Hot off the heels of his ick-producing performance on The View earlier this week, JD Vance held a press briefing Thursday in response to blowback surrounding the recently signed deal with Iran. It’s a deal that does some truly stunning things: opens up the Strait of Hormuz (that was closed because of the US launching a war with Iran), thus stabilizing the global economy (that was destabilized because of the US launching a war with Iran), while promising that the U.S. and “regional partners” will draw up a $300 billion reconstruction plan (to rebuild everything Trump bombed in Iran), while lifting US sanctions on Iran, and affirming that Iran won’t build a nuclear weapon (something we already had a deal in place about before Trump tore it up.)
It’s pretty clear that even Donald Trump himself realizes how underwhelming it all is. He spent almost an hour defending it Wednesday to the world in his G7 closing speech, and on the same day he “joked” that if it all goes wrong, he’ll blame Vance.
Little wonder, then, that Vance was asked during the Q&A portion of his press conference today if he thinks he’s the “fall guy” for this poor excuse for diplomacy. He laughed and brushed off the question. Then he tried to defend his own position, and made everything worse.
What’s so good about the deal? Well, the stock market is recovering, he said; oil prices are “down nearly at the level they were before the conflict” and the economy is starting to bounce back to nearly “pre-conflict levels”. This, apparently, is proof that the deal is already “bearing fruit for the American people”: that the administration has started trying to undo the mess they made by going to war in the first place.
“The only way [Iran] will get any benefit from the bargain” is if the Iranians comply with the terms of the deal, or they’ll get bombed, Vance added, meaning that “really it’s a win-win”. But bombing countries costs money and, more importantly, human lives. Both Vance and Trump’s proud announcements that they’ve discovered they can either make deals with countries or bomb them — as if those aren’t options everyone has always been aware of — underline how little experience either of them have in government. Worryingly, it seems to imply that neither of them have even read many books.
But can you blame Vance for misunderstanding the landscape? As he pointed out himself during this very press conference, he has absolutely zero experience in conducting diplomatic negotiations. “Progressive critics” say he can’t do “hostile negotiations,” he said, with a smile, “but just two days ago I went on The View.”
Nobody laughed. He tried again: “Joy Behar is way more hostile than the Iranians and she and I are best friends now.” The room remained silent. Notwithstanding the fact that Joy Behar seemed to quite openly dislike Vance when she encountered him on The View, this joke doesn’t really work unless you follow it up with solid proof that you actually do have good political credentials and the “progressive critics” are wrong. Instead, Vance merely moved on.
When pressed why this deal was better than Obama’s, Vance couldn’t offer a lot of specifics. He kept going back to the idea that “Gulf states like this deal” and they didn’t like the old one, “and I trust their judgment”. He didn’t seem to know exactly why they’d come to that judgment.
Is Cuba next? “You guys would have to ask Marco [Rubio] about Cuba,” he said, before adding that the administration is talking with the Cuban government and hopes they “make smart decisions.”
Is he still going on his promised trip to Switzerland Friday to sign the deal that has, it turns out, already been signed? Apparently not. There are other people going “on the ground” in Iran to do “technical negotiations”, possibly over the weekend, and the Geneva signing may or may not happen after that.
“So you’re not going tomorrow?” one reporter asked. Vance equivocated and, again, moved on.
Then we entered the weirder portion of the presser. When told that the Pope had hailed the end of the war, Vance said, in a tone of voice that skirted a little too close to sarcasm, “My response to that is: Praise Jesus!” When someone said they noticed his voice is hoarse, he said, “I’ve been on a book tour,” thus reminding everybody of the fact that the chief Iran negotiator has been wasting his time this week on daytime talk shows soft-launching a 2028 presidential run by shilling a book about Christianity.
It was in his final question of the afternoon that Vance suddenly and unexpectedly became laser-focused. Asked about Netanyahu and whether Israel is happy with the deal or will stick to it, he launched into a surprisingly severe criticism of the Israeli government.
“What I will say — and this does bother me,” he said, is that people close to Netanyahu have been attacking the deal publicly. Staring into the camera, he then suddenly addressed Israel directly: “Donald J. Trump” — Vance always likes to wheel out the middle initial when he’s getting righteous — “is the only head of state in the entire world who is sympathetic to the state of Israel at this moment in time,” he said. Israel should consider, he added, that “two-thirds of the defensive weapons that have protected your homeland have been built by American hands and paid for by American taxpayers.”
Israeli politicians should “wake up and smell the reality of the situation that that country is in,” he concluded, before abruptly ending the press conference. He’d clearly been waiting for the opportunity to say it, and hoping to be able to make a dramatic exit while talking on the issue. It gave his conference a weird cadence, moving as it did from cold and distant — oil prices, Strait of Hormuz blockades — to jokey and animated — best friends on The View! — to angry and threatening.
But it spoke volumes about what’s actually being said between Vance and his compatriots behind closed doors.
