The morning after Republicans suffered the most devastating midterm loss in recent memory, Vice President JD Vance posted his response to the election results on X. Vance’s poignant diagnosis has garnered over 72 million views and widespread support from both the administration and voters on the right.
To riff off a famous line from President Bill Clinton’s strategist James Carville, Vance’s midterm manifesto basically boiled down to one thing: “It’s the war, stupid.”
And Vance is right. The Iran war was overwhelmingly unpopular, especially amongst young voters.
Predictably, pundits like Marc Thiessen and The Wall Street Journal editorial board were quick to blame the loss on anything but the war. Instead of owning up to their miscalculations, they doubled down on their stale warmongering and went straight for President Donald Trump’s most popular (and successful) policies: tariffs and immigration.
In their efforts to label Vance’s diagnosis as a break from the president, war-loving neoconservatives like Thiessen themselves utterly betrayed Trump and the American people.
Americans care about affordability, simple as that. Trump’s tariffs and immigration crackdown opened up jobs right here at home and were largely popular with the American people.
The Iran war was not.
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