, Trump said he has long known “how he feels about it,” but the president did not directly answer whether Vance had told ahead of time about his plans to make the post.
A White House official told The Washington Post that Trump had been briefed on the statement before its release and was comfortable with it.
“I think it was fine,” Trump said of what Vance wrote. “I thought it was good.”
Asked whether he has spoken to Vance about his 2028 ambitions, Trump said he speaks to his vice president “about a lot of things.”
“We’ll see what happens. You don’t know who’s talking about running,” Trump said. “You can have a lot of people, maybe a lot of people, running. Maybe nobody’s going to run. Maybe he won’t run.”
Trump insisted, however, that “as far as that war is concerned, I would have done nothing different.”
Donald Trump Jr., Trump’s son and a close friend of Vance, offered his support and reposted the vice president’s statement: “Every word of this is 100,” Trump Jr. wrote, using an emoji for 100 that signifies full agreement with someone.
Vance and Trump Jr. have privately opposed the war in recent months, and Vance, a Marine Corps veteran who served in the Iraq War, had become the face of the administration’s efforts over the summer to find a diplomatic solution to the conflict. In-person talks Vance held with Iranian officials in Pakistan and Switzerland ultimately failed to secure a lasting peace deal.
Some MAGA-aligned but anti-war conservatives were quick to praise Vance’s appraisal of the conflict’s cost and suggest a change of course.
“This is maybe the most thorough and honest diagnosis of an election defeat that we’ve ever seen from a politician at Vance’s level,” podcaster Matt Walsh wrote. “And he’s right.”
“It’s time to end the Iran war,” Andrew Kolvet, the executive producer of “The Charlie Kirk Show,” wrote in response to Vance, noting that “many on the right mercilessly attacked the VP’s efforts at peace over the summer.”
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