Republicans Turn Against JD Vance After His Stark Warning to Israel

Vice President JD Vance is taking flak from conservatives after criticizing Israeli opposition to President Trump’s deal with Iran.

Vance was asked at a news conference Thursday about reports that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was angry over the deal, which provides Iran with several major concessions. Vance said that he hadn’t heard Netanyahu offer any criticism, but he had words for Israeli Cabinet ministers attacking Trump and the deal.  

“My message to them would be twofold. ​No. 1: Donald J. Trump is the only head of state in the entire world ‌who is sympathetic to the nation of Israel at this ‌moment in time,” Vance said. “If I was in the Cabinet of the Israeli government, I might not be attacking the only powerful ally that I have anywhere left ‌in the entire world.“

Vance added that two-thirds of the weapons that Israel has “have been built by American hands and paid for by American tax dollars.” 

“The problem for Israel is not Donald J Trump, and anybody in Israel who thinks their biggest problem is the president of the United States needs to wake up and smell the reality of the situation that country is in,” Vance said. 

That was enough to set off the MAGA base, including Republicans in Congress.

Hard-right Representative Randy Fine, known for his bigotry against Muslims, called Vance’s comments “absolutely inappropriate and frankly disgusting” in an interview on Real America’s Voice Friday morning. 

“The state of Israel was not created by the United States; it is not funded by the United States, except in some small way. It was created in the blood and sweat and tears of the Jewish people arising out of the Holocaust,” the Florida congressman said. “The United States didn’t support Israel in its formation: In fact, there were times when it put arms embargos in place, and JD Vance would be wise to go back and learn his history. I think his comments … were completely out of line.”

Fox News host Brian Kilmeade also expressed his dismay at the vice president Friday.

“If the cartels were lobbing rockets into Texas from Mexico, we would not allow that, even if Israel asked us to, and I think that I was a little surprised that the vice president was going after Israel yesterday at the podium more than he was going after Iran,” Kilmeade said. 

NewsNation host Batya Ungar-Sargon said Thursday that “JD Vance is out there criticizing Israel, making up fantasies about how it is Israel’s fault and Israel wants Iran to be failed state, and if only Israel would lay down its arms and allow Hezbollah to keep attacking it, there would be peace in the Middle East.

“It is disgusting, it is the complete Tucker Carlsonificiation of the vice president of the United States, and it is utterly deplorable. The only good thing I can say about it is if this was a dry run for Vance 2028, we sure learned a lot,” Ungar-Sargon said. 

Vance also told The New York Times earlier Thursday that his response to Israeli opponents of the deal “would be: What is your exact proposal? You’re a country of 9 million people. You can’t just kill your way out of solving every single national security problem that you have.”

The backlash to Vance reveals that many conservatives want Israel to have a blank check regardless of U.S. interests. Vance is also getting off easy compared to Democrats, who are called antisemites for anything resembling criticism of Israel, as Abby Phillip pointed out on CNN Thursday. Israel has committed genocide in Gaza and continues to kill civilians in Lebanon, trying to prevent any checks on its actions and block any hope of peace.

Vance’s words may be self-serving to protect the Trump administration from political fallout over a protracted war with Iran, but his criticism of Israel doesn’t even go far enough, letting it off the hook for its ongoing genocide. Conservatives should realize that Israel trying to dictate U.S. foreign policy is bad for Republicans politically, and bad for America and global peace overall.

President Donald Trump has sparked a diplomatic crisis with Italy after insulting Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni on television.

The president told an Italian TV channel Meloni “begged” to take a picture with him. “She wanted a picture with me so badly. I wouldn’t have taken it, but I felt sorry for her,” Trump said, according to Reuters.

Meloni responded with her own video, captioned, “Io e l’Italia non imploriamo mai,” which translates to “Neither I nor Italy ever beg.”

“Donald Trump’s statements are completely made up,” Meloni said, writes Reuters. “I am frankly astonished. I don’t ‌know why ⁠the president of the United States behaves like this towards his allies: It is not the first time, moreover.”

Trump’s flippant comment had immediate diplomatic consequences. Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani canceled his upcoming trip to the U.S., writing on X, “The serious and offensive words of President Trump towards Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni offend all of Italy,” according to the platform’s translation.

Other Italian politicians are also coming forward in support of Meloni, including Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini.

“Whoever attacks @GiorgiaMeloni attacks all of us,” Salvini wrote, as translated by X.

Trump and the right-wing Meloni used to be close allies, but recently sparred over Trump’s tirades against Pope Leo.

Meloni’s political ally, Italian Senator Giovanbattista Fazzolari, put it well: “It is ​unclear whether out ⁠of intent or ineptitude [Trump] is wrecking the historic relations between the United States and Europe,” he told Reuters.

President Trump’s pick to be acting director of national intelligence showed up to work on Thursday, one day earlier than he was expected, and asked for a list of every employee in his office so he could decide who to fire.

His visit to the office caught everyone off guard, CNN reports, including outgoing director Tulsi Gabbard, who only got a brief notice that Pulte was coming. Trump had previously said that Pulte would start his job on Friday.

On Thursday, Pulte reportedly met with lawyers and staff. Pulte alarmed intelligence officials last week when, in his only other briefing with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, he asked if he could bring the President’s Daily Brief to his house, one intelligence source told CNN. That includes sensitive, classified information on national security issues. (Another intelligence source disputed this account, saying that the brief is provided electronically.)

At that briefing with the ODNI, Pulte also asked about his security clearance level, and whether he’d get access to a government plane, even though the meeting was supposed to be about explaining the ODNI’s main mission.

Pulte has reportedly asked about the use of a plane numerous times, and wants to know his schedule so he can travel between D.C., Florida, and Chicago, as he splits his time between three places. He also asked for a protective security detail before starting his job at the ODNI, according to CNN.

This seems oddly familiar to anyone who has followed the career of FBI Director Kash Patel, who has flown around the country on government jets partying instead of focusing on his job running the government’s preeminent law enforcement agency.

Earlier this month, Trump said to The Wall Street Journal that he wanted Pulte to shrink the ODNI because he thought it was “too big.” The president added that as acting director, Pulte would have more freedom to gut the office before a director confirmed by the Senate assumed the position.

Trump’s choice of Pulte drew almost immediate backlash from Democrats as well as Republicans. Pulte had used his previous position as head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, as well as the finance companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, to pursue mortgage-related criminal charges against Democrats and others who opposed Trump’s agenda.

Democrats sought to block extension of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to prevent Pulte’s appointment, leading Trump to announce a formal appointment to the directorate, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Jay Clayton, in order to pass the national security measure. (Trump has since unilaterally “postponed” Clayton’s confirmation hearing.)

Trump is now holding up FISA in order to force his voter restriction bill, the Save America Act, through Congress, even though it stands no chance of passing the Senate. It’s all a big mess, with Trump hoping for a loyalist at the ODNI to get rid of the people who might have inside information about him, while also leveraging a national security bill to restrict voting so his party doesn’t get massacred in November’s midterms. Will Republicans in Congress cave and give him everything he wants?

Now that President Donald Trump has signed an agreement with Iran that caves on many of his initial demands, you would be forgiven for hoping he’s learned a valuable lesson.

Trump’s main takeaway? There are “no limits” to his power, as he declared on “The Axios Show” on Thursday.

Never mind that he went in with the goal of “unconditional surrender,” and left with a memorandum of understanding that provides a $300 billion fund for Iran’s reconstruction and opens the door to ending sanctions, in return for no real limits on Iran’s nuclear program.

Axios’s Marc Caputo asked the president whether he learned there are limits to his power after the war.

“I haven’t learned that lesson yet,” Trump replied. “I know there are, but there are no limits. We defeated them totally militarily.”

To Trump, his power is comparable to conquerors and dictators of history, according to a new book from The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan. In the book, Trump shows off a document that argues he’s more powerful than Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Napoleon, and Hitler.

“They didn’t have airplanes, right? You couldn’t travel around,” Trump said of Alexander the Great, the Caesars, and William the Conqueror, according to the authors.

Grimly, Trump also seemed to take “evident pleasure” in “the company of Mao, Hitler, and Stalin.”

Trump also posted the document on Truth Social on Thursday. Whether comparing himself to Genghis Khan or saying he’s “the boss” of other G7 leaders, it’s clear that Trump sees power as the ability to submit other nations to your will.

Vice President JD Vance’s weird attempt to be woke just made it clear how little he thinks of working class people.

In an interview published Thursday, The New York Times’s Ross Douthat cornered Vance about how the Trump administration’s tone of “aggressive uncharity” contrasts with its purported brand of Christian politics.

Vance immediately started flailing, calling the interviewer’s claim “fundamentally unfalsifiable.” The vice president argued that there were plenty of “clips” of administration officials that would read as Christian or un-Christian, shamelessly plugged his new book, and then pivoted to something even more surprising.

“The tone argument is in some ways, I think, people see what they want to see. I also think that tonal arguments are ways of, frankly, policing working-class ways of communication and covering them in elite preferences,” Vance said.

If that argument sounds a little “woke” for Vance, that’s because tone policing is most often used to prevent marginalized individuals and groups from sharing their experiences. The term typically refers to policing emotional language—not overt cruelty.

Vance suggested that if he was coming across as uncharitable, that was because he was speaking for a working class that was totally onboard with it. How little he must think of working class people to imagine that they’d co-sign gutting social programs and shuttering humanitarian aid. Not to mention all of the wildly un-Christian things Vance himself has said, including making up racist lies, defending an unjust war, and hating thy neighbor.

But it should come as no surprise that the “tone” of an administration headed by a billionaire is not representative of the working class. Rather, it represents the elite.