Vice President JD Vance has become the face of the Iran deal, leaving two immediate tasks before him: negotiate a final peace deal and ultimately sell it to the public.
Doing so, according to Trumpworld insiders, requires couching President Donald Trump’s brash public statements, keeping both domestic and foreign wings of the president’s coalition on task, and seamlessly shifting from defense to offense as the situation demands.
“The vice president has been pushing to avoid a war with Iran since Day 1. Hell, even before that,” one former senior Trump White House official told the Washington Examiner, noting that Vance cautioned Trump on the downsides of a hot conflict in the lead-up to Operation Epic Fury. “Couple that with the fact that Vance has been a critical player in advancing talks to this point already, and I think that the president trusts him 100% on the issue. So when the vice president speaks, he’s not only voicing the president’s position and personal feelings but is filtering that through an understanding of the intricacies with, let’s not forget, very complex negotiations with the Iranians.”
“It’s pretty simple. He’s the anger translator,” a second former Trump White House official said, referencing a nearly 15-year-old comedy sketch from Comedy Central’s Key & Peele.
“Trump and Vance are completely on the same page at this point, in terms of making this deal a success, but the vice president — because of his position, because of his direct involvement in the negotiations — he’s able to say the quiet part out loud in a way that President Trump isn’t quite able to, for whatever reason,” that person added.
One longtime GOP operative, a veteran of Trump’s past two presidential campaigns, said that Vance has been an important part of addressing criticisms of the Iran deal coming from within the president’s own party.
“Everyone was happy when [Trump] campaigned, he found a way to show everyone that they will get a win. Everyone was happy,” that person told the Washington Examiner. “Everyone saw in him what they wanted to see in him, and the story of this presidency is just bit by bit disappointing various bits of the coalition.”
“I think JD is able to explain this stuff, not as some betrayal of ‘America First’ like some Republicans are trying to spin it, but as illustrating the reality that there is no ‘MAGA orthodoxy,’” they continued. “What MAGA really is — Trump isn’t just going to do the same s*** that’s gotten us nowhere in the past. He’s going to try new stuff because he’s really fighting for America, not to make the political elites talking heads, who think they’re the reason he’s in the White House, by the way, feel puffed up and important and right.”
Vance traveled to Switzerland on Sunday to engage in face-to-face talks with Iranian officials, where he was already forced to explain the actions and comments of the top players in the dialogue on multiple occasions.
Israel’s lingering strikes on Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, retaliatory measures taken in response to rocket attacks fired into Israel, brought elements of the Iranian government to once again close the Strait of Hormuz over the weekend. But on Monday, Vance, speaking to reporters after hours of talks with the Iranians, reaffirmed that the strait was once again open to international traffic and that much of the conversation on Sunday had been devoted to standing up a “mechanism” to avoid future backsliding.
“When there are the conflicts that inevitably come up, we can make sure we work through them rather than that leading to escalation, and that is exactly what we did yesterday,” he said.
During the same press conference, the vice president subtly acknowledged that some of Trump’s own comments, where he threatened to take over the strait militarily if necessary, weren’t helpful.
“The Iranians, yes, they did threaten to walk out, or at least there were social media threats that they would walk out, but we were negotiating well past 1 in the morning yesterday, so they didn’t walk out, and their technical team is still here in Burgenstock,” Vance explained Monday, referring to the Swiss resort where peace talks were being held. “What we told the Iranians yesterday is when you guys engage in what us millennials might call trash talk, you can’t expect the president of the United States not to respond and not to correct the record.”
Perhaps surprisingly, keeping the United States’ strongest Middle Eastern ally, Israel, in check appears to be one of Vance and the U.S. delegation’s toughest challenges in the coming days.
A number of senior Israeli government officials have heartily criticized Trump’s decision to pursue a diplomatic end to the war, and concerns linger that a resumption in fighting with Hezbollah could shatter the shaky truce with Iran.
Vance was blunt in his assessments of Israel’s Lebanon campaign before heading to Switzerland, but he rolled back his rhetoric slightly on Monday.
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“We want Israel’s security to be protected, and we also want Lebanon’s sovereignty to be protected. And this is going to be an ongoing conversation,” he told reporters. “The Israelis have been very clear they do not have territorial intentions on south Lebanon. The reason they feel they have to be there is because they’re worried about Hezbollah fighters in south Lebanon firing into Israel.”
Vance continued, “We do believe, of course, it’s going to require a lot of hard work that we can get to a place where Lebanon’s territorial integrity and sovereignty is protected, Israel’s security is protected, and that’s going to require some coordination with the Lebanese armed forces, and also it’s going to require the Iranians to rein in Hezbollah. That’s all the sort of things that we were talking about yesterday.”