Vice President JD Vance Is Being Border Czared
The Vice President has been out front and center promoting what's looking more and more like a bad deal with Iran. Is Trump doing to Vance what Biden did to Harris by making her the 'Border Czar'?
The text of the Memorandum of Understanding that President Trump signed with Iran this week has not yet been released. That’s a huge miscalculation on the part of the Trump administration, because it left a vacuum that allowed Iranian state media to flood the zone with its own version of the deal. Of course, the Iranians are trying to sell the deal to their people, so they are making it look as favorable to them as possible. Plus, they lie about everything, so the details released on their end are not to be trusted. Yet what has been shared on our end is not promising, either, and it’s getting harder and harder to imagine that the deal is any good. It’s increasingly looking like Trump caved to the Iranians, despite their situation being so dire economically and militarily.
Again, we don’t have the MOU. But even in the best case scenario, we’re letting up the financial pressure on Iran by ending our blockade of the Straight of Hormuz in exchange for 60 days of negotiations that could lead absolutely nowhere.
Ask yourself: What are the chances that the Iranians will be more likely to sign away their ability to procure nukes after 60 days of selling the oil we were holding hostage with our blockade?
I say this as someone who is desperate for this conflict to end. On my NewsNation show, I’ve devoted the last three weeks to the crushing cost of life for working-class Americans. Access to the American Dream for working-class Americans is not just my top but pretty much my only political priority. But the juice has to be worth the squeeze—in no small part because of how much working-class Americans have already paid for it. Trump needed the time to make a good deal—which is why I repeatedly called for stimulus checks to offset the pain at the pump.
President Trump keeps saying the Iranians have promised not to build or buy nukes—but this is no great achievement; they always promise that. They certainly promised President Obama that—then cheated.
Maybe Trump has an ace up his sleeve. The expert class has certainly been wrong about him before. But I can’t help but suspect that if the MOU was a good deal, we’d have seen it by now.
Meanwhile, Vice President JD Vance, on book tour for a new memoir about his conversion to Catholicism, has been on all the shows defending the deal, doing his best to dispel the version of it being floated by the Iranians.
But this media tour has not been confidence inspiring.
It began with Vance telling Jake Tapper something that came across as wildly and dangerously credulous. “The coolest thing about the progress we've made over the last few weeks is that you see people within the Iranian system, senior leadership, even IRGC officials say, ‘You know what? We may have some animosity, we may have some mistrust, but we recognize the way that we've done business with the United States for 47 years is a mistake. Let's try something else.’”
Are we now taking the IRGC’s word for it that they have had a change of heart?
This seems . . . unwise.
Vance also contradicted himself on the crucial question of releasing funds to the Islamic Regime. In one interview, he said that Iran could have access to $300 billion, but later clarified that “not a single cent of American money goes to Iran.” I guess it’s a little better that it’s someone else’s money, but it doesn’t quite solve the problem of Iran getting access to funds to keep being the leading state sponsor of terrorism.
In another interview, Vance said, “No matter what happens, Iran's nuclear program has been destroyed. They have no enrichment capacity. We destroyed it over the last year and a half. No matter what happens, their economy is in dire straits. The blockade and a number of the actions we've taken ensures that. No matter what happens, their conventional military has been destroyed and they don't have the resources to rebuild it.”
But the blockade is being lifted. Sanctions, too, are allegedly being lifted. They don’t need a conventional military to fight us and force our hand, they’ve proven; they just need a few mines in the Strait of Hormuz. And the whole point is what comes next—not whether we obliterated the past ability to create a nuclear weapon.
It also doesn’t seem like the MOU includes a commitment on Iran’s part to have U.S. inspectors, which was one of the main problems with Obama’s JCPOA and is pretty much the only thing the deal absolutely needs to include to have any teeth. When asked by Sean Hannity if inspections had been agreed to, Vance said, “That's absolutely something that we are negotiating over, Sean. That's one of the final details that's going to be figured out here.”
In other words, no, they have not been agreed to yet.
The MOU apparently begins with a commitment to peace, Vance told Jake Tapper: “What paragraph one of the agreement says is effectively that Iran commits itself, just as the United States commits itself, to regional peace and stability.” Vance seems to think that this means Iran will “stop funding violent terrorist organizations.”
But the whole problem with Iran is that it costs them nothing to say things like this.
Did we just ease up all the pressure on their economy and military in exchange for the same lies they told Obama?
It feels almost like Trump knows this is weak sauce, which would make his decision to send Vance out to defend it really telling.
Remember when President Biden appointed Kamala Harris border czar amidst an absolutely staggering border crisis? He gave her the single most important portfolio, setting her up for total failure. It hung around her neck like an albatross all throughout the 2024 campaign.
It feels like Trump is doing something similar to JD Vance.
Notice how Secretary of State Marco Rubio is nowhere near this deal. The opposite: He’s listed in an Axios piece along with Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and CIA Director John Ratcliffe as skeptical of the deal. “Ratcliffe and Rubio said that based on that intel, they doubted the Iranians would agree to take the nuclear steps the U.S. was seeking,” Barak Ravid reported.
It’s doubly ironic that Vance has become the face of defending the deal, given his initial opposition to the entire operation, reported in the New York Times.
Did the world’s greatest superpower just cave to an Islamic Republic on its knees over a few mines?
That would be a disaster.
Suggest waiting to see the MOU before jumping to conclusions. The agents of chaos will have you believing all sorts of things.
Yep. Seems like Vance is set up to fail. The enigma to me is kushner and witkoff by his side. I personally think that this is to get hormuz open and extend the ceasefire in the hope that iran implodes on its own. US sucks at regime change and that is the only hope for iran. I suspect the IGRC is forming a circular firing squad.