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.