So, the MAGA movement has finally burst like the rotten carcass it is. Unless you were around for the Reagan/Mondale election in 1984, Tuesday night’s midterm results could be the most lopsided political thumping you’ll see in your lifetime. It’s not just that the Democrats took control of both the House and Senate with comfortable majorities, leaving President Trump stranded to deal with a hostile legislature in 2027, and John Fetterman powerless to help him. (Seriously, John, just resign already.) It’s also the fact that Republicans lost what, according to conventional wisdom, should have been their safest seats. Texas. Kansas. South Carolina. At the time of writing, maybe Mississippi. Even Louisiana came within less than two points. The bedrock assumptions of American politics just got re-written, and with them, the roadmap to the presidency in 2028. At the Guardian, Moira Donegan writes that “the death knell of Trumpism has finally sounded.” That might be slightly too optimistic, but it’s undeniable that the GOP has taken a body blow.

Which leaves an uncomfortable position for one man: JD Vance. He has served as Trump’s vice president for two years now, and until recently, it looked like he was the heir apparent to a powerful MAGA machine. But now, the Trump administration has the Loser Stink on it, and he’s standing right in the middle of it, soaking up the fumes.

Of course, he can’t accept that. Based on his career so far, there are two things we truly know about Vance. The first is that he is, above all, a creature of pure ambition. From Yale law school, to Hillbilly Elegy and the anti-Trump talk-show circuit, to the vice presidency, to his newfound Catholicism and beef with the Pope, he may pursue different projects and espouse different beliefs, but they always have one thing in common: the advancement and enrichment of JD Vance. He has invested years into his political career, embarrassed himself in public on countless occasions, and is now one McDonald’s-clogged aorta away from the presidency. He’s not giving that up. And the second thing we know about Vance is that he’s a shapeshifter. To get ahead, he’ll do, say, and become anything he thinks he needs to.

Which is why, on November 4, he wrote a very long tweet. In it, Vance takes on an ostentatiously humble tone, worlds away from his previous persona as Donald Trump’s attack dog. Gone are the sexist belligerence toward “childless cat ladies,” the shameless boasts about “creat[ing] stories” to sway public opinion, or Vance’s recent commands for everyone to “stop whining” about Vivek Ramaswamy’s repulsive attack ads. The gist of the post is that unlike a lot of Republicans, he understands why voters gave his party the boot. He sees you, he hears you, and he’s listening:

[...]The main problem is that many people who voted for Trump/Vance in 2024 voted for Democrats in 2026.

 

There will be a lot of infighting and arguing over what happened and why that is. One of the pollsters I really respect told me that our economic messaging wasn’t sharp enough down the stretch. I’m sure that’s true.

 

But the real reason we lost is obvious to almost everyone.

 

Another pollster—one of the smartest people I know in politics, told me yesterday we’d lose the generic ballot by 13 points. I felt negative going into Tuesday, but even I was shocked by this. In his polling, he saw that a lot of Trump 2024 voters were angry and planning to vote for Democrats. He asked those voters who had abandoned us what would cause them to come back on our team. 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

 

Our voters showed up. And the above four reasons are why many of them voted for Democrats. This is according to a pollster who nailed the results. While many spent Monday attacking Rachel Campos Duffy for calling for a diplomatic resolution to the conflict, it turns out her political advice was sound.

 

Now, as the late Norm Macdonald might have put it, this statement could have come straight from the pages of the journal DUH. The problem is that voters voted for your opponents, you say? And it was because of your policies? Isn’t that something!

Shortly afterward, UnHerd editor Sohrab Ahmari hailed this as “VP Vance’s extraordinarily frank statement about the war.” But when you read it closely, it’s clear that Vance is being the opposite of frank. He’s incredibly disingenuous. He talks as if he hasn’t been the vice president this whole time, and had a direct role in making and executing the policies he now acknowledges were catastrophically wrong. (Or rather, unpopular; there’s no actual admission of wrongdoing here.) To hear him tell it, you’d think the war against Iran was something that just happened to him, an innocent bystander.

This is part of a bigger propaganda narrative, concocted by the vice president and his allies in the media. Its primary vehicles are interviews, profiles, op-eds, and monologues about Vance published by either Ahmari or Tucker Carlson. Both pundits are the vice president’s supporters on an ideological level, and his friends on a personal one. Together, the message they consistently put out is that Vance is an anti-war populist, who sincerely believes in “America First,” an “extreme skepticism towards intervention overseas,” and prioritizing the interests of American citizens over pointless “forever wars.”

During the lead-up to the 2024 election, the claim was that both Vance and Donald Trump held these “anti-war” values, but after the Minab school strike, that became impossible to maintain. So now the narrative has shifted slightly. Now, we’re meant to believe that there’s a tug-of-war within the Trump administration, between “hawks” and “doves,” with Vance representing the latter. As Ahmari wrote in March, “JD Vance lost the foreign policy war,” with his influence “dwarfed by that of the traditional hawks in the President’s orbit,” chiefly Marco Rubio. Or, as Carlson said in May:

I know [Vance] well and think so much of him as a person. And it is my guess that, based on his past behavior, that he’s doing everything he can to mitigate what he sees as the ill effects of this. But it’s kind of hard to call the shots when you’re vice president, because that’s not in the Constitution.

So, the story goes, the Trump administration is indeed waging wars of aggression all over the place, and Vance is the second-in-command of that administration. But it isn’t his fault. His hands are tied, you see.

What a load of bullshit! Vance recently published a book detailing his mid-life religious conversion, and Carlson and Ahmari both pontificate about Christianity to whoever will listen. So they should be familiar with a famous line from the Sermon on the Mount: By their fruits ye shall know them. In other words, what a person says means very little, and what they do means everything. Vance says he’s anti-war. In practice, when his boss is waging a needless war of aggression, assassinating and kidnapping heads of state, bombing little girls’ schools, and openly threatening to commit genocide, he takes no actual, material action to oppose it. He doesn’t resign from his post in protest, as counterterrorism director Joe Kent did in March. He doesn’t use his enormous media profile to say publicly that Trump’s wars are wrong.

Instead, he acts to promote and defend them. In January, Vance used his tie-breaking vote in the Senate to block a War Powers Resolution against attacking Venezuela, ensuring that more war could be waged. The previous year, he used another tie-breaking vote to confirm the distinctly “hawkish” Pete Hegseth as Secretary of War. With Iran, he has helped Trump peddle pro-war propaganda at every turn: in February, he told reporters there was “no chance” striking Iran could lead to a prolonged war, and as recently as September, he insisted that he “wouldn’t call it a war.” And when Trump backed a primary challenger against Representative Thomas Massie, who actually is consistently anti-war (if for eccentric reasons), Vance defended Trump and attacked Massie, saying that the Kentucky legislator had “ma[de] too many enemies.”

On November 1, Tucker Carlson claimed that the Trump administration “may be within days of launching a nuclear strike on Iran,” an act that could lead to World War III and the extinction of vast swathes of humanity. Personally, if I thought my boss was about to launch nuclear missiles and kill thousands or millions of people, I’d do something about it. But although Carlson says Vance “argue[s] a deal with Iran can be made” behind closed doors, there hasn’t been a peep from the vice president publicly against nuking Iran. So if Vance opposes militarism, he’s really got a funny way of showing it.

Although he’d doubtless hate the comparison, the closest analogue to Vance’s actions is actually the Biden administration. In both governments, the president was a visibly senile creep who rambled incoherently in public—finally beating Medicare for Biden, Jon Husted’s “powerful ass” for Trump—and was responsible for some of the worst war crimes of the 21st century. Despite this, Kamala Harris obediently kept “no daylight” between herself and Biden on Gaza. Now Vance does the same, snapping at reporters that they can’t “drive a wedge[…] between me and the president” on Iran. We should take him at his word, rather than speculate that maybe he secretly disagrees in private.

In 2023 and 2024, the most Biden would do was leak comments to friendly reporters about how he was “frustrated” or “increasingly at odds” with Benjamin Netanyahu and the Gaza genocide, while continuing to send Israel money and weapons. (At the Nation, Adam Johnson has helpfully collected examples of this genre, which he calls the “Fuming Biden” story.) Now, the vice president uses a similar media strategy, with Carlson and Ahmari pumping out “Fuming Vance” narratives. It’s just as transparent and sleazy as when Biden did it.

The most charitable interpretation you can make of all this is that Vance thinks his future chance of being president, and potentially making some nebulous “populist” change happen, are worth turning a blind eye to piles of dead kids now. It’s not a good excuse, and the more plausible interpretation is the more venal one: he just wants power, and doesn’t particularly care who dies along the way. But ultimately, his intentions don’t matter, and neither do his words. Only outcomes matter, and the outcome here is that Trump is on an international killing spree, while Vance sits on his hands and does nothing to oppose it. Now, it turns out there are electoral consequences, so he wants to pull off his usual magic trick: peel away the skin suit, shift identities, and start fresh for 2028. Morph from JD Vance, Trump’s Right-Hand Man, to JD Vance, Principled Anti-War Populist. But don’t be fooled. Voters overwhelmingly rejected him on Tuesday, too. The Iran war is his rotting albatross to deal with. Hang it around his neck, and remember it every time he opens his mouth.