RICH LOWRY: A Trump-Vance fissure

JD Vance may have many ambitions, but probably being the next Hubert Humphrey isn’t one of them.

During his 1968 presidential campaign, the Democratic vice president couldn’t escape the shadow of the Vietnam War vigorously prosecuted by the incumbent, Lyndon Baines Johnson, despite his VP’s private doubts about it. Now, the Iran war isn’t Vietnam and will probably end prior to the 2028 election, but Vance still might want to bone up on how Humphrey tried to balance achieving independence from the policy of an administration he served and provoking the ire of the sitting president of his own party.

Humphrey ultimately went his own way late in the 1968 campaign, calling for a bombing pause, but lost nonetheless. Vance made his own semi-declaration of independence from the Iran war last week. He couched it in political punditry, posting on X that the war was to blame for the GOP’s midterm defeat.

This set off a furious intramural debate on the right over how to interpret the electoral debacle, and whether Vance was being “disloyal” to his boss or simply advancing a view that Donald Trump himself largely shares. The president, too, has said Iran hurt, so that’s not the potential fault line here. It is whether or not Trump botched one of the most consequential decisions of his presidency by launching the Iran war last February.

In an extraordinary passage in his X post, Vance wrote disparagingly of defenders of the war: “If you’d like to argue it was worth it, that losing the Senate for the next six years was worth it, then do so. Argue it was a worthwhile cost to pay. Agree or disagree, that’s at least honest.” The vice president had in mind hawkish pundits who are minimizing the political price of the war, for whom he has ill-concealed contempt.

But you know who else has been arguing that the war was worth the cost? The president, upon whose favor Vance’s political prospects depend. Since the vice president published his post, Trump has repeatedly said that war was the right decision, that he would do it again and that history will judge him favorably for it. He’s gone further and proclaimed that the one thing Vance left out of his post was saying it would be the right call to go to war if they had to do it over again, something Vance clearly doesn’t believe.

Elsewhere in his post, Vance made a pointed nod to critics of the war: “To the people who are pissed off and want to say, ‘I told you so’: you’re right, you did tell us so. Take that energy into electing Republicans who share your worldview.”

It’s almost never easy for a VP to handle his relationship with the sitting president as he makes his own bid for the White House, and this will be doubly so dealing with a figure as personally domineering and mercurial as Trump. The president is likely to insist on total loyalty from a GOP nominee. So, being in a different place on a hugely important policy question with fraught ideological implications is particularly treacherous for the VP.

Perhaps Vance, a deft communicator and shrewd political player, finds a way to cleverly finesse this issue, or Trump changes his mind about the war, or other considerations prevail. They also could find common ground on a diplomatic exit from the war. All of this is possible, and yet the ghost of Hubert Humphrey is in the room.

Rich Lowry is on Twitter @RichLowry.