President Donald Trump has handed his vice president a new assignment, and it points him as far from the Iran war as the White House can send him.
Trump, 80, used a social media post on Thursday, Nov. 12, 2026, to direct Vice President JD Vance, 42, “to focus his complete and total attention” on his anti-fraud campaign, the drive against what the president calls corruption and crime in Democratic-controlled cities and states, rather than on the war.
“We don’t need a deal with Iran,” Trump wrote in the same post. “Those days have long since passed. We’ve got their money, Hundreds of Billions of Dollars, and we’ve got their Strait!”
Reports emerged Wednesday evening, Nov. 11, that Vance was weighing a new round of direct talks with a senior Iranian official. The White House press office, asked about the report, pointed to the president’s post saying he sees no need to negotiate with Iran.
The One Thing Vance Left Out
Trump publicly corrected his vice president twice on Sunday, Nov. 8, first on a tarmac and then on television within the hour. Asked whether the midterm post-mortem had strained the relationship, he said it had not. Then he graded the work.
Trump told reporters on the tarmac in West Palm Beach, Fla., before flying out on Air Force One, that plenty of people disliked Vance’s comments, though he was not one of them. “He was right, other than one thing,” the president said. The missing item, by his account, was whether the war would be worth fighting again, and his own answer was yes. His administration will be remembered for the Iran strike as one of its best moves, Trump insisted, since a nuclear-armed Iran would have put the whole world at risk.
Trump had empowered Vance to negotiate with Tehran during the eight-month-old war, and he has said the United States has already won and that renewed military action is not currently necessary.
The second correction came on CBS’ “60 Minutes.” Conservative journalist Ross Douthat, in an interview recorded Friday, Nov. 6, asked about Vance’s claim that the war cost Republicans the election. Trump said Vance came to him before posting and that he let the vice president write whatever he wanted. His one regret, the president said, was that the post skipped the question of whether the war would be worth doing a second time. Vance was part of the decision-making process, Trump said, and his own answer was an emphatic yes, because Iran cannot be allowed a nuclear weapon.
History will judge the strike a very good decision, Trump predicted, even if not for today and tomorrow, and he said he would have been excoriated far worse had Iran obtained a weapon on his watch. Voters disliked the war, he told Douthat, and they disliked watching gasoline prices climb after he had pushed them down. On a 2028 endorsement, in the interview aired Sunday, Nov. 8, Trump said he “may or may not get involved.” He has endorsed no successor, and Vance is considering a run.
The Sentence That Started It
Democrats flipped both chambers of Congress on Tuesday. The next day, Wednesday, Nov. 4, Vance put the post on X. “The reason we lost is the war,” Vance wrote, pointing to what the president himself had said the previous night. Republicans who believed the outcome was worth it should argue that losing the Senate for the next six years is a cost worth paying, he wrote, which would at least be honest. Any real conversation about the party’s future has to start there, he added.
A pollster he respects had studied 2024 Trump voters who switched sides, Vance wrote. The research pointed to four ways the GOP could win them back: ending the war, focusing on the cost of living and inflation, putting “America first,” and changing the country’s relationship with Israel. He took a swing at the Republican “establishment” and wrote that anyone pushing amnesty for immigrants is lying to voters. Donald Trump Jr. reposted it about an hour after it went up, writing: “Every word of this is 💯💯💯.”
A joint U.S.-Israeli assault opened the fighting in late February, killing Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, along with several senior officials. Vance had voiced concerns about a war with Iran before it started; he served in the U.S. Marine Corps and deployed to Iraq in 2005 as a military journalist.
Trump himself named Iran as a piece of the Democratic sweep on Tuesday night, Nov. 3, saying oil prices skyrocketed because of the fighting and that the frustration over prices ran deeper than over the conflict itself. He wrote on Truth Social after the results: “I wasn’t on the Ballot and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!” He said the losses came because voters “didn’t like the candidates in most cases.”
No Daylight, the White House Says
Taylor Van Kirk, Vance’s communications director, dismissed a viral clip of the tarmac gaggle on X as dishonest and taken out of context, and said her boss and the president are on the same page. The White House “Rapid Response” account pushed the same line, declaring “ZERO DAYLIGHT” between the two men on Iran and accusing critics of inventing a rift. A Trump aide said the president was briefed on the statement in advance and raised no objections. The White House also retweeted Vance, and Trump called the appraisal good.
Standing By Two “Very Fine People”
Trump used the same West Palm Beach remarks to address Democratic talk of impeaching Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. He stood by both, labeling them “very fine people,” touting Kennedy’s popularity and saying Hegseth handled the Iran war well. The only two shortcomings anyone can pin on his defense secretary, Trump argued, amount to a pair of military victories. Democrats need to get back to the country’s problems, he said.
Eight articles of impeachment against Hegseth were filed Monday, Nov. 9, by Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky. The House then scheduled a procedural vote on the resolution for Tuesday, Nov. 10. Hegseth has promised to fight, posting defiant videos online.