J. D. Vance’s Own Alien Abduction

By Helen Lewis

Thursday, July 16, 2026

 

Well, thank you very much, J. D. Vance. Because of the vice president’s appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast this week, I found myself googling photos of Joe Biden licking an ice-cream cone to pass judgment on whether, as Vance claimed, they look “suggestive.” I will save my final ruling for the end of this article, to keep you in suspense.

 

Watching Vance’s media appearances is uniquely painful. He lacks the authentic berserk of Kash Patel, or the pageant-queen polish of Karoline Leavitt, or his boss’s unique corkscrew approach to conversation. Like Stephen Miller, Vance desperately wants to be funny and cool. Like Stephen Miller, he is neither. And that’s before we get to the awkwardness of knowing that Vance—a Yale Law School graduate—has voluntarily lobotomized himself in the pursuit of power and attention. Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his dignity to be Donald Trump’s lackey.

 

Vance was allegedly on The Joe Rogan Experience to promote his second memoir, Communion, which I haven’t read. (He fooled me once by presenting Hillbilly Elegy as the sincere output of a thoughtful writer, and I won’t be fooled again.) Luckily, that doesn’t matter, because the two men spent most of their time on weightier matters, such as alien abductions and which foodstuffs risk making you look gay. When Jesse Watters of Fox did the latter bit a few years ago, his suggestions were at least excitingly left-field—soup, plus anything drunk through a straw—but Vance and Rogan just went with the obvious corn dogs and bananas. “Anything that looks like a dick,” Rogan helpfully explained.

 

Vance then spent a lot of time defending his negotiations to end the war with Iran—which, as you might have noticed, have not turned out particularly well. The people criticizing his efforts, he said, want America “to bomb and bomb and bomb. And the honest view, Joe, is that they do not actually have a solution.” He added: “They’ll say things like, ‘Well, just bomb them to oblivion.’” Madness! Who are these idiots? Vance blamed Mike Pence, his very own Ghost of Christmas Past, but inexplicably failed to mention President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who began the war by promising to bomb Iran “back to the Stone Age.” Perhaps Vance’s amnesia is political genius: He simply picks his favorite of the nine conflicting opinions that Trump has expressed on any given subject, and enthusiastically agrees with it.

 

The Iran discussion was one of several stretches in which Vance, who sits near the top of the government of the world’s most powerful country, affected the demeanor of a guy spitballing at the bar: Someone should really look into this. “You know, I will go to my deathbed believing there’s a story there, but I can’t prove it,” he told Rogan about the possibility that Jeffrey Epstein was running a blackmail operation. He also suggested that Epstein had caused wokeness in academia. Really. “He was funding a ton of scientists, but like when he died it’s almost like the era of censorship started to break,” he observed. Yes, as if Epstein’s pedophilia were not horrifying enough, Vance seemed to hold him responsible for land acknowledgments.

 

***

 

The other explanation for this hey-I-wonder approach is that Vance is dealing with the cognitive dissonance between his own self-image as a smart guy and the constant requirement to defend dumb and inconsistent actions by hallucinating that he is not really part of this administration, but instead a mere interested bystander. Vance treats the vice presidency the way that Instagram influencers approach a vacation in the Maldives: It only truly exists when converted into content. In one telling exchange, Vance said that he felt like he had “made it” when he was satirized on South Park, rather than at his inauguration.

 

Rogan was, by his usual collegiate standards, pretty tough on Vance over U.S. support for Israel, probing whether Trump would have gone to war in Iran without Benjamin Netanyahu’s lobbying. But then the podcaster swerved into suggesting Trump had been blackmailed over the Epstein files, a connection that made no sense until he asked whether Jeffrey Epstein was a CIA or Mossad agent. In the interview’s most viral moment, Vance joined Rogan in a kind of shrugging speculation, suggesting that the disgraced financier “clearly had connections to the highest levels of Israeli intelligence.” Vance had asked for any relevant documents and came up with nothing, he said, “but if that shit existed, it wouldn’t exist in 2026.”

 

Vance played the same card when talking about the possibility of a vast alien conspiracy, one of Rogan’s animating obsessions: “I’ve said that I’m going to, like, I’m going to look into the UFO thing,” the vice president said, “and I’ve been saying for a year and a half, and I haven’t done it yet because I haven’t had the time.” Sir, you had time to fill in as host of Charlie Kirk’s podcast after he died. You can take five minutes to send Kash Patel a memo with the words: Roswell fake Y/N?

 

***

 

Vance often feigns ignorance for strategic reasons, because the pose gets him out of all kinds of trouble. He pretended not to understand what he called the “overreaction” to the fighter Josh Hokit taking the mic at the White House UFC event to shout that Michelle Obama was a man. Vance left it to Rogan to explain that it might be bad form to visit the official residence of every president since John Adams and make baseless insinuations about a former first lady for attention. “If he said Michelle Obama’s a man at the T-Mobile Arena in Vegas, it’s like, okay, less of a story,” said Rogan, adding: “Not the best thing to say at the White House.”

 

Vance took a similar wide-eyed approach with his criticisms of California Governor Gavin Newsom, whom he disdained as a populist, before suddenly remembering that Republicans now like that word. “There’s a real populism that I’m very much a fan of because I think you should be responsive to people,” he said, recovering, “but there’s like a faux populism of: The way that I’m going to appeal to people is by assuming that they’re idiots and acting like they’re idiots.” Again, Mr. Vice President, are you aware that you are saying these things out loud?

 

Two hours in, Vance and Rogan began to talk about whether there’s “a meaningful difference between an angel or a demon and a space alien with super technology.” Rogan suggested that his guest should hurry up with Iran-war negotiations and get on with the real business of the government, such as finding out whether the government is secretly hoarding extraterrestrial corpses. “I’m skeptical that it’s true that we have the physical remains,” Vance said, before promising that he would take a photograph of them if he found them. Show it to the “ladies of The View,” suggested Rogan—“the intellectual leaders of our world.” The ABC show’s hosts may look like philistines to Rogan, but when Vance appeared on their show last month, they asked him tough questions about deaths in ICE custody, not Area 51.

 

The final half hour of Rogan’s interview dealt with Vance’s book, his surprising support of labor unions, and the effect of immigration on wages. But I know what you’re thinking: Joe Biden. A waffle cone. Maybe some rainbow sprinkles. Could that really be as unbearably erotic as J. D. Vance made out? The answer is no. As is the answer to the question, “Does J. D. Vance have the capacity to feel shame?”

A Reasonable Moderate

By Nick Catoggio

Thursday, July 16, 2026

 

Not every member of the current administration is a lowbrow populist s--tposter. But every member of the current administration is required to genuflect before the hobby horses of lowbrow populist sh-tposters.

 

Yesterday brought three examples within a few hours. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth came first, releasing a new video announcing that service members age 30 and older will be screened for testosterone deficiency going forward. (Yes, women too.) Title: “The High-T Department of War.”

 

Whether the new policy was contrived to justify his habit of blocking qualified female officers from promotions is unclear. But “Mr. Hegseth’s focus on testosterone levels at a moment when U.S. forces are ramping up attacks in Iran is unorthodox,” in the dryly understated words of the New York Times.

 

Later Jay Clayton, the president’s nominee to become director of national intelligence, sat for questions during a Senate hearing. Clayton is an Ivy League law graduate, federal prosecutor, and former head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, so you might think he would have had an easy time when Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff tossed him a softball: “Who won the 2020 election?”

 

He refused to answer. For two full minutes, he filibustered as Ossoff pressed him. “Isn’t it humiliating to be unable to answer this question, to have to indulge the president’s delusions?” the senator asked at one point, trying to shame him into an uncomfortable admission. But Clayton wouldn’t budge, rightly calculating that maintaining a cowardly silence would get him confirmed whereas telling the truth would see his nomination withdrawn before the day was out.

 

Finally there was J.D. Vance, who entered the belly of the beast of lowbrow populism by appearing on The Joe Rogan Show. Rogan’s podcast is a sort of Meet the Press for postliterate America, in which it’s taken almost for granted that shadowy forces are surreptitiously controlling the government. The vice president, “a conspiracy theorist for a decade” in the words of White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, was expected to flatter those suspicions. He didn’t disappoint.

 

The topic of Jeffrey Epstein, the central hub of every paranoiac’s evidence board, naturally came up. “He clearly had connections to the upper, the highest levels of American intelligence,” Vance alleged. “He clearly had connections to the highest levels of Israeli intelligence.” Has the VP seen evidence? Well, no, he admitted—but only because it’s been destroyed, in all probability. “If that sh-t existed, it wouldn’t exist in 2026,” he reassured Rogan.

 

That wasn’t the only time the Jewish state was mentioned. The peace deal that Vance helped broker between the U.S. and Iran lasted less than a month before collapsing in a heap, which required an explanation. Among the reasons suggested by the vice president for its failure: Israeli sabotage.

 

“There are some people within their system, we know beyond a shadow of a doubt, who are manipulating and trying to change American public opinion to keep the war going on indefinitely,” Vance said in a three-hour conversation with the podcaster Joe Rogan this week. “Not toward any objective, but just indefinitely.”

 

…

 

“When I open up the pages of Time magazine and I see that there’s a literal foreign influence campaign being funded to tank the very deal that I was pursuing, and, oh, by the way, many of the people who were receiving that money were actually attacking me in completely dishonest ways. You know, my response to that is, ‘Well, go to hell,’” Vance said.

 

He went on to describe himself as “a reasonable moderate” in America’s “massive pro-Israel, anti-Israel debate.”

 

This was all predictable. I know because I predicted it.

 

Triangulation.

 

“Vance will seek to separate himself from the war by finding ways to position himself as a skeptic of Israel going forward,” I wrote in March, long before the peace talks in which the VP was involved gained momentum. It was obvious even at the time how he’d try to wriggle out of the political jam in which the war had placed him. In a word: triangulation.

 

Vance is a postliberal isolationist who aspires to lead a party still dominated by pro-Israel evangelicals. The Iran conflict risks making him unpalatable to both constituencies. The young-chud Tucker Carlson faction whom he’s trusting to be his foot soldiers in the 2028 Republican primary was let down by his failure to prevent a war they despise, and he needs to atone to them for it. Taking the lead in peace negotiations was an obvious way; getting noisier about the supposedly malign influence of the Jewish state is another.

 

But it’s not that simple. The weak deal he brokered with Iran makes him suspect to right-wing hawks, and he can’t afford to get so noisy in his criticism of Israel that he begins to alienate the GOP’s Zionist majority. Doing so could create an opening in the primary for someone like Ted Cruz or depress Republican turnout for Vance in the general election.

 

He needs to position himself as, well, a reasonable moderate, skeptical enough of Israeli motives to make groypers happy yet supportive enough of Israeli prerogatives to satisfy the broader Republican base. Per yesterday’s interview, in America 2026, reasonable moderation seems to lie somewhere in the broooooad middle ground between “Israel has an absolute right to defend itself” and “the Jews are the source of all wars.”

 

Vance threw right-wing Zionists several bones on Rogan. He told his host that Israel didn’t pressure the president into striking Iran and claimed that some Israeli officials support Trump’s peace efforts. He also took care to say that he doesn’t fault Israelis for the American influence campaign they’re reportedly conducting. Countries like Qatar and Russia do it too, he noted—interesting company for him to place a close longtime U.S. ally in.

 

Why, even Viktor Orbán’s Hungary did it, as the vice president’s well-compensated postliberal influencer pals might attest. Vance neglected to mention that, oddly.

 

You don’t need to squint to see how Vance was also trying to pander to Tuckerites in yesterday’s interview, though. Endorsing the deathless “Epstein had ties to Mossad” theory without evidence speaks for itself. But the vice president also allegedly distorted Israel’s online influence operation, which is being conducted by former Trump adviser Brad Parscale. According to Parscale, the goal of the effort is to boost the nation’s flagging image among young right-wingers, not to “tank the very deal that I was pursuing,” as Vance claimed. “I have never funded, organized, or participated in any effort to undermine President Trump—ever—including his [memorandum of understanding with Iran] or ceasefire proposal,” Parscale promised the magazine.

 

In Time’s telling, the belief that Israel has been quietly drumming up American opposition to the deal rests on a “senior White House official” (whose name may or may not be “J.D. Vance”) who noticed a surprising number of right-wing online influencers criticizing the terms “with similarities in language and tone.” That wasn’t supposed to happen: “President Donald Trump’s aides had expected his supporters to celebrate the agreement,” the magazine claimed.

 

But it was a silly expectation. The deal was indefensible, dangling a $300 billion bonanza at the Iranians if they complied with it. And some of the influencers who attacked it, like Larry Elder and Pamela Geller, are longtime admirers of Israel who wouldn’t need to be bribed to say so. Essentially, the White House simply assumed that the Trump cult would behave like its usual culty self by uniformly applauding a humiliating capitulation to a terrorist regime that Americans have spent almost 50 years despising.

 

It wasn’t a crazy assumption given how the right has behaved for the last 10 years. But in this case, given the mainstream right’s hawkish DNA and the deal’s embarrassing terms, mindless loyalty was a bridge too far.

 

Far worse than that, though, was Vance’s inane claim to Rogan that elements inside the Israeli government are agitating for endless war—“not toward any objective, but just indefinitely.” Indefinitely? As in, they don’t want to win? They just want us to keep bombing ad infinitum?

 

It’s fair (more than fair) to say that Benjamin Netanyahu’s goals in the conflict were recklessly, foolishly ambitious, but there were goals. Framing Israeli opposition to the peace deal as driven instead by bloodlust devoid of strategy is conveniently self-serving for someone who’s desperate to spin the deal he negotiated as the most reasonable option that was on offer. But it’s also a none-too-subtle dog whistle to groypers and other conspiracy theorists who yearn to believe that Israel’s motives are diabolical. The Jews love war for war’s sake, above and beyond their desire to get anything out of it.

 

Israel is subverting America’s peace efforts from within to sustain its dream of “forever war,” but also lots of countries do it, and there are some sensible Israelis: That’s the sort of “reasonable moderation” Vance hopes will deliver him safely through a Republican primary and into the White House in 2028.

 

Sabotage.

 

The vice president has also staked out a “reasonable moderate” position on right-wing bigotry, not coincidentally.

 

You won’t catch him saying anything racist (well, not overtly), but you won’t catch him taking offense at racists either. To the contrary, he reliably goes out of his way to excuse or minimize prejudice among his postliberal flank, in some cases even when it’s aimed at his own wife.

 

It happened again yesterday. Joe Rogan brought up last month’s UFC event at the White House—no, I still can’t believe that actually happened either—and how one of the fighters shouted “Michelle Obama is a man!” during an interview after his match. People say crazy things all the time, Vance shrugged, before launching into a whine about the hosts of The View being unable to take a joke.

 

It fell to Rogan to note that it was “not the best thing to say,” particularly in a forum like the White House. “Fair,” Vance conceded, “but … dude, people say stuff all the time.”

 

People say stuff all the time is the safe stance on bigotry in a coalition like the modern GOP. Some sizable share of Republicans still blanches at prejudice; another sizable share embraces it; and a third regards any attempt to police for it as unacceptably “woke” and redolent of leftism. Vance needs all three of those contingents in his corner in 2028. So he’s landed on a position designed to satisfy each: He won’t endorse racism, but neither will he make any effort to discourage it.

 

He’s a “reasonable moderate,” building a tent in which the moral and grossly immoral should each feel welcome. In J.D. Vance’s GOP, you’re free to support Israel or believe that a hidden Jewish hand is tossing around shekels to sabotage peace and sustain war “indefinitely.” There’s room for debate.

 

It reminds me of the bargain that the late Lindsey Graham struck with Trumpism. The most favorable interpretation of Graham’s conduct after 2016 is that he was a hard-nosed realist, someone who secretly disliked the president’s influence on politics but made peace with it in order to maintain influence over policy and steer it in a more virtuous direction. J.D. Vance, one of the few right-wingers to navigate the Trump era more successfully than Graham, might be understood the same way. He doesn’t like the racists in his ranks, perhaps, but they’re a fact of political life and must be appeased to win their votes and advance to a position of presidential influence.

 

It’s not a perfect analogy, though, is it? Graham was a stranger to Trumpism, a hawkish traditional conservative forced by circumstance to reconcile himself to populist nationalism. It was easy to believe that he privately disdained the president’s worst tendencies. Vance, however, is a postliberal himself, the Tuckerites’ choice for vice president in 2024. He’s not trying to protect traditional politics from a chud insurgency. He’s part of that insurgency, having joined it before he first ran for office. If he’s pandering disingenuously to anyone with his “reasonable moderate” shtick on bigotry and Israel, it’s the traditionalists.

 

It’s remarkably cynical. But not necessarily ineffective.

 

While Vance was busy chatting yesterday with Joe Rogan, House Democrats were crossing a sort of policy Rubicon with respect to the Jewish state. Republican Rep. Thomas Massie introduced a bill that would cut all aid to Israel, and I do mean all—offensive weapons, defensive weapons, funding for humanitarian programs, the whole shebang. It was a gut-check vote to test whether opinion in the House, particularly on the left, has turned so sour toward Jerusalem that members of Congress would rather sever support for Israel entirely than maintain the status quo.

 

Two years ago, 37 Democrats voted to kill all funding when a similar bill was proposed. Yesterday 103 did, the first time in recent memory that more members of one of the two parties supported cutting all aid than opposed it. Even House Minority Whip Katherine Clark backed the measure, placing her at odds with caucus leader Hakeem Jeffries. “Nothing will be the same on this issue ever again,” Progressive Caucus chairman Greg Casar declared afterward, not a little triumphantly.

 

He’s right, though. The polling doesn’t lie. For Israel, the realistic best-case scenario for American politics circa 2028 is a Democratic Party that’s solidly against it versus a Republican Party that’s still supportive—although less so than it used to be.

 

But that’s also a best-case scenario for Vance. The more strident and monolithic the left’s opposition to Israel becomes, the more tolerable his “reasonable moderate” act on the subject will be to evangelicals and other Zionist right-wing hawks. Sure, the VP might occasionally babble about shadowy influence campaigns, but at least he’s not questioning Israel’s right to exist. He might grumble about the Israelis’ penchant for “indefinite” warmongering, but he wasn’t celebrating on October 7.

 

Modern American politics is an endless cycle of having to choose between the lesser of two evils as the evils on both sides relentlessly metastasize. I find it hard to imagine J.D. Vance as the lesser evil in any political contest. But given the pace of national decline, I also wouldn’t want to bet serious money against it.

Trump Just Did More Damage to American Elections Than China

By Tom Nichols

Thursday, July 16, 2026

 

President Trump addressed the American people tonight and told them that their elections are at the mercy of foreign actors—especially China. He called the current situation a “crisis” and vowed to prevent any future elections from being “stolen.” He directed the public to a website where people can peruse documents that he says prove not only that bad actors have influenced U.S. elections, but that all of this was kept from him by “deep state” malefactors during his first term.

 

Foreign powers do, in fact, try to influence American elections, but that was about all that the president—who seems shocked that other nations have preferences about who wins elected office in the United States—got right. The rest was a mishmash: Much of the previously classified material that Trump just splattered on the internet does not support his accusations, and in some cases, these declassified documents actually undermine and refute his charges.

 

Trump’s speech tonight rested on a few solid facts submerged in wild, and even somewhat paranoid, extrapolations. It’s true that bad actors have accessed basic data about the names and addresses of voters in several states. It’s also true that China has some pretty strong views about Trump and probably didn’t want him to be reelected in 2020. (The Chinese wanted him out because, Trump said, “I was wise to them,” which does not explain how he was nonetheless hoodwinked.)

 

From there, however, we slip the surly bonds of Earth and head into the dark and cold of the space of conspiracy theories. Trump strongly implied that in 2018, China was on the attack and trying to influence the outcome of the 2020 election, and that American intelligence operatives plotted to keep that from him while he was in the Oval Office. He said that attempts to rectify all of this have fallen “catastrophically short” but that he will take “swift” action in the coming days.

 

The documents he offered tonight, though, tell a different story—so different that they raise the question of whether Trump, or anyone else in the White House, actually read them.

 

For example, one of the memos from the National Intelligence Council (the analytical group within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence) said in 2020 that the group in charge of cyber-issues and threats to U.S. elections “assesses that Beijing has taken at least some low-level, exploratory steps to undermine the President’s reelection chances by denigrating him and shaping voter perceptions.”

 

That sounds pretty bad. Except that (as often happens in the intelligence community) this group was representing a minority view, as it says in the very next sentence: “Their assessment differs from the IC’s judgment that Beijing has considered but not deployed influence efforts to affect the Presidential election.”

 

So, which is it? The IC (shorthand for intelligence community) seems to have reached a pretty firm judgment in these documents: “The IC,” one of the memos says (with some passages redacted),

 

has seen no evidence that Beijing is engaged in an effort to influence the outcome of the presidential election, nor has it observed activity that it assesses is likely the result of such an effort by Beijing. While we have seen Beijing develop other options that could be used to influence the election, we have not seen these capabilities deployed.

 

Note that what these documents discuss are influence operations—propaganda, proxies who speak for foreign interests, fake stories, and so on—rather than interference, which would involve actual manipulation of data or sabotaging of electoral infrastructure. These classified revelations, despite Trump’s assertions, show that the intelligence community didn’t even agree that China was fully engaged even in these more limited influence operations.

 

One document says, with more firmness, that the Chinese were attempting to undermine Trump’s chances and to pressure business partners into withdrawing support for the president’s reelection. This is perfectly plausible behavior from a U.S. adversary. Of course, Trump skipped over the part about other nations, including one where “senior officials” and their leader were seeking to “covertly influence US politicians’ and political candidates’ thinking” about the election.

 

That nation? Turkey.

 

On one point, however, the declassified reports are clear. One country, more than any other, actively engaged in operations against the 2020 elections: Russia. And the Russians had a clear preference:

 

We assess that Russia is using a range of measures to denigrate former Vice President Biden and what it sees as an anti-Russia establishment. For example, it is directing or encouraging proxies to spread claims about Vice President Biden. Some Kremlin-linked actors are also seeking to boost President Trump's candidacy on social media.

 

This isn’t news, but Trump carefully cherry-picked his way around it. In charts provided by the White House itself that compare Russia, China, and Iran, only Russia is judged to be actively involved in such efforts.

 

Trump not only ignored these multiple (and much more categorical judgments); he interpreted the normal in-house fighting that goes on every day in the intelligence community as evidence of some sort of plot against him. He made much of a comment in a group email—these conspirators were pretty relaxed about sending their nefarious ideas around to everyone—about “massaging” the President’s Daily Brief to take out references to the 2020 election. But the conversation was clearly about which product would include such issues, and how strongly the minority view would be stated. Like so much else in the speech and the documents, Trump threw everything he could find at the wall and in the hope that some of it would stick.

 

So what, then, was the point of Trump’s speech? First, he is almost certainly trying to soothe his wounded ego over the 2020 election. He is obsessed with his loss to Biden and wants to blame it on foreign manipulation. But Trump might also have a darker motive, attacking the integrity of American elections because he wants to delegitimize the coming midterms—and perhaps even create the predicate for interfering in them.

 

The Chinese, the Russians, the Iranians, the North Koreans, and many other enemies of the United States clearly hope to undermine the faith of every American citizen in their own elections. But no regime, no spies, no saboteurs have yet matched the damage that America’s own president did tonight.

Trump Dooms His Own Party

By David Frum

Thursday, July 16, 2026

 

In early 2021, Republicans were poised to win a majority in the U.S. Senate. Had they won, they could have stalled President Biden’s agenda and forced him to govern on Republican terms. All they had to do was win the two Senate seats in Georgia headed to a run-off in January.

 

Then Donald Trump opened his yap. He had just lost the presidency. To assuage his own ego injury, Trump attacked the election as fake and rigged. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported the effect of this talk in Georgia. In rural and conservative areas of the state, 752,000 Georgians who had voted in November stayed home in January. Turnout rose by 228,0000 in Democratic-leaning areas. Trump had discouraged his own voters and energized his foes. His party lost both seats and any hope of retaining the Senate.

 

Tonight, Trump repeated his self-destructive behavior.

 

If you are an anti-Trump voter who watched all or part of tonight’s speech to the nation, you saw a president removed from reality, babbling about conspiracy theories, threatening your right to vote. You probably came away from the speech alarmed, angry, and motivated.

 

If, on the other hand, you are pro-Trump, you heard a message of despair. Your president, in whom you trust, described a hopelessly compromised voting system, so broken that it fooled even Trump himself in his first presidency. Between the Chinese, the illegal aliens, and the hated liberal media, your vote will probably count for nothing. Plus, it’s crooked and unpatriotic to vote by mail. It’s all hopeless. Why bother?

 

When presidents face tough election environments, they typically look for ways to rally wavering voters to the cause. In October 2010, President Obama promised supporters, “If everybody who showed up in 2008 shows up in 2010, we will win this election.” Trump’s message was one of futility, as if to say: It doesn’t matter how many of us show up, because of all the sinister plots against us. We’re doomed almost no matter what we do.

 

That message makes psychic sense for Trump. He’s probably going to lose at least one congressional chamber in November, perhaps two, and he desperately needs an explanation as to why it’s not his fault.

 

But the message makes no sense for the Republicans who are actually on the ballot in 2026. There are marginal Republican-held seats that might be saved by an exciting message about Republican themes, by an economic plan to curb inflation, by some good news about the war in Iran. Instead, Trump is serving dismalness. Even the people credulous enough to believe that Trump lost the presidency in 2020 because he got outsmarted by crafty Venezuelans cannot be too eager to return to the polls so he can be outsmarted again.

 

We’ll know soon enough just how many Americans watched the speech, how many heeded Trump’s call to demand that their representatives pass his SAVE America Act. But among those who watched for sure—the hard-pressed Republican candidates begging for Trump to throw them a frickin’ bone on some issue of concern to voters—how mad are they tonight?

 

Trump is always about Trump first. Tonight was about Trump alone. He’s abandoned his allies because it’s his nature; he cannot help it. Soon he’ll discover what it’s like to be even more isolated and embattled than he needed to be, because he could not speak for—or about—anything other than himself.

A Brief History of Trump’s Failures to Bring Peace

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, July 17, 2026

 

Campaigning for the White House in 2024, retired game show host Donald Trump insisted that he would end the Russia-Ukraine war on his first day in office—maybe before. He repeated that boast more than 50 times—it clearly was not a one-off remark. The war rages on, of course, and we have a pretty good idea of who is going to put a stop to that war: the Ukrainians.  

 

How are the great peacemaker’s other projects going?

 

There’s the much-ballyhooed “ceasefire” (a funny kind of ceasefire, in which the firing never ceases) in the complicated U.S.-Iran-Israel-Lebanon-Hezbollah conflict. Vice President J.D. Vance put together a sort of a deal (call it the JCPOS) that lasted about four minutes. Israel carried out airstrikes targeting Hezbollah agents in Beit Yahoun early in the week. Iran now says that Iranian control of the Strait of Hormuz is a non-negotiable “redline” that its military will defend “until the end.” Trump, having five minutes ago insisted that the “new” Iranian leaders were more reasonable and tractable than their immediate predecessors, now says they are “scum.” Trump, who promised an Iranian genocide before signing off on a memorandum of understanding somewhat softer than what the Barack Obama administration had negotiated, is back to promising war crimes, including terroristic attacks on civilian infrastructure.

 

Those are the two big ones. Nothing you would call an unqualified success. We did wreck the Iranian navy, much of which might as well have been ordered from a 1972 Montgomery Ward catalog.

 

Last year, Trump said he negotiated a ceasefire between India and Pakistan. There are two parties who dispute Trump’s characterization of the U.S. role in that conflict: India, vociferously, and Pakistan, more quietly. India, in fact, rejected the Trump administration’s offer to act as a mediator in the Kashmir dispute. “We have a longstanding national position that any issues related to the federally controlled union territory of Jammu and Kashmir must be addressed by India and Pakistan bilaterally,” India’s defense ministry said. “There has been no change to the stated policy.”

 

Trump also claims to have negotiated a truce in the Thai-Cambodian dispute. Neither the Thais nor the Cambodians seem to have got the word, and within a few weeks of the supposed ceasefire having been secured late last year, a half million residents of the border area were forced to flee fighting. Thai troops recently marched across the border, began raising Thai flags, and burned commercial buildings, according to a Cambodian complaint.

 

Trump claimed to have negotiated a “historic” peace deal in the conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Fighting has, in fact, intensified since the supposed peace deal was announced. “Fighting continues unabated,” says U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk.

 

In the months since Trump’s announced intention to intervene in the Egypt-Ethiopia dispute, there has been no fighting. Also, there was no fighting before, no war per se to be resolved. Trump did cause some head-scratching in the Arab world when he talked about his first encounter with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who “was in a hotel, and I met him, and we fell deeply in love.” A strange thing to say, but, then, Trump has for years been losing ground in what evidently is a hopeless war with his frontal lobe.

 

Trump has campaigned hard for a Nobel Peace Prize. Why? It is shiny, for one thing, and Barack Obama got a Nobel Peace Prize that he did not deserve, so why shouldn’t Trump? Unhappily for the president, the only peace prize he has secured for himself so far is the one invented for him by a corrupt soccer organization seeking to curry favor with his administration.

 

Ronald Reagan was interested in being a peacemaker, too. Everybody remembers Reagan’s enthusiasm for building a space-based missile-defense system—“Star Wars” was the sneering nickname the Democrats gave the idea—but fewer people remember that Reagan also wanted to share the technology with the Soviets, the idea being to lower the strategic value of nuclear missiles and consequently make it easier to get rid of the damned things altogether. It was an idealistic and slightly batty notion, but Reagan was a serious man surrounded by serious men.

 

Donald Trump, in contrast, is a social media addict who watches cable news all day and is surrounded by sycophants, grifters, and incompetents. It is remarkable to note that even as the U.S. military has depleted its weapons reserves to dangerous levels, the priority for the strutting, preening secretary of defense is … testosterone screening for U.S. troops. It is as though these goofs wish to advertise their insecurities.

 

As a peacemaking team, the Trump administration has an almost unblemished record of failure. That being the case, they might wish to change the subject.

 

Should we talk about inflation?

Rubio’s Strong Case Against the ICC

National Review Online

Friday, July 17, 2026

 

In one of the first acts of Donald Trump’s second term, the president imposed sanctions on the International Criminal Court for, among other offenses, attempting to subject the U.S. and its allies to its jurisdiction with or without their consent.

 

The ICC didn’t take the hint. So, this week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio revealed that the U.S. would take things a step further. “Using all the tools at our government’s disposal,” he wrote for the Wall Street Journal, “we will dismantle the ICC — brick by brick, if necessary.”

 

Trump’s chief diplomat makes a sound case for the administration’s opposition to the ICC. He observed that one of the court’s prosecutors has called America’s activities in Afghanistan “war crimes,” to establish the predicate for the prosecution of U.S. soldiers and political officials. More than that, Rubio noted that the ICC’s prosecutors have attempted to thwart our deportations solely because these expulsions involve other nations, as any deportation program would. And when America’s elected officials complain about the court’s power grabs, Rubio observed, they, too, are accused of crimes.

 

“It is only a matter of time before the ICC begins making good on these threats,” Rubio wrote. The left-leaning European press scoffed at his worry that the ICC would seek to criminalize the domestic enforcement of U.S. immigration law — concocting “images of US border patrol agents and elected leaders being ‘dragged before an international court’ and tried by judges from around the world,” as The Guardian put it. But why is that so hard to believe? The ICC invents flimsy pretexts to justify its intervention into the affairs of nonmember states all the time.

 

Take Israel, for example. Because the ICC wanted to prosecute Israeli officials for the conduct of Jerusalem’s post–October 7 war on its terrorist enemies, it erected a dubious rationale to justify its intervention in that conflict. In ICC prosecutor Karim Khan’s words, the court was engaged in the oversight of a war that was being conducted inside “the state of Palestine.” No internationally recognized legal entity goes by that name, of course. But pretending the Palestinians have a state justifies the ICC’s desire to prosecute Israelis on their behalf.

 

Khan, who was sanctioned by name by Trump in February 2025, just made up this legal fiction so that he could violate Israeli sovereignty. Why wouldn’t these same malleable standards be applied to the United States?

 

Trump’s Democratic predecessors, by the way, could look askance at the court. President Barack Obama did not seek the Senate’s consent to join the court. Indeed, he unilaterally declared that U.S. soldiers engaged in peacekeeping operations abroad operate “without risk of criminal prosecution or other assertion of jurisdiction by the International Criminal Court.”

 

President Joe Biden lashed out at the court when it issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. “The ICC issuance of arrest warrants against Israeli leaders is outrageous,” he said in a statement. “Whatever the ICC might imply, there is no equivalence — none — between Israel and Hamas.” Biden’s secretary of state, Antony Blinken, said in 2024 that he was open to sanctions on the ICC.

 

The activist and academic left accused both presidents of hypocrisy — praising the ICC and using it to advance U.S. interests when it suited them, but undermining the court when it threatened U.S. sovereignty and that of its allies. Well, yeah. Welcome to the world of statecraft.

 

“Independence is our birthright,” Rubio concluded. “To accept the ICC is to surrender control of our national destiny.” Indeed, no supranational entity should have a veto power over U.S. security priorities as defined by America’s elected leaders and, ultimately, its voters. Let the dismantling begin.

Does JD Vance Think Trump Is an Agent of Foreign Influence?

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, July 16, 2026

 

Typically, an embattled administration looking to shore up support within what it views as influential elements of its base will dispatch its principals on goodwill tours designed to convince skeptics to support the administration’s policies. In JD Vance’s interview with Joe Rogan, however, the vice president lobbied the podcaster on his own behalf, not Donald Trump’s.

 

When it comes to Iran, the policies Vance advocated do not reflect those of the administration in which he serves. Indeed, his views seem to be incompatible with the president’s.

 

“There are people, you know, who are super hawkish in the American system who have attacked the deal, and frankly, in some ways, have tried to derail the deal,” Vance said of the now-defunct memorandum of understanding with Iran. “And I always say to those people, ‘What is your proposal?’”

 

Donald Trump was asked a similar question this week, and he answered it succinctly:

 

 

“They always want to meet,” Trump said of his Iranian counterparts. “If you’re not going to do it the way I’m doing it, you’re never going to make a deal with them.”

 

The vice president and his allies have done their utmost to ensure that you know he’s not on board with any of this. In his conversation with Rogan, Vance articulated the capitulatory logic behind the MOU, which would cede the Strait of Hormuz to Iran based on his conclusion that defanging the Islamic Republic in the strait is an impossible task.

 

“The people who are like, ‘You can’t negotiate with the Iranians,’ the reason why that’s fundamentally idiotic is, so long as you have some person who is willing to fire off a few cheap drones, you’re going to have some ship captains who say, ‘No, we’re not willing to do this,” Vance said. “You can bomb them. You can take away some of their drones and some of their missiles, but it’s just too easy to fire at ships in the strait, so you’ve got to be willing to talk and to try to figure out the problem.”

 

That’s another way of saying that the president is putting American blood and treasure on the line in a fool’s errand that is destined to fail. That’s a serious charge. It’s one the president’s Democratic opponents have expressed almost in those precise terms on a semi-regular basis.

 

Perhaps Vance thinks the president has been misled. Maybe he thinks Trump has been ensorcelled by what he alleges was “a literal foreign influence campaign” paid for by “certain elements within the Israeli government” to undermine diplomacy with Iran. If the vice president believes that all his critics are acting in bad faith and the president is as much a victim of this campaign of Israeli active measures as anyone, Vance might have taken his concerns to the president in private before setting out to embarrass him on one of America’s most listened-to podcasts.

 

This is reflective of a familiar dynamic. The vice president spent much of last year promulgating an alternate reality in which the Trump administration was skeptical of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government and Israel’s defensive priorities. It was an evidence-free proposition. Similarly, Vance regularly informed reporters that, if the Ukraine-Russia peace process failed, America would leave Ukraine to the fate the Kremlin had in store for it. After all, “This is not our war,” he maintained.

 

The vice president wasn’t describing the administration’s policies. He was outlining his own preferences.

 

There’s the chance that the vice president believes everything he told Rogan. We cannot rule out the possibility that Vance has related his concerns to the president, but that Trump is nevertheless deaf to them. If Vance truly believed the president is sacrificing American interests to those of a foreign power, putting U.S. service personnel in the danger in the process, then he has another option: resign in protest.

 

That would dispel the notion, at least, that the vice president is feathering his own  political nest at the expense of the administration of which he is a part. It would confirm that Vance’s principles are deeply held and his objections to the Iran war are sincere. Otherwise, it’s not clear what Vance is doing save campaigning for the presidency. That wouldn’t be as distasteful if it didn’t apparently require him to undermine America’s ongoing efforts to subdue an implacable U.S. enemy in wartime.