How Much Humiliation
Can Vance Take?
April 7, 2026
By Dana Milbank
Mr.
Milbank is a columnist at the news site NOTUS.
At a closed-door Easter
luncheon at the White House, President Trump decided to entertain the crowd by
humiliating his understudy.
Mr. Trump demanded an
update on Iran peace negotiations from Vice President JD Vance. “How’s that
moving?” Mr. Trump asked, in a video of the event the White House seemed to
have accidentally posted online.
“It’s going good, sir,”
Mr. Vance replied from the audience. Mr. Trump cut off the rest of his
response.
“Do you see it
happening?” the president asked, about a successful end to the war.
“Uh,” the vice president replied.
“We’re going to brief it to you.”
Then Mr. Trump delivered
his punchline. “So, if it doesn’t happen, I’m blaming JD Vance,” he said, to
laughter. “If it does happen, I’m taking full credit.”
Does Mr. Vance still not
realize that the joke is on him? The interesting thing is not that he keeps
debasing himself but that he gets less and less in return each time. As his
political fortunes dim, his soul has become a depreciating asset.
Over and over in recent
years, Mr. Vance struck devil’s bargains, first to gain a Senate seat and then
to become Mr. Trump’s No. 2. He embraced the anti-immigrant stances he once
called “reprehensible” and other dark elements of the MAGA movement in hopes of
positioning himself as its next leader.
What once might have
been a cruise to the 2028 Republican presidential nomination now looks more
like a run through the Strait of Hormuz. Mr. Vance is experiencing a version of
the pain experienced by other ambitious Republicans who embraced Mr. Trump only
to see themselves used and (eventually) discarded by him.
The ethnonationalist right to which
Mr. Vance tethered himself now appears to be faltering at home and abroad. The
Iran war has exposed a rift in the MAGA movement, alienating those who believed
Mr. Trump’s “I’m not going to start a war” promise — and then watched the
“America first” president bomb Yemen, Somalia, Syria, Nigeria, Iraq and
Venezuela while threatening Cuba and Greenland.
Mr. Vance had turned
himself into a leading America first voice — he said in 2024 that war in Iran
is “very much” against the national interest. Then Mr. Trump saddled him with
the war.
Polling shows that Mr.
Vance’s standing in public esteem is about as low as his boss’s, now the worst
of his term. The vice president’s status as Mr. Trump’s heir in the MAGA
movement is slipping, as measured by last month’s straw poll at the Conservative
Political Action Conference. Secretary of State Marco Rubio surged to 35
percent from 3 percent last year, while Mr. Vance, though still leading,
retreated to 53 percent from last year’s 61 percent.
So Mr. Vance is
responding as he always has whenever ambition calls: He’s humiliating himself.
The vice president is
scheduled to go to Hungary on Tuesday to campaign for the country’s
authoritarian leader, Viktor Orban, a Kremlin-allied white nationalist who
proclaims that Europeans “do not want to become peoples of mixed race.”
It’s not clear how much
Mr. Orban would benefit from the visit. After 16 years in power, his party is
trailing in polls despite Mr. Trump’s “complete and total endorsement” in next
Sunday’s vote, a February visit from Mr. Rubio, and a reported proposal from
Russia to bolster Mr. Orban by staging a fake assassination attempt.
Mr. Vance may hope that the visit will
distract from his Iran problem and lift his flagging fortunes in the MAGA
movement. Trump supporters lionize Mr. Orban, whose party rewrote Hungary’s
Constitution to create an “illiberal democracy” and constantly feuds with the
European Union over his anti-immigrant policies.
For an ordinary
democratic leader, stumping for Mr. Orban would require a certain amount of
nose-holding. But Mr. Vance is no ordinary democratic leader.
He is vice president to
a man he once referred to as “cultural heroin” and feared could be “America’s
Hitler.” He’s transitioned from public intellectual to social-media troll,
using profanity to attack critics and accurate news reporting.
He has more than once
dismissed criticism of fellow Republicans caught engaging in racist rants that
included bigotry against Indians — even though his wife and children are of
Indian descent. He has fueled conspiracy theories, most notably with his claim
that people in his home state, Ohio, “have had their pets abducted and eaten”
by Haitian immigrants.
For all his moral
flexibility, though, there’s probably nothing Mr. Vance can say to make
Hungarians feel better. Their economy has been stagnating as Mr. Orban’s family
and friends became rich.
Whether Mr. Orban wins or loses, his
authoritarianism seems to have run its course and led Hungary to a bad place.
Other right-wing nationalists have suffered recent setbacks at the polls in
France and, last year, in the Netherlands. Far-right parties in Germany and
elsewhere have begun distancing themselves from Mr. Trump over a war that has
made the president even more disliked among American voters.
While anonymous White
House officials let it be known that
the vice president was skeptical about the war in the lead-up to the invasion,
Mr. Trump has cut off that route of escape, saying Mr. Vance was “maybe less
enthusiastic about going, but he was quite enthusiastic.” Mr. Vance is reduced
to maintaining that war is OK now because “we have a smart president whereas in
the past we’ve had dumb presidents.”
Whatever one thinks of the president’s
intellect, there is no doubt that we have a smart vice president. That makes it
all the more tragic that he hasn’t used his office to be something more than
Mr. Trump’s punchline.