With everything going wrong in Donald Trump‘s presidency these days, he is still the master at one thing: making sure that no one who pledges fealty to him will escape with their dignity intact. As vice president, JD Vance receives regular reminders of this, including an especially brutal one delivered on Tuesday. His plane was standing ready to fly to Islamabad, Pakistan, to lead the administration’s peace negotiations with Iran. But instead of taking off, Vance was made to wait hours while his boss dawdled, before eventually extending a deadline for Iran to offer a proposal to end the war that Trump impetuously started in late February in partnership with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The vice president didn’t even want to be there, a feeling he has apparently made clear through anonymous leaks from either himself or his associates to journalists, which haver resulted in flattering stories alleging that the vice president tried to talk Trump out of launching a war on Iran. These accounts are likely true enough, but not because Vance has some noble objection to needless killing. At 41, the vice president has enough wits about him to see what was very obvious, something the Trump has refused to see: that this war would be a political debacle for the administration — and for Vance’s future plans to run for president.
