OPINION:
Vice President J.D. Vance knew he had to get out — quickly. So he threw his boss, President Trump, under the bus the day after Republicans lost the House and Senate, rendering them both lame ducks until they leave office.
“The reason we lost is the war,” Mr. Vance wrote in a finger-pointing post on X, pinning the GOP’s historic drubbing squarely on Mr. Trump’s decision to drag the country into a conflict with Iran. He did not stop there. “If you’d like to argue it was worth it, that losing the Senate for the next six years was worth it, then do so. Argue it was a worthwhile cost to pay. Agree or disagree, that’s at least honest.”
Honest, maybe. Smart, debatable. The post was drafted without Mr. Trump’s sign-off, according to two sources familiar with the matter, which tells you everything you need to know about where Mr. Vance believes the wind is blowing.
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This was not a eulogy for the party’s midterm performance. It was a campaign launch disguised as a postmortem.
Here is the thing: He is not wrong about the war. Voters who backed the Trump-Vance ticket in 2024 on a promise of “no new wars” watched that promise evaporate, and reliably red Midwestern states such as Iowa and Kansas and Texas flipped blue as energy costs spiked.
Mr. Vance, an Iraq War veteran who reportedly lobbied against the Iran campaign from the start, even recruited a pollster back in January to test the political appetite for regime change. The numbers came back split, loaded with caveats. Mr. Trump barreled ahead anyway.
So Mr. Vance gets to say, “I told you so.” What he does not get is a clean escape.
This is the problem with the sudden rebrand: You cannot un-ring the bell of being the sitting vice president in an administration that voters just rejected by a ridiculously huge margin. You lose Texas, you are done. One of Mr. Vance’s own allies reportedly warned him that his path to the nomination as a Trump insider could well be (duh) a dead end.
Young voters who found a 40-year-old Mr. Vance relatable in 2024 have cooled. Hispanic voters who gave Mr. Trump a record 42% of their vote are drifting back to Democrats. The Trump-Vance coalition didn’t just lose an election — it lost its shine.
A source close to Mr. Vance insists the tweetstorm worked: “JD came out on top and is now the leader of the American Right.” Maybe. But leading a movement that just got historically rebuked is not the flex it sounds like.
Mr. Vance can distance himself from the war all he wants; he will still have spent four years as Mr. Trump’s second-in-command, and voters have long memories for that particular brand of loyalty.
Meanwhile, the undercard is assembling, and it is not inspiring. Sen. Ted Cruz, Texas Republican, says it is “no secret” that he wants the job. This is the same Ted Cruz who lost the last contested primary he entered and has spent the years since auditioning for whichever faction will have him.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, term-limited and freshly unemployed come next year, is reportedly being floated by at least one major New York fundraiser as the “distance from Trump” candidate, a framing that requires ignoring his own failed 2024 run.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, ever the Zelig of the Trump era, will not say whether he is running, which is its own kind of answer. Nikki Haley is making the rounds, explaining what went wrong last time, as if she were not part of the same primary ecosystem that produced this mess.
Throw in Tulsi Gabbard, Sen. Rand Paul, Kentucky Republican, and Chris Christie attempting a third go and a grab bag of governors and senators — Greg Abbott of Texas, Brian Kemp of Georgia and Glenn Youngkin of Virginia — and you have less a field than a support group.
None of them is walking in untainted. That is the real inheritance of this administration: a bench so thin that “did not personally sign off on the war” counts as a bold differentiator.
As George Will put it, with characteristic understatement, Mr. Vance’s ambitions deserve to be “stymied” — his conduct this cycle, Mr. Will argued, “underscored” that a Vance presidency would mean “a potential four-year prolongation of the nation’s slog through a sewer of scabrous rhetoric serving odious politics.”
Mr. Vance may be positioning himself as the man who saw the Iran war debacle coming and said so. But being right about one catastrophe does not erase four years of being present for all the others. He did not just serve in this administration; he defended it, dismissed Watergate as a “12-hour news story” and called a mother-shaming attack ad “audacious.”
The stink does not come off with one well-timed tweet.
For the record, there is no MAGA movement without Mr. Trump, hence no heir. Mr. Vance wanted to lead the party into 2028. Instead, he may have just confirmed that there is nowhere left for any of them to go.
• Joseph Curl has covered five American presidents over nearly four decades at The Washington Times. He can be reached at jcurl@washingtontimes.com.
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