A lone social media post from President Donald Trump may have single-handedly doomed Vice President JD Vance’s political future in perpetuity, MS NOW columnist Paul Waldman argued Sunday.
The day after Republicans’ historic midterm defeat earlier this month, Vance wrote on X about “the reason we lost is the war,” referencing Trump’s deeply unpopular war against Iran. Reports soon followed that he was trying to revive talks with Tehran.
Trump ended that effort Thursday in an early-morning Truth Social post in which he directed the VP to focus his “complete and total attention” on what he called “Massive Corruption and Crime” in Democratic-run cities and states.
“We don’t need a deal with Iran,” Trump wrote. “Those days have long since passed.”
The episode, Waldman argued, showed that Vance can’t simply walk away from “the political albatross that is this war,” even if losing the Iran role looks like a break for him on paper.
“No matter how hard he tries to distance himself from the president, in 2028 and forever after, voters will always see JD Vance as Trump’s guy — and the Iran war as, in part, his war,” Waldman wrote.
A peace deal would have let Vance run in 2028 as the war’s lone internal critic and the man who brought it to a close, but any deal needed Trump’s approval, and the president has shown little appetite for giving Tehran anything meaningful in return, Waldman noted. He had a blunt read on Trump’s no-deal bravado: “What he really means is that he can’t get a deal with Iran.”
Waldman likened the political fallout to the Iraq War, which was still haunting Republicans in the 2016 primaries, 13 years after the invasion.
Vance’s 2028 plans remain murky. People close to him told CNN he has seriously weighed sitting out the race, though allies told The Washington Post a bid remains the likelier outcome.