Dem
47
GOP
53
Sooner or later—probably sooner—it will be clear to a majority of Americans that Iran won the war and the peace and America lost both of them. That is when the blame game will start in earnest.
As we note above, one head that ought to roll is that of Pete Hegseth, for losing the war. But who will get the blame for losing the peace? On Sunday, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said: "Under our law, any nuclear deal with Iran will be sent to Congress for review and a vote. I look forward to reviewing the final product and I believe it is imperative that the architect of the deal, Vice President Vance, and his negotiating partners, be part of the process in presenting the final deal to Congress" (our emphasis). Graham is the ultimate toady, although he probably has some empathy for Young Khamenei, and he knows what Donald Trump wants to hear. So, the deal (the "peace") is apparently Vance's "fault"? When people figure out how bad this is, is Trump going to need a scapegoat, real fast? Paging Nancy Pelosi, Hunter Biden, and Barack Obama. Those probably aren't going to work, so maybe Trump's plan is to blame Vance for not having memorized The Art of the Deal (Persian edition) and give him the blame.
What makes this plausible as a theory is that when something goes wrong, it is never, ever Trump's fault. He is more infallible than Kim Jong-Un multiplied by Pope Leo. So it is goat-hunting season. There is an increasing amount of indirect evidence that Trump wants Secretary of State Marco Rubio to be his successor, probably not for ideological reasons (Rubio doesn't even pretend to be MAGA the way Vance does), but because Republican donors have told Trump that Vance can't win and Rubio maybe can. Normally, the vice president's job is to call the White House every day at 8 a.m. to see if the president is alive, and if so, take the day off. You know who is the country's top diplomat? Yeah, the secretary of state. But Rubio wasn't involved in the horrendous deal with Iran at all, so his hands are clean and Vance has been set up to take the fall. If Vance decides to run in 2028, despite having fallen out of favor with Trump, Trump could blame Vance for the bad deal and then support Rubio.
We don't claim to be clairvoyant, but we wrote this item yesterday afternoon before Trump chimed in on the situation. After we were done writing, Trump "joked" when talking to Fox News' Peter Doocy, saying: "If it works out, I'm going to take the credit. If it doesn't work out, I'm blaming J.D. You better be careful, J.D. He's going to turn his plane around and get the hell out of here." Except it wasn't a joke at all. It was saying the quiet part out loud, prepping for exactly what is going to happen.
Vance is smart enough to understand that the rug is being pulled out from under him, but he is in no position to do anything about it. Why didn't the White House get a better deal? Because Trump wanted gas prices to go down on account of the midterms and was prepared to give away the farm to get that. He undoubtedly ordered Vance to make a deal, any deal, and the only deal the Iranians were interested in was total victory, so that is what Vance had to give them. The irony here is that Vance was the only one in the administration who saw in advance that the war was going to be a disaster and argued against it. Now he is going to be the fall guy for it. He could push back on Trump and say: "I ran the deal past the president and he said I should sign it," but that would infuriate Trump. We don't see how Vance can wiggle out of this one easily. He's trapped. Poor J.D. If he sees that the presidency is out of reach in 2028, he could write the mother of all tell-all books and at least make a lot of money on the way out the door. (V)