Official portrait of Vice President JD Vance. Photo: Daniel Torok / The White House, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
A blunt verdict on the war
Vice President JD Vance has publicly broken with President Donald Trump over the war in Iran, blaming the conflict for the Republican Party's crushing defeat in the midterm elections and questioning whether the war was worth its political cost.
"The reason we lost is the war," Vance wrote in a lengthy post on X on Wednesday, a day after Democrats seized control of both the House and the Senate. "If you'd like to argue it was worth it, that losing the Senate for the next 6 years was worth it, then do so."
Vance, widely seen as a leading contender for the Republican presidential nomination in 2028, said Republican voters had turned to Democrats because of the war, the cost of living, the sense that America was not being put first, and the administration's relationship with Israel. He added that an earlier recommendation to end the war had been "sound advice."
The vice president's remarks were striking because he had spent months publicly defending a war he had long been uneasy about. Vance, who built his political career on opposition to open-ended military intervention, was lukewarm in his support for the conflict after Trump launched it, and he later became the face of an unsuccessful attempt to end the fighting. In September, he declined to call the fighting a war at all, while acknowledging he could not say when it would end.
Trump calls the post "good" — then defends the war
Trump responded to Vance's post during his first public appearance since the election, an impromptu tour of the White House ballroom under construction, where he signed the final steel beam of the project. Asked about his deputy's remarks, the president called them "good" and said, "I know how he feels about it."
But Trump also defended the war itself, saying the United States had stopped Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon and that he would make the same decision again. "I think it's largely true because it drove the gasoline up a little bit short term," he said of Vance's argument that the war cost Republicans the election — while insisting the conflict was only one of several reasons for the defeat.
The exchange exposed a rare public split between the two men. A White House adviser told Reuters that some officials inside the administration viewed Vance's post as a genuine foreign policy break from the president, and a public recognition that the war had carried domestic economic consequences. Vance sought to play down any difference, noting that Trump himself had acknowledged the war played a role in the losses — though the president's own assessment was far more measured than his deputy's.
What the voters said
The scale of the Democratic victory gave Vance's argument force. Democrats flipped seats in states Trump had carried comfortably two years earlier, including the Ohio Senate seat Vance himself had briefly held. About six in 10 voters said the United States made the "wrong decision" in taking military action against Iran, according to the AP voter poll, a survey of more than 100,000 voters.
The political fallout was also felt in the markets. Oil prices fell after Vance's post, with Brent crude slipping below $100 a barrel to a two-month low, as traders bet that a weakened president facing a Democratic Congress would be less likely to resume major combat operations against Iran.
What comes next
Vance's intervention could complicate Trump's deliberations as he weighs whether to restart major combat operations against Iran, a step US officials have told Reuters remains under consideration. The vice president, who was tapped by Trump to lead peace negotiations with Tehran, has now publicly aligned himself with ending the war — a position that sets him apart from a president who insists the campaign must continue.
Vance has said he will decide after the election whether to run for president in 2028. His post was widely read in Washington as the opening move of that campaign: a deliberate separation from a war that voters have now rejected, and from a president who cannot run again.
Sources: Reuters; Associated Press; The Wall Street Journal; The New York Times; Politico.