To say that the past week was “bad” for Vice President JD Vance would be an understatement. To say it was “a trash fire that seriously threatens to undermine Vance’s political future” would be slightly more accurate. Over the past seven days, the vice president has suffered setbacks on three continents, found himself in the middle of a fight between his boss (secular) and his boss (religious) and became the scapegoat for failing to end a war he reportedly never even wanted.
The American vice presidency has rarely been the best of gigs. The role was an afterthought for the Founders, and it shows in the hodge-podge of responsibilities that it has accrued over the years. But rarely has a vice president been hit harder by the disjointed, catch-all vibe the job brings with it than Vance over the past several days.
The most direct blow to Vance came Saturday in Pakistan. The vice president traveled from Washington for talks with Iranian diplomats and the stated goal of ending the war Trump launched. Spoiler: The talks did not end the war Trump launched.
Rarely has a vice president been hit harder by the disjointed, catch-all vibe the job brings with it than Vance over the last several days.
As my colleague James Downie noted, it felt wildly risky for Vance to go in the first place, especially given his reported skepticism to the war. His stance has left him somewhat on the outs in the White House, but according to CNN, is exactly why the Iranians preferred to talk with him than the nightmarish negotiating duo of Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner. That still left him flying into Islamabad with very little diplomatic groundwork done and no real technical knowledge in the areas being debated. For instance, after the talks, Vance claimed that Iran had refused to promise not to develop a nuclear weapon, even though the Iranian government has done just that many times over, including when it ratified the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
It’s not clear exactly what Vance was supposed to achieve other than Tehran’s total surrender, but he left empty-handed after only a day of talks and with Iran still in total control over shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. When you compare Vance’s diplomatic speedrun to the talks leading up to the 2015 nuclear deal that Trump scrapped in his first term, which took years to finalize, the failure of the talks makes for an unsurprising conclusion.
The negotiations were exactly the kind of high risk/no reward assignment that vice presidents are often forced to accept into their portfolio. (See: former Vice President Kamala Harris’ assignment to deter migrants from Central America from heading north.) And Trump made no effort to hide the buck-passing at work, according to The New York Times:
‘If it doesn’t happen, I’m blaming JD Vance,’ Mr. Trump said to laughter of Mr. Vance trying to secure a deal at an Easter lunch earlier this month. ‘If it does happen, I’m taking full credit.’
Adding insult to injury, as Vance was busy spinning his wheels in Pakistan, his potential 2028 rival, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, joined Trump on Saturday night in Florida to watch a UFC match. “Regardless what happens, we win,” Trump told reporters as he was leaving the White House. “We’ve totally defeated that country.” But Monday’s order for American ships to blockade Iranian ports contradicts the claim that Iran has been totally defeated.
Sunday wasn’t much better for Vance. He had spent last Tuesday in Hungary stumping for Prime Minister Viktor Orbán ahead of the country’s elections. The floundering Hungarian autocrat was feeling nervous about his chances after 16 years in power, most of which have been spent cozying up to Russia and choking off room for dissent. And as The Washington Post explained, “Orban’s government — bankrolled in part by cheap Russian energy supplies — poured money into a network of think tanks that became hubs for MAGA and nationalist ideology, and that in turn provided channels for the Kremlin to filter its talking points to American right-wing groups.”
Vance’s presence was meant to remind Hungarian voters about the ties the strongman had developed with Trump and the MAGA movement. Vance dutifully parroted Kremlin-based claims about Ukrainian intelligence being the ones trying to influence global elections. It’s a major bit of irony given Vance’s open support for Orbán, telling reporters in Budapest: “I want to help, as much as I possibly can, the prime minister as he faces this election season.” Orbán lost big in Sunday’s election, depriving CPAC of its spinoff conference location and providing Vance with another loss to add to his tally.
To have them all land in a string must be tremendous psychic damage for someone striving to position himself as MAGA’s heir apparent
And as this was all going on, Trump has spent the past week in a fight with Pope Leo XIV. The pontiff took issue with Trump’s warning to Iran that “a whole civilization will die” if it didn’t yield, with Leo urging Americans to call their constituents about the matter. As MS NOW’s Akayla Gardner noted that this stance “put him in direct tension with senior American officials who have framed the war in explicitly religious terms.”
The papal beef has only grown since then, culminating in a lengthy Truth Social rant from Trump calling Leo “weak on crime and terrible for foreign policy,” and a quickly deleted image depicting the president as Jesus Christ himself. Vance would clearly like to be excluded from this narrative but that’ll be hard given the centrality of Catholicism to his image. Only a few days earlier, HarperCollins Publishers announced that this summer they will publish Vance’s memoir about his conversion to Catholicism. That the vice president is now trapped between the Holy See and his loyalty to the embodiment of MAGA’s will on Earth is a delightful bit of irony.
Any one of those defeats would be a tough pill to swallow. To have them all land in a string must be a tremendous bit of psychic damage for someone striving to position himself as MAGA’s heir apparent. None of this is to say that Vance is permanently out of the running to succeed Trump. But at some point, the president — who loves to claim intolerance of losers — will surely realize that the guy standing next to him is deeply lacking in wins. After this week, it’s easy to picture Vance being the latest person whom Trump forgets he knew.
Hayes Brown is a writer and editor for MS NOW. He focuses on politics and policymaking at the federal level, including Congress and the White House.