WASHINGTON — Vice President JD Vance blamed the war in Iran for Tuesday’s GOP electoral bloodbath, a sharp departure from his own remarks about the conflict and the closest Vance has come to criticizing President Trump as his second-in-command.
Vance, believed to be the top contender for the 2028 Republican presidential nomination, decried the GOP “establishment” and nudged Republicans to reconsider their support of Israel in his first public midterm post-mortem.
“In the next few months, there’s going to be a lot of gaslighting. Expect to hear any number of establishment politicians say the solution to our woes is amnesty,” Vance posted on X.
“But anyone pushing amnesty is lying to you. The reason we lost is the war,” he added. “The president himself said so last night. If you’d like to argue it was worth it, that losing the Senate for the next 6 years was worth it, then do so.”
Trump had acknowledged during conversations with the Wall Street Journal and multiple other news outlets Tuesday night that “Iran was a piece” of why Republicans suffered one of their worst electoral blowouts in decades. The president also insisted that the fallout was worth it, telling the Journal that he”did the right thing” by going to war.
Despite Vance being known to have had private misgivings about the war, the veep was defensive in public about it, assuring supporters that “if you’re worried about another forever war, Donald Trump is never going to let this be a forever war.”
Still, the longtime skeptic of foreign intervention repeatedly made sure to make overtures to Republicans who felt betrayed by Trump’s decision to attack Iran.
Vance cited findings from a pollster who told him the four top priorities from voters who backed Trump in 2024 but abandoned Republicans in the midterms were ending the war in Iran, focusing on cost of living issues, putting America first, and changing “our relationship to Israel.”
“[E]veryone knows why we lost. And any honest conversation about where we go from here must start there,” he stressed.
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Despite the generationally bad election results, the VP stressed that he remains “hopeful about our country” and urged disaffected Republicans to “take that energy into electing Republicans who share your worldview.”
“To the people who are just pissed at the results, you should be. Let’s take that anger and get back to the work of saving our country,” he continued.
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Vance quickly got support from Donald Trump Jr., who had backed him in the 2024 veepstakes, and said he supported “[e]very word of” the vice president’s postmortem. The Trump scion had long been rumored to have been at odds with his father over the war in Iran.
The vice president, who saw his former Senate seat taken over by Democrat Sherrod Brown Tuesday, previously said he wouldn’t make a decision about 2028 until after the midterms.
