Where did things go wrong? That question is often top of mind after a humiliating failure, so it’s hardly a surprise that Vice President JD Vance is asking it after the Republican Party lost both chambers of Congress in the largest midterm defeat since Watergate. What’s surprising is how he’s answering the question.
In a lengthy post Wednesday on X, Vance spun the GOP’s massive defeat by blaming the administration he serves in—and the president he serves under, in particular—for launching a deeply unpopular war on Iran. The veep’s goal is barely concealed: He wants to succeed Donald Trump in two short years, and he doesn’t want the stink of Iran or the 2026 midterms on him. So he publicly threw his boss under the bus in an essay on Elon Musk’s hellsite. It has to be one of the boldest and most shameless things a vice president has ever done.
Vance, ever the clumsy retail politician, starts with an anecdote. He takes us behind the scenes to the days leading up to the midterms. The polls were looking bad then, though they ended up considerably underestimating Democratic margins, and the vice president wanted to know what was up. Was there any reason to hope?
Vance turned to the “smartest data guy I know” to ask if his party had any shot in hell. “No,” that man—who may or may not actually exist—allegedly responded. “We might do better than the polls suggest. But the data is telling us that a lot of Trump/Vance 2024 voters are pissed and planning to vote for the other guys. Our voters are turning out, but they may not vote for us.”
This was “prophetic”—and not in a good way. “The main problem is not turnout,” Vance wrote. “The main problem is that many people who voted for Trump/Vance in 2024 voted for Democrats in 2026.” Hence the blue wave. Hence the X post.
But here’s where it gets really interesting. Vance then goes to a pollster—maybe the second smartest data guy he knows, maybe not. This person gives him a list of the priorities of the defectors: “The top four answers, accounting for nearly all of the responses were: 1) End the war 2) Focus on cost of living/inflation 3) Put America First 4) Change our relationship to Israel.”
That is essentially a repudiation of the president and his administration, which 1) Started the war and can’t figure out how to end it 2) Has not brought down the cost of living, and indeed has made it worse 3) Is putting Corporate America first 4) Has steadfastly defended Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Vance then drops the hammer: “The reason we lost is the war.” The vice president attempts to temper this this by saying that Trump himself acknowledged as much last night. But that’s not really true. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal early Wednesday, Trump said Iran was a “piece” of why they lost. Vance is saying something altogether different: that the war Trump started, in part due to his close relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is why Republicans were just handed the worst midterm defeat in half a century. And not only that, Vance is all but saying that he opposes the war.
This borders on insubordination. Vance has been playing a weaselly game since the start of the war, offering tepid public support while his team anonymously leaks to the press about his supposed opposition. Whether he’s genuinely opposed to the war, or simply plotting his political future, is not clear. But he clearly understands that the war has turned a blue wave into a total wipeout, and that he need to wash his hands of it if he wants to stand a chance in 2028.
But Vance’s decision to blame the GOP’s midterm collapse solely on the Iran war is especially interesting. “Everyone knows why we lost,” he wrote, referring to voters’ anger over the war. “And any honest conversation about where we go from here must start there.” It’s undoubtedly true that the war and the resulting spike in prices—particularly oil and gas—played a major role in Tuesday’s results. But one could point to a host of other possible factors: the administration’s violent immigration crackdown, its self-destructive tariffs, or its alienation of longtime allies and coddling of dictators.
Vance doesn’t do that, however, and it’s not hard to see why: He’s walking a tightrope. He has to acknowledge the defeat, but he cannot see it as a rebuke of MAGA/America First. As wily an operator as he is, it’s too late for him to disown the movement: As Trump’s vice president, he is one of its main inheritors. So he is trying to rescue MAGA from the president.
The choice to single out Iran is notable because it’s an obvious area in which the president deviated from his campaign platform, which at least paid lip service to not starting endless foreign wars. It allows Vance to suggest—albeit subtly—that Trump betrayed his own movement. In his telling, the people want immigration crackdowns and (in the abstract) tariffs; they just don’t want wars and high prices. Another subtext of Vance’s post is that Trump is simply too erratic and incompetent to be trusted—and that Vance is. (One delicious wrinkle is that the post was approvingly quote-tweeted by Donald Trump Jr., who, in a particularly Succession-y move, commented with several 100 emojis.)
It’s hard not to read Vance’s post in the context of a rather odd column Wednesday in the New York Times by Christopher Caldwell, one of the global populist right’s few interesting thinkers. Caldwell blames Trump for squandering the mandate he was handed in 2024, suggesting that the Republicans lost because Trump “chose swagger over rational argument. Instead of allowing his policies to have their effect, he squandered his energy humiliating his opponents.” He suggests, for instance, that Trump should have calmly, cooly laid out the case for sending goons to Minneapolis. It’s an unconvincing argument. Swagger and humiliation are central to Trump’s political appeal; rational argument is for RINOs and libs.
And JD Vance. Caldwell’s column makes more sense if you read it as being addressed to the vice president. Indeed, in some ways it lays out a conceivable version of what the last two years would have looked like if Vance had been in charge this fascist administration. (Spoiler alert: It’s not pretty.) Vance is now making the case that he can give the people real Trumpism: the immigration and economic policies they want, without all the chaos, incompetence, and buffoonery. That, ultimately, is what is so extraordinary about his X post: It’s a bid to take over the political movement Trump launched eleven years ago and fundamentally change its direction. It’s audacious, but also consistent with everything we know about JD Vance. He only has one loyalty, and that’s to his own ruthless ambition.
