The Obvious Scapegoat

By Nick Catoggio

Friday, March 27, 2026

 

As the universe of good-ish outcomes in Iran shrinks, the right’s desire to blame someone not named “Donald Trump” will intensify.

 

That universe is small already. From where I sit, there’s one plausible result left on the table that might fairly be called “good-ish”: Iran agrees to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and in return the president withdraws all U.S. forces from the Persian Gulf. A TACO with all the trimmings.

 

We can’t call that outcome “good” because it would amount to ending the war without achieving America’s two key objectives, regime change in Iran and neutralizing its buried stockpile of enriched uranium. But at this point, averting the economic disaster of a sustained energy crisis and a U.S. ground incursion that would involve many American casualties certainly qualifies as good-ish.

 

Our armed forces have destroyed thousands of military targets and meaningfully degraded Iran’s missile capabilities. (And in so doing have degraded our own.) It will be a few years before the fanatics are in a position to make serious regional trouble again. Pretty good-ish.

 

The problem is that there’s no reason to believe the regime is prepared to do that deal. Their chokehold on Hormuz has left the president with two terrible options: TACO-ing out without reopening the strait or committing thousands of American soldiers to reopening it forcibly and enduring whatever that entails. The first would be a gross humiliation for Trump and for American military power; the second would place U.S. infantry in the crosshairs, trigger Iranian escalation against energy infrastructure around the region, and further poison public opinion against the war.

 

To watch the president “negotiate” lately is to watch him desperately try to carrot-and-stick Iran’s government toward the good-ish outcome. He keeps postponing his idiotic deadline for bombing the country’s power plants to create space for diplomacy while saber-rattling with leaks about sending 10,000 more troops to the region. His hope, obviously, is that the Iranians will panic and sue for peace, offering at last to reopen the strait in exchange for a ceasefire.

 

But if they don’t? I don’t think he has the slightest idea what he’ll do. (And I’m not alone.) “The problem with [securing] the straits is this,” Trump said at a Cabinet meeting on Thursday. “Let’s say we do a great job. We say we got 99 percent. One percent is unacceptable, because 1 percent is a missile going into the hull of a ship that cost $1 billion. If we do a 99 percent decimation, that’s no good.”

 

Correct. Something he maybe should have considered a month ago, no?

 

The truth, according to senior White House officials who spoke to MS NOW, is that the president has “grown a little bored with Iran” and “wants to move on,” lately pivoting toward the economy, domestic policy, and the midterms in conversations with aides. With much of the Iranian leadership dead and the daily explosion highlight reel doubtless having grown monotonous, the glorious part of the war is over. What’s left is messy business, and Trump has always been comfortable walking away when business gets messy and leaving someone else holding the bag.

 

He might be content with this war ending with a bad outcome rather than with the lone remaining good-ish one, but many Americans won’t be. Unwilling to blame the president himself, his supporters will need a scapegoat. Whom will it be?

 

You know whom.

 

The Jewish partner.

 

“The degree to which ‘blame Israel’ is the actual [White House] back-up plan is underappreciated,” Vox’s Benjy Sarlin observed this morning. “It’s not just a complaint from the anti-war left and right, it’s going to be the MAGA default from Trump down if this goes badly.”

 

To say that many right-wingers will blame Israel for the president’s strategic failure is not to imply that they’ll only blame Israel. Cultish nationalists are forever scanning their own tribe for traitors. Trump himself has always seemed to take as much pleasure in purging “RINOs” from his party as he has from seeing Democrats lose.

 

If the war escalates and/or the White House fails to achieve anything more militarily, the GOP base will look first to scapegoat treacherous hawks in Trump’s orbit. (“Whichever adviser told him to do this needs to be fired!”) That means Secretary of State Marco Rubio, whose low profile in this conflict won’t spare him from suspicions related to his Reaganite origins. And it means Republican politicians and media stars who are known to have the president’s ear.

 

Postliberals won’t pass on a gift-wrapped opportunity to marginalize the party’s remaining interventionists by training all of their rhetorical fire on Israel. Especially not with a succession fight brewing in 2028.

 

But they’re surely going to train some of that fire on the Jewish state.

 

They already have. One of Trump’s own deputies quit the administration with an Israel-bashing flourish earlier this month, and the usual suspects in chud media are saying the things you’d expect the usual suspects to say. “This feels very much to me like it’s clearly Israel’s war,” groyper-panderer Megyn Kelly declared a few days after the conflict began. “Mark Levin wanted it. It’s his war. Ben Shapiro, Lindsey Graham, Miriam Adelson—that’s obvious. They’re the ones who’ve been pushing us into it.”

 

It was thoughtful of her to toss in Graham’s name with a group of prominent Jews, just to muddy the traditional stereotype about the hidden hand behind unpopular military conflicts.

 

Criticism of Israel’s role in the war has also reportedly been heard among attendees at CPAC this week, especially the cohort that’s come of age under Trumpism. “There’s a resentment now with younger Republicans toward Israel because they feel like the U.S. put Israel before them,” one conservative pollster told CNN about the conflict. It couldn’t be otherwise: An ideology as tribal, anti-intellectual, and conspiratorial as right-wing nationalism is all but lab-designed to encourage grievances toward Jews and the power they wield.

 

It’s not a coincidence that some of its avatars appear to prefer sharia law to liberalism.

 

And so no matter how many times hawks try to explain our national interest in preventing anti-American fanatics with a taste for extortion from building nuclear ICBMs, a joint U.S.-Israeli military offensive that ends badly is destined to be demagogued by postliberals as a “war for Israel” that our “America First” president somehow got sucked, or suckered, into. In a movement that treats its own leader as beyond reproach, blaming his Jewish partner for the present misfortune is a no-brainer.

 

We will hear ad nauseam in years to come, I’m sure, about Mossad’s misplaced faith that it could foment an uprising among the Iranian people once the bombing began. We’ll hear much less about why Trump opted to trust that plan instead of listening to the “doubts about its viability among senior American officials and some officials in other Israeli intelligence agencies.” Granted, it’s not the first time he’s chosen to trust foreign assurances over his own intelligence agencies. The fact remains: It was his choice.

 

Go figure that Megyn Kelly’s list of influential warmongers would overlook that, omitting the name of the commander in chief entirely in assigning blame. It’s precisely what you’d do if you had to navigate an audience that believes simultaneously that the war is bad but that Donald Trump is, and can only be, good.

 

Which brings us to J.D. Vance.

 

Vance’s path.

 

Israel is potentially the vice president’s way out of the political jam he’s in.

 

Trump’s war has made life uncomfortable for Vance (although not as uncomfortable as many like to think). He entered office as the great postliberal hope, an isolationist watchdog inside the West Wing who would guard the president from wily neocons beckoning to him to start a new war. He failed spectacularly and is now reduced to smiling awkwardly as Trump lays waste to Iran while Lindsey Graham eggs him on to hit Cuba next.

 

If the war ends badly, the VP will bear the burden of it in 2028 among both the general electorate and the disappointed nationalist right. He needs a way to align himself with public opinion without doing anything career-wrecking, like denouncing the conflict forthrightly.

 

That’s where Israel comes in. Sources are whispering this week to Axios that Vance held a “difficult” phone call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday in which he “mentioned that several of Netanyahu's predictions about the war had proved far too optimistic, particularly when it came to the prospects of a popular uprising to topple the regime.” One person told the outlet, "Before the war, Bibi really sold it to the president as being easy, as regime change being a lot likelier than it was. And the VP was clear-eyed about some of those statements.”

 

So: Israel misled us into war, and people around the vice president want Americans to know he’s angry about it. Hmm.

 

That’s not all. One U.S. official who spoke to Axios blamed Israel for the claim circulating this week that Iran wants to negotiate with Vance because they think his isolationist tendencies will make him easier to roll. “It’s an Israeli op against J.D.,” the official complained, alleging that Tel Aviv wants to discredit Vance because of his dovishness.

 

So: Israel is out to get the vice president because he opposes its reckless military adventurism and, once again, people around him want Americans to know. Double hmm.

 

No one in America has more at stake than J.D. Vance in finding a way to be somehow pro-Trump and anti-war. He (probably) can’t win a Republican presidential primary without claiming the president’s legacy, and he (probably) can’t win a general election without denouncing the campaign against Iran as a mistake. The only way through that narrow passage is to shift blame for the war away from Trump and onto some other party.

 

Conveniently, the other party in this case has seen its support collapse among Democrats and independents and shrink among Republicans, particularly younger ones. And so the strategy is clear, as I’m sure Axios’ mysterious sources would agree: Vance will seek to separate himself from the war by finding ways to position himself as a skeptic of Israel going forward.

 

He’s dipped a toe into doing so in the past, criticizing the Israeli Knesset last year when it held a vote on annexing the West Bank while he was visiting the country. But until now most of his postliberal signaling has taken the form of gestures toward his chud base—biting his tongue about postliberal bigotry, posting about the Holocaust without mentioning Jews, not correcting supporters when they babble at him about the Jewish faith supporting the persecution of Christians.

 

“Vance stands up to Israel” is a much better headline for him than any of that given the current mood of the country—and better still if he can figure out ways to make it a regular occurrence. Making it known to Axios that he told Netanyahu directly that he’s kinda sorta to blame for the war is a splashy start.

 

How well it’ll work for him in 2028 depends on a few X factors, though.

 

X factors.

 

One is Trump, of course.

 

I’m not sure Sarlin is right in thinking that the president himself will scapegoat Israel for the war if it ends badly. That’s not because Trump has too much affection for Israelis to do so or, lord knows, because he has too much integrity to blame others for his mistakes. It’s because he can’t bear to look like the mark in someone else’s con. Remember what he said when he was asked whether Israel forced his hand on joining the war by resolving to attack Iran whether the White House approved or not? “If anything, I might’ve forced Israel's hand."

 

The president doesn’t want to look like a sucker who’s being led around by the nose, and he won’t stand for it if Vance makes him look that way in his haste to blame Israel for the conflict. Unless, that is, things turn so ugly in battle that “Bibi fooled me” becomes the less unappealing option politically. Trump’s instinct to show authority and command is momentarily overriding his instinct to foist the messes he makes onto others. That could change if the mess gets big enough.

 

Another X factor is what sort of primary challenger Vance draws in 2028.

 

Blaming Israel for the war will protect his postliberal flank, giving someone like Tucker Carlson or Joe Kent less reason to enter the race and use Trump’s foreign policy record against him. But what about a challenger from the party’s conservative rump? Sen. Ted Cruz is eyeing another run for president and has reportedly criticized Vance to donors for playing footsie with the party’s Jew-baiters. “Tucker created J.D. J.D. is Tucker's protégé, and they are one and the same,” he allegedly said last year. He also accused Carlson and Vance of conniving to oust former National Security Adviser Mike Waltz because Waltz supported war with Iran.

 

Cruz’s downfall in running for president in 2016 was skating to where the political puck was instead of where it was going to be. He ran as the apotheosis of Tea Party small-government conservatism at a moment when the right was spoiling for anti-woke anti-immigrant tribalist demagoguery. He risks making the same mistake in 2028 if he jumps into the race and attacks Vance for being hard on Israel and soft on antisemitism … only to find that the new GOP primary electorate is A-OK with both.

 

But maybe not! Cruz would surely point to polling showing that support for Israel is still robust among Republicans. If Trump manages to avert total disaster in ending the war and stays publicly supportive of Israel, most Republicans in 2028 will probably prefer a nominee who’s allied with the Jewish state to one who’s skeptical of it.

 

But if Trump doesn’t manage to avert total disaster? All bets are off.

 

The final X factor is Republican voters themselves, of course. It’s unlikely that a party that’s been ardently pro-Israel for decades and remains solidly pro-Israel today will turn on its back on the Jewish state over the course of the next two years. But it was also unlikely that a party that was ardently Reaganite for decades and remained solidly Reaganite in 2015 would turn its back on conservatism over the course of the next two years.

 

Don’t underestimate the average right-winger’s ability to assimilate new tribal orthodoxies very, very quickly.

 

The wrinkle this time is religion. Not all evangelical Republicans are “Dispensationalists,” believing that Jews’ dominion over the Holy Land is a pillar of God’s plan for salvation, but many are. For obvious reasons, convincing them that Israel is a malign force with whom we shouldn’t ally will be trickier than convincing them in 2016 that being led by a character as foul as Donald Trump was necessary for national renewal. That’s what Cruz is counting on, I assume: If Vance and his postliberal faction campaign against Israel in 2028, they’ll run into a buzzsaw of unshakeable Christian support for the Jewish state.

 

Could be. But when powerful faiths collide, I’d never bet against tribal political allegiance in modern America. (The same Megyn Kelly who complained about the White House fighting a war for Israel affirmed more recently that she’ll be voting Republican this fall anyway because of illegal immigration.) If the U.S. ends up humiliated by the war, if the result is serious economic hardship, if Trump throws his enormous influence behind scapegoating Israel, it would not surprise me if many right-wing believers began revisiting their theological beliefs about the Jewish state to bring them into line with their partisan obligations. Some already have.

 

“Why the hell should we tell people to take to the streets when they’ll just get mowed down?” Trump allegedly asked Netanyahu last week, responding to the prime minister’s proposal to call on the Iranian people to rebel. That too was leaked to Axios, another sign that the White House might be coming around to a narrative about Israel foisting bad ideas on the president that will get—and have gotten—people needlessly killed. It might not convince the American left, which is free to blame Trump entirely for this war if it prefers. But the right, which has no such luxury? Stay tuned.