Even the couch-fucker knew it was stupid...

Vance was ‘skeptical’ voice in White House on Iran strikes

White House officials revealed that the vice president made his opposition known in the leadup.

By Diana Nerozzi and Eli Stokols

Vice President JD Vance was skeptical of the U.S. striking Iran in the leadup to President Donald Trump’s decision to launch the war, two senior Trump officials told POLITICO.

Vance, who has long questioned U.S. intervention abroad, has publicly defended Trump’s Iran operation. But White House officials revealed that the vice president made his opposition known in the leadup, pulling the curtain open after months of speculation about Vance being far more tepid about military action than Trump.

Vance is “skeptical,” is “worried about success” and “just opposes” the war on Iran, a senior Trump official said via text message. The official was granted anonymity to speak about the vice president’s views.

A second senior Trump official said “his role is to provide the president and the administration, you know, all points of views of what could happen from many different angles and, you know, he does that. But once the decision has been made, he’s fully on board.”

Vance’s well-documented skepticism of U.S. military engagement, forged in his experiences serving in the Marine Corps in Iraq, paired with his more subdued tone on the successes of the operation, have fueled speculation of a schism between the president and his vice president.

It is not the first time Vance has appeared to differ from Trump over U.S. military action. When the U.S. bombed the Houthis early last year, Vance wrote in a thought-to-be-secret Signal chat with other administration officials that he thought the move was a “mistake.” And it comes amid a years-long paper trail of public remarks documenting the reasons it is not in the U.S.’s interest to go to war with Iran.

The fresh example of a policy divide between the two men comes as Trump has cited a role for both Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio – who is publicly more aligned with the president on Iran – on a 2028 ticket.

Even Trump on Monday brought up the division – but it didn’t seem to bother him.

Vance “was, I’d say, philosophically a little different from me. I think he was maybe less enthusiastic about going, but he was still quite enthusiastic,” Trump told reporters at Mar-a-Lago.

Vance has not explained that “philosophical” difference, and his aides would not go into details about his thinking on the military action.

“The Vice President has been the focus of constant leaks left and right by people trying to project their views onto him,” Vance spokesperson Taylor Van Kirk said. “And as a result, there have been countless inconsistent accounts of the Vice President’s views published, which shows the mainstream media has no idea what they’re talking about.”

She added, “the Vice President, a proud member of the President’s national security team, keeps his counsel to the President private.”

White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said “efforts to drive a wedge between President Trump and Vice President Vance are totally misguided. The President listens to a host of opinions from his talented national security team and ultimately makes decisions based on what is best for our country and national security. Vice President Vance is a tremendous asset to the President and the entire administration.”

A person familiar with Vance’s thinking, granted anonymity to describe it, said the vice president saw the need to strike quickly and that a delay could cause U.S. casualties due to potential leaks of U.S. military plans.

In the first year of Trump’s second term, Vance has often given voice to the skeptics of military action. After the U.S. bombed Iranian nuclear facilities in June and after the U.S. capture of former Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro, Vance went to social media to defend the moves but gave credence to Americans who are “right to be worried about foreign entanglement,” as he wrote after the June bombing.

Since the strikes began, Vance has walked a public line of supporting the president’s military objectives without echoing his triumphant language, such as Trump’s proclamation Wednesday that “we won” the war.

“Trump will not get the United States into a years-long conflict with no end in sight and no clear objective,” Vance told Fox News on March 2, arguing that the “simple” objective of destroying Iran’s nuclear capability will prevent the U.S. from quagmires like in Iraq or Afghanistan.

While showing vocal support for the strikes now, Vance has a history of being a voice of skepticism on U.S. intervention abroad, specifically in Iran.

Two days before Trump launched the strikes, he told the Washington Post that he views himself as a “skeptic of foreign military interventions” and that “we all prefer the diplomatic option.”

Two years earlier as vice presidential nominee, he told podcaster Tim Dillon that “our interest, I think, very much is in not going to war with Iran” and that it would be a “huge distraction of resources” and “massively expensive to our country.”