JD Vance walked into the White House briefing room on Thursday afternoon for the first time in six weeks. He was standing in for a press secretary job that’s been empty since Karoline Leavitt left for Trump’s super PAC last month and called on reporters using a printed seating chart. He joked he’s “old and blind” now, at forty-one years old, but spent the next hour demonstrating that his eyesight wasn’t really the problem.
He soon faced a question on the Iran war that has beleaguered the nation since Trump started it earlier this year and has since prolonged it without clear rationale.
On the heels of Trump posting earlier to Truth Social that the fight with Iran is a war, one “we’re easily winning,” CNN’s Kaitlan Collins asked Vance directly whether the war would be over by the midterms. His answer: “I wouldn’t call it a war, right now there’s no active shooting,” he said, and if you want to know when it ends, “you would have to ask the Iranians.” So on his first day back in front of the American public, the VP immediately contradicted his own president’s statement about an active war costing American lives from that same morning.
As vice president, coherence with the president’s message is the single easiest test of the job, and he whiffed. Then it got worse.
Asked to defend the administration’s war record, Vance offered something even more unserious: “America has fought a lot of wars since I’ve been alive. Forty-two years. And we have won almost none of them until Donald J. Trump became the president.”
He is seemingly forgetting every campaign we’ve engaged in since the 1980s. The Gulf War. Panama. Kosovo. The initial campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. Whatever you think of how those wars ended or whether we should have fought them, American service members won battles and took objectives. Which wars, exactly, does he think we lost?
I flew combat missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. I know exactly what it costs young Americans to fight and win the battles this country actually did win over the last forty-two years, and I am not going to sit here while the VP erases that record to make his boss sound better by comparison. That’s disrespectful to the very people whose job his boss is supposedly commanding, and who he is clearly forgetting during this present war with Iran.
Then came the economy, where Peter Doocy, of all people, asked Vance why voters shouldn’t blame Republicans for the cost of living, blind to the fact that Republicans control the entire government. Vance’s answer was to blame the Biden administration for “bad decisions” that take time to unwind.
Except July’s inflation number is 3.4 percent, up from 2.9 percent when Biden left office. Whatever you think caused it, it went up on this administration’s watch, and “it takes time to fix” gets worse every month it keeps climbing instead of coming down. Let’s call this for what it is: a deflection wrapped in a deception.
Being ready for primetime requires being able to field questions without appearing shallow. The American public don’t want lip service.
Soon, he fell apart even more. So after Treasury Secretary Bessent told reporters back in July that three-dollar gas was realistic by Labor Day, AAA has the actual number today at $4.14 a gallon, up from $3.83 over the Fourth of July. Vance was asked about that broken promise and retorted that prices are “inherently unpredictable.”
Then he handed Democrats the perfect soundbite from the arguably worst messenger of this administration. A reporter asked why we should feel fine about our circumstances anyway and he postured that gas “could have been much, much higher were it not for our efforts.”
In the span of one briefing, he asked Americans to not blame him for the war, not blame him for the price of gas caused by the war, and to be grateful it isn’t worse. That’s three different defenses for one number, none of which involve fixing it.
Somewhere in the middle of all that, a reporter asked him about his friendship with Tucker Carlson, who has publicly called for Trump’s impeachment. Vance said he wasn’t going to “throw friends under the bus” over political disagreements. I actually don’t mind that answer on its own terms because loyalty to a friend isn’t a character flaw. But it’s a strange thing to hear this from a man who was happy to ride to the Vice Presidency by trashing RINOs and anyone else in the party he disagreed with.
Here’s the deal. Vance isn’t this administration’s ace.
He is, however, one of three senior officials who are currently rotating through a podium that’s been without a permanent press secretary for over a month, and every one of those appearances doubles as an audition for 2028. If this is the audition tape, it’s not a good one. Not because he got asked hard questions, but because in fact every one of these was a question he should have seen coming and had an answer ready for.
He didn’t have an answer on the war. He didn’t have an answer on inflation. He didn’t even have an answer on gas prices. What he had, instead, was a shabby improvisation through his own record and obvious missteps in front of the cameras.
There’s an old label for a cast that hasn’t earned its stage yet: “not ready for primetime.” JD Vance had six weeks to prepare for one hour at that podium, but on the easiest questions of the day, he still fumbled the read.
Isn’t it interesting that problems that affect ordinary Americans are all “Biden’s fault” and “Take time to fix” and “Require Americans to be patient” but Tax Cuts for the rich, money for the sycophants, unwanted memorials to a President in office, and Presidential enrichment all seem to happen with lightning speed?
When his mouth is open he is lying. I would not waste time even talking about him.