Dana Milbank: Vance, Trump and the Week of So Much Losing

Vice President JD Vance admitted this week to being a “conspiracy theorist,” so his paranoid mind must have been spinning during the closing minute of President Donald Trump’s news conference at the G7 in France on Wednesday.

Trump called on Peter Doocy, even though the Fox News correspondent had already had a turn. Doocy, asking why Trump planned to skip the signing ceremony in Switzerland for his Iran peace framework, suggested it might be so that Vance, representing the United States, would take the fall “if it doesn’t work out.”

“I like that idea,” replied Trump. “If it works out, I’m going to take the credit. If it doesn’t work out, I’m blaming JD.”

Trump had made similar jokes in private, but now he was sacrificing Vance on, quite literally, the world stage. Over Trump’s left shoulder, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Vance’s chief rival for the 2028 Republican presidential nomination, managed to keep a straight face. “You’d better be careful, JD,” Trump added.

With that, Trump went off to Versailles for dinner (“I sort of like that palace, has a lot of gold”) and left his understudy to explain how the United States managed to lose the war with Iran.

Trump had made Vance the face of the Iran war from the start, assigning him the task of negotiating its end even though he had opposed its beginning. This week, Vance suffered the exquisite bad luck of having the Iran deal announced just as he was launching his book tour, which meant he would have to face ABC, CBS, CNN, CNBC, Fox and others for previously scheduled interviews.

Vance vigorously defended the deal, assuring all that “it’s a great day for the American people” and that it’s “so brilliant the way the president structured this.” He claimed that the deal meant that “Iran will never develop or procure a nuclear weapon,” that “they’ve committed to destroy and dispose of their stockpile of highly enriched material” and that the Strait of Hormuz “is going to be opened in a toll-free way for the long term.”

But then the text of the memorandum of understanding came out. There were no enforcement provisions and only vague aspirations (Iran “agreed to discuss the issue of enrichment”) to be settled later. And Iran stood to receive $300 billion in new investment, perhaps $100 billion in frozen assets, an end to all sanctions and freedom to keep its ballistic-missile program.

The deal seemed so unfavorable that U.S. officials felt it necessary to tell reporters not to focus on the actual text, assuring them that they had reached a “gentleman’s agreement” on the side with the Iranian regime.

Now the zealots who have been terrorizing the world and chanting “Death to America” for 47 years are to be trusted as gentlemen?

Trump gave away the game in his G7 news conference, explaining that he was facing dwindling oil supplies. “We run out of reserves in about four weeks,” he said. “We would really run out, and it’ll be a time when you wouldn’t be able to get it. And you want to see bedlam?”

So he cried “uncle” because he was afraid of gas lines.

But give Trump credit. He recently said the United States was “in Vietnam 19 years because of stupid people.” Trump, the very stable genius, managed to lose the Iran war in just over three months — a marvel of efficiency.

And Vance gets the blame. Conservative commentator Ben Shapiro faulted him for the “disaster” of an agreement: “In my opinion, the vice president, the chief negotiator, has not well served the president.” Marc Thiessen condemned the “Vance peace deal.” Sen. Lindsey Graham labeled Vance the “architect of the deal” and Ben Domenech lamented this “‘Hillbilly Obama’ kind of GOP.” In Israel, a TV host close to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu referred to Vance as “scum.”

Vance, watching his presidential ambitions turn to nuclear dust, tried to laugh it off on Megyn Kelly’s show.

“What is the progress of the deal? How’s it going?” she asked.

“Hahahahahahaha.”

She asked about Domenech’s “hillbilly” insult.

“Hahahahahahaha.”

She asked about Thiessen’s “Vance peace deal” line.

“Hahahaha. I wonder why he doesn’t call it the Trump deal.”

Yes, Mr. Vice President, you’ve been set up. It’s a conspiracy

***

It can now be stated, with complete objectivity, that Trump has brought scum to Washington.

Two weeks ago, he sat in the Oval Office, boasting about his renovations to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, accomplished through a $15 million no-bid contract to paint the thing “American Flag Blue.”

“We did a fantastic job,” Trump said. While renovation efforts by President Barack Obama “failed miserably,” Trump explained that he is “very good at building things” and these improvements would “last for 50 to 100 years before you have to do anything.”

They lasted for about five days. Then the pool filled up with thick, green algae. The National Park Service has been working furiously to fight the algal bloom with hydrogen peroxide and ozone nanobubbles. As the saying goes: Everything Trump Touches Turns to Green Slime.

There is so much losing for the administration right now.

Trump spent the last 18 months harassing then-Fed Chair Jerome Powell to cut interest rates. Now his handpicked replacement, Kevin Warsh, is on the job — and the Fed this week signaled a rate increase is more likely this year than a cut, because of rising inflation. Warsh said the governors “are unambiguous and unanimous. This committee will deliver price stability.”

Trump’s endorsed candidate for governor of Georgia lost in a primary, and Trump’s preferred candidate for Senate, who won, had already been leading before Trump endorsed him. Trump, once gifted at assigning nicknames, could do no better than refer to the incumbent, Jon Ossoff, as “failed Dumocrat Senator, Os(jerk!)off.”

Trump’s cage-fight extravaganza at the White House for his birthday turned ugly when one of the winning fighters used his moment at the microphone to shout, “Michelle Obama is a man!” Trump had nothing to say about it. Trump’s hapless FBI director, Kash Patel, boasted on social media that a plot to attack the fighting exhibition had been foiled — but he did so before law enforcement could round up all the suspects.

Trump, with a post on his Truth Social platform heralding “a slight bit of intrigue,” blew up attempts in Congress to renew a crucial surveillance program by insisting that it be attached to his attempt to restrict voting, which has no chance of passing.

Trump also announced that Bill Pulte, a partisan with no intelligence experience, would lead the nation’s intelligence services. Even that seems more defensible than Trump’s pick for general counsel of the Federal Labor Relations Authority, who was asked at his confirmation hearing this week about a college publication he ran that featured a Jewish student with horns and pitchfork. “I would not say it’s antisemitic,” he testified.

Where does Trump, who appeared to be tired and breathing heavily in France this week, find the energy to produce so many provocations? Maybe he was inspired by the quote attributed to Teddy Roosevelt on a four-story banner hanging from the Office of Personnel Management: “Courage is not having the strength to go on; it is going on when you don’t have the strength.” As my friend Sammy Westfall at The Washington Post noted, TR never said such a thing.

Yet Trump continues to live his best life: dining on asparagus with lobster and caviar at Versailles; reportedly working with Los Angeles Olympics organizers to funnel business to his golf course; repurposing money meant for the Secret Service to build his White House ballroom; using the White House to promote the Ultimate Fighting Championship, in whose parent company he owns stock; and being hailed by winning UFC fighters at the White House like gladiators saluting the emperor.

At the G7, Trump was his erratic self, comparing himself favorably to Herbert Hoover, declaring that Iran has a “primitive culture” in which half the people are named Mohammed, announcing that “Mexico has lost control of their country” and that “Afghanistan is kissing our ass.” He called Obama a “stupid son of a bitch.” He reiterated that “the word ‘affordability’ is a fake word made up by the Democrats.” And he proclaimed his love for strongmen. India’s Narendra Modi: “Look at this man. He’s the most beautiful looking man. He’s so nice, he’s like an angel.” Egypt’s Abdel Fattah el-Sisi: “He was in a hotel and I met him. We fell in love, deeply in love. ... We had great chemistry, and I stayed twice as long as I was supposed to.”

Most problematic, at least for Vance, was Trump’s praise for the Iranian regime. It was “nice” and “fine” and run by “very rational people” who are “going to behave much differently” going forward, he attested.

He saw no reason to deny Iran ballistic missiles (“They have to have some”) or its frozen assets (“We have taken a lot of their money. It’s not our money.”). He admitted nothing in the deal was enforceable (“Doesn’t have to be”) and dismissed the significance of Iran’s enriched uranium stockpiles (“It’s not important that we do it quickly”).

But will he be able to convince Americans of this?

“It’s very tough,” a self-pitying Trump said, “because I never get good stories.”

Yep. That must be the reason.

***

There are some three-dozen mentions of “truth” in Vance’s new memoir, “Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith.”

“The truth is the truth,” he writes of his Christian beliefs. He writes elsewhere about “searching for deeper truths” and about the importance of “honest (and sometimes uncomfortable) truths,” and he laments that “people trafficked in comfortable lies rather than accepting uncomfortable truths.”

Vance cites a biblical passage: “Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest … if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.” Vance wrote that the passage “made me feel like God was speaking to me.”

Evidently, Vance disagreed with God on this point, because his book tour produced the same mix of flagrant dishonesty, vitriol and moral compromise he has shown before.

Trump never said that affordability was a “hoax” or that he loved “the inflation,” Vance asserted. Trump was the one who wanted to “get everything out there” from the Epstein files, because he was the moral paragon who “narced on him to the police and led ultimately to Jeffrey Epstein’s downfall.”

On Greg Gutfeld’s Fox News show, Vance alleged that congressional Democrats “are just terrible people, so many of them” and that “too many Democrats don’t show appreciation for the country.” At a stop on Long Island, Vance announced that “they’ve become anti-Christian in the Democratic Party. They’ve become anti-white.”

We’ve seen all this before from Vance, who went from calling Trump “America’s Hitler” to being his vice president, who excused anti-Indian bigotry even though his wife and children are of Indian descent, who claimed Ohioans had “their pets abducted and eaten” by Haitian immigrants, who campaigned for the Kremlin-allied, far-right nationalist Viktor Orbán before his defeat in Hungary, who warned the pope to “be careful when he talks about matters of theology.”

“What are you willing to excuse in the name of power?” Sara Haines, a self-described Christian, asked Vance during his appearance on ABC’s “The View” this week.

Apparently, everything. Haines asked Vance to reflect on his 2016 tweet about Trump: “Fellow Christians, everyone is watching when we apologize for this man. Lord help us.” Vance replied that he had been wrong about Trump and that “many of the things that people said about him weren’t actually true.”

On Sean Hannity’s Fox News show, Vance anointed Trump as “a person of faith.”

Now he’s deploying that same moral elasticity to sell the Iran deal.

He appeared in the White House briefing room Thursday to assure the country that the agreement is a “win for the American people and for the president” and “an amazingly transformative thing” — while somehow also saying it would be “no skin off our backs” to abandon the framework before Iran got its money.

Why does the administration, which previously said its “No. 1” war aim was to “raze their missile industry” and leave it “obliterated,” now say it’s “unfair” to take away Iran’s ballistic-missile capability?

“We haven’t abandoned the mission, we’ve accomplished that particular part of the mission,” Vance ventured.

He even blasted members of Netanyahu’s Cabinet, warning them against “attacking the only powerful ally that [they] have anywhere left in the entire world” and telling them to “wake up and smell the reality of the situation that country is in.”

Vance was far out on a limb. Is he worried that Trump is going to make him the fall guy?

“I think the president was joking,” Vance replied.

Talk about a person of faith.

Dana Milbank is a NOTUS Perspectives columnist.

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