The Iran War is so bad even JD Vance can't enjoy lying about it

JD Vance has never really been a real vice president. From the start, his role in the Trump regime has been something more absurd: while other officials ran agencies and shaped policy, Vance was, in the most literal sense, posting.

Jamelle Bouie roasts JD Vance the way campers roast s’mores, mostly for pleasure. Last summer, Bouie nailed the odd dynamics of this White House, where vice presidents go into the job knowing they could end up with a target on their back and a rope around the neck thanks to the president. Trump focuses on the pomp and ceremony of the presidency, mostly fixating on building temples in his own honor. That leaves the rest of the regime doing the work of implementing Trump’s wishes as interpreted by Stephen Miller, who put them in Trump’s head in the first place.

Vance busies himself as a troll. His niche is the internet, where he preens for allies, spars with ideological enemies, and lends a veneer of intellectual seriousness to an regime whose defining qualities are cruelty, corruption, and incompetence. And since Charlie Kirk died, he’s tried to play the role it’s now clear Kirk played of keeping the MAGA coalition together around the lies of The Great Replacement, he’s stepped up only to do things like make sure neo-Nazis are welcome in the GOP.

But now neo-Nazis are not loving this war that Secretary of State Marco Rubio said we had to start because we follow Israel’s lead. And it’s tearing apart the exact kind of coalition that Vance imagined would be his and his tech oligarch and forever sugar daddy, Peter Thiel, means of taking control of the White House in 2029, if not before.

So JD has become a lurker. The greatest sycophant and word-twister alive has decided that his best move is to just shut up. He can’t admit “No dumb wars,” his foundational excuse for backing Trump—after once comparing Trump to Hitler—was a lie. Vance, the posting machine, has essentially stopped; the cheer captain gone silent and is just watching the game. According to Politico’s reporting, he has largely withdrawn from his usual online role since the conflict began. This silence feels different from JD’s usual strategic positioning. It’s more like a man who knows his lies may help the “cause” of the war, but not his own career.

And the reason for that silence may go beyond MAGA’s cracks: the economic and geopolitical warnings are blaring, but the situation is so historically unprecedented that few can read them clearly. The assassination of a foreign head of state in a theocratic, non-personality-cult regime of a country this large and powerful doesn’t have a clean historical precedent. This isn’t toppling a strongman whose followers scatter; it’s something different, a hardened religious institution, decentralized, ideological, and with deep, sadistic roots.

The uncertainty cascading through financial markets reflects that. Economists are struggling for analogies that even begin to capture the stakes. From the New York Times:

“It’s a little bit like asking, when the Archduke Ferdinand got killed, what the macroeconomic consequences would be, and having no idea what was next.”

When the best available analogy is the opening shot of the First World War, we are not in Kansas (where Republicans are ignoring all real issues to focus on stealing trans people’s driver’s licenses) anymore. The moment is unmoored, the precedents gone, and even JD Vance, whose entire purpose was to project confidence and explain away the inexplicable, has apparently looked at this one and decided he has nothing to say.

Now, if Trump gets that Politico article or senses JD trying to step aside to hand all the blame for this likely never-ending debacle to Marco Rubio, a rival for the 2028 nomination, Trump will certainly send him out to defend the indefensible. Because what’s the worst that happens to him? The two men who could be rivals to his namesake, Don Jr., could end up destroying their candidacies. So sad for them.

JD has played the game of being a lickspittle to powerful men probably better than anyone in history. As of now, his gameplan is as non-existent as Trump’s path for getting us out of a mess that threatens to rain death, destruction, and misery on millions for a purpose that Trump himself cannot stick to for longer than a sentence.

We all know the endgame. Trump will look for a way to declare victory and move to the next thing someone else will have to fix.

But history is now broken. And the blowback will likely be with us forever. So JD is going to have to buy into the lie and sell this war in some way for the rest of his life. Because JD was never picked to be a real vice president. He’s there to dance at the whim of those who pull his strings.

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