Do It for Charlie

By Nick Catoggio

Friday, September 11, 2026

 

Unless I missed something, Wednesday’s prediction turned out to be correct. We didn’t hear anything at this week’s Republican convention about the ruling party’s plans to keep artificial intelligence from going full Skynet.

 

The president did address it in an interview. A few hours after Anthropic revealed that it had shut down multiple lines of inquiry this year that may or may not have been aimed at building biological weapons, Donald Trump was asked what sort of “guardrails” are needed to stop AI from turning against humanity.

 

“It’s going to be fine,” he said, struggling to keep a straight face. “We’ll always have something to stop them. We’ll have a little gear. Boom. ‘I really don’t like that robot.’”

 

It will all work out in the end.

 

The second night of the convention was less eventful than the first and will be remembered mostly for its cultish flourishes. A hype video began with these words, a Paul-Harvey-by-way-of-North-Korea melange: “On June 14, 1946, God looked down on his planned paradise and said, ‘I need a caretaker.’ So God gave us Trump.”

 

Later the star of the show came onstage and half-jokingly goaded the crowd to raise their hands and pledge to “the greatest president in the history of the United States” that they’ll do whatever it takes to maximize GOP turnout in November, even “cheating like hell” as the Democrats supposedly do. It was peak Trump, the authoritarian menace safely diluted by Borscht Belt humor.

 

The closest thing to actual news was made by the vice president.

 

It felt significant that J.D. Vance was tapped to be the headline speaker for the convention’s final night rather than its first, as if the Trumpist torch were formally being passed. At points during his speech, the audience even interrupted with chants of “48! 48!”

 

And no wonder. The president reportedly has stopped quizzing confidants on whether they prefer the VP to Marco Rubio and now asserts that Vance will be the nominee. Rubio himself has supposedly said privately that he isn’t planning a presidential campaign, seeing no point to doing so. And Turning Point USA, the most influential activist group in right-wing politics, “intends to play a key part in getting [founder Charlie] Kirk’s close friend, Vice President J.D. Vance, elected president,” according to the Washington Post.

 

Ted Cruz’s presidential pipe dream will need to wait another four years, it seems. In 2028, it’s going to be J.D.

 

The newsy part of Vance’s remarks came when he dared to address the subject of the Iran war, a bitter point of contention between Trump and another prominent friend of the vice president’s, Tucker Carlson. Referring to the martyred Kirk, on the anniversary of his assassination, Vance said this:

 

He did not always agree with us. Let me just give you one example. Charlie hated war. Whether it was Europe or Africa, the Middle East, he didn’t care. He just hated war. That was his view.

 

Now, of course, there are people who love what we’ve done and people who don’t. I’m not here to litigate the disagreements between Charlie and some of the people that he disagreed with. But what I’m asking you to do is do what Charlie did. Do not throw the baby out with the bath water. Don’t give the country over to a bunch of crazy people because you happen to disagree with us on a policy issue here or there.

 

Look, I’m not asking anybody to agree with me on every single issue. I’m not asking anybody to agree on every single policy of the administration. What I am asking you to do is to recognize the contrast with the radicals and recognize the achievements of the last 18 months. We have done a lot, my friends, and we can do a lot more if we fight together.

 

So that’s how he’s going to make the case to the anti-war right to stick with Team GOP in 2028, is it? Do it for Charlie.

 

‘Hating’ war.

 

Let’s get something straight. Charlie Kirk didn’t “hate war.”

 

Vance is lying about that because he hopes to convert the right’s sympathy and admiration for Kirk into sympathy and admiration for his own isolationist preferences. Opposing war yet blindly supporting the GOP anyway was St. Charlie’s position, he’d have you believe—and therefore, conveniently for Vance and his party, should also be the presumptively correct moral position for any Kirk-loving anti-war Republican in 2028.

 

It’s nonsense on stilts. An example: Less than three months after he became president in 2017, Trump surprised everyone by bombing a Syrian airfield to punish Bashar al-Assad for using chemical weapons. He had run and won by promising to end America’s “stupid wars” in the Middle East, yet here he was immediately thrusting the U.S. into military conflict with another Arab nation that most voters can’t find on a map. Surely the war-hating Charlie Kirk must have been incensed at that betrayal.

 

He was not. “I hope the rest of the world is watching. War is a terrible thing, but allowing maniacs to go unchallenged is unacceptable,” he tweeted on the day of the airstrikes. The next day he doubled down: “Oh Assad’s regime is upset we didn’t notify them before we sent missiles? Maybe they should stop using chemical weapons.”

 

Three years later, Trump ordered the most dangerous military action of his first term when he had the head of Iran’s Quds Force, Qassem Suleimani, assassinated. Suleimani was immensely powerful and a national hero to the regime and its loyalists; the risk of Iranian retaliation followed by all-out war was real enough that Carlson used his primetime gig at Fox News to criticize the attack, albeit in more restrained terms than he’s come to be known for.

 

Here again was a chance for Kirk to follow Tucker’s lead and flash his war-hating bona fides. Instead he was exultant. “Qassem Soleimani, Iran’s most revered military figure has been killed in an airstrike in Baghdad. Don’t mess with America under [President Trump],” Charlie crowed. “Obama & Hillary are gone. We fight back now. America is back.”

 

Okay, you might say, but the Suleimani strike and the Syria bombing were small operations, not “wars.” Kirk would have opposed a more ambitious U.S. attack in the Middle East. Oh? A few months before he was murdered, he watched Donald Trump order an air campaign against Iran’s nuclear facilities that “obliterated” (supposedly) the country’s bomb program. That was an act of war any way you slice it. Finally, Kirk could let his inner dove take flight.

 

He chose to keep it locked in its cage. “Iran gave President Trump no choice,” he assured his fans. “For a decade he has been adamant that Iran will never get a nuclear weapon. Iran decided to forego diplomacy in pursuit of a bomb. This is a surgical strike, operated perfectly. President Trump acted with prudence and decisiveness.”

 

Charlie Kirk didn’t hate war. What he hated was the thought of losing influence and market share, the same as every other MAGA-pandering hack in populist media. He recognized that most of his audience worshiped Trump, so he made sure that his opinions about the president’s actions, including his warmaking, remained agreeable to them. There’s no contradiction between believing that his murder was a horror and a horrendous human tragedy and understanding that he was a ratings chaser who helped accelerate the intellectual collapse of the American right.

 

If there’s any grain of truth in what Vance said about him hating war, it’s that Kirk might have ended up as a (measured) critic of the current conflict—not because it offended his supposedly dovish sensibilities but because it would have made him nervous to be out of step on the issue with ascendant postliberal demagogues like Carlson and Nick Fuentes. Kirk was obviously anxious about losing influence over young Republicans as they gradually became groyper-ized, enough so to have begun resorting to light groyper-ism himself to try to meet audience demand.

 

Had he lived and seen the litmus test for angry right-wing populism devolve into hating “Israel’s war,” my guess is that he would have grasped toward whichever position on Iran ended up costing him the least amount of influence with the president on the one hand and the grassroots right on the other. Which, ironically, in a way does make him a good example for Vance to cite to anti-war Republicans: Just as Kirk was seemingly able to subordinate his opinions about war to some grander priority (i.e., his own power), the vice president is asking Tuckerites to subordinate their own opinions about it to a different grand priority. That is, J.D. Vance’s and the Republican Party’s power.

 

War without end.

 

The other standout aspect of the “do it for Charlie” pitch for ignoring Iran, as The Bulwark’s Tim Miller noted, was that Vance chose to make it in lieu of defending the case for war on the merits.

 

Instead of using his star turn on primetime television to try to convince Americans that the conflict was warranted, the VP made a pure “Flight 93 election” argument for not letting one’s opinion of it affect one’s vote: Even if you dislike how this plane is being flown, it will crash unless the GOP remains at the controls.

 

One reason for opting not to make the hard sell for war is obvious. Vance is understandably jittery about voters taking their opposition to it out on him in 2028 and doesn’t want his fingerprints on it any more than they already are.

 

If anything, he’s trying to scrub them off. Presumably that explains how the New York Times came to know that Vance spoke to various military commanders about the conflict earlier this year and “came away from some of his conversations with deep concerns about the overall strategy and the prospects for success. … The assessments made clear the extraordinary amount of pain the Iranian government was prepared to endure in its fight for survival, and the limited supply of U.S. defensive weapons available to block Iran’s retaliatory strikes, or to deal with threats elsewhere.”

 

Donald Trump’s heir apparent can’t go around saying that he always thought his boss’s war was stupid and reckless—but he can have his allies in the administration whisper it to the Times on his behalf. And he can certainly avoid arguing otherwise in a televised forum that would make life easy for Democratic admakers in 2028.

 

Vance also can’t argue the case for war without antagonizing his friend Tucker and the untold number of “America First” Republican primary voters who might prefer a more charismatic and demagogic critic of the war as their leader in 2028. At the moment, the Carlson wing of the right seems prepared to tolerate Vance as the GOP nominee, if only as a far superior alternative to lapsed Reaganite Marco Rubio. The vice president’s efforts to signal to them that he privately shares their opinion about the war but is obliged by his position to bite his tongue is working.

 

If and when he lets his “good soldier” obligations to Trump lead him to become a public proponent of the conflict, though, that might change. “Vote Republican because righteous war-hater Charlie Kirk would want you to” is a much safer play for him with the right’s Lindberghians than “ackshually, the war is good.”

 

There’s a third reason for Vance to avoid making the case for attacking Iran, though, and it’s a doozy: All signs point to the war intensifying, possibly significantly, and sooner rather than later.

 

The good news is that the U.S. naval blockade is working, leaving Iran’s oil-dependent economy in a shambles. There’s also good news in the Strait of Hormuz, where American ships have quietly restored transit for a meaningful percentage of tankers. As of late last month, by one government estimate, roughly half the prewar volume of oil was now moving through the strait.

 

Economically and militarily, Iran is under immense pressure. That could lead it to capitulate—or it could lead it to do the opposite. The more desperate the regime becomes to regain leverage, the greater the risk that it will escalate, possibly in reckless ways.

 

In fact, reports have been circulating for more than a month that it’s planning to escalate in order to complicate life for Trump before November’s midterm election. Among the options being considered, according to a story published in August by the Wall Street Journal, are “sabotaging Internet cables in the Persian Gulf, creating political unrest in countries with Shia communities such as Kuwait and Bahrain, and potentially even ground operations in Kuwait.” Iran’s military is also hastily rebuilding its arsenal of ballistic missiles from components on hand.

 

“Some Iranian leaders … believe now is a good moment to act because Mr. Trump will return to war after the midterms anyway,” the Times reported on Wednesday. “The president will either feel vindicated by an unexpected electoral victory or feel that he has nothing more to lose by pursuing his own strategy, several of the analysts said.” That calculus is well founded: When Trump was asked yesterday why he hasn’t hit Iran hard lately, he answered, “Well, maybe I don’t do that because of the election.” It sounds like escalation is coming after November no matter what, in which case the Iranians would be foolish not to get a jump on it.

 

Maybe they already have. Yesterday Iran’s proxy in Yemen, the Houthis, captured a key port city near the Bab al-Mandab Strait, which Saudi Arabia uses for some of its oil exports. The prospect of Hormuz and Bab al-Mandab being cut off generated multiple emergency phone calls to Trump by the Saudi crown prince, but the president declined to open a new front by ordering U.S. strikes on the Houthis. News of the crisis caused Brent crude oil prices to jump above $108 per barrel on Thursday for the first time since May and sent the price of diesel fuel in the U.S. on Friday past $6 per gallon, an all-time high.

 

Imagine being J.D. Vance and trying to defend the Iran war at a moment like this, with hostilities, gas prices, and inflation all set to spiral. Imagine assuring Americans that starting that war was a good idea when Pentagon officials are now admitting that Iran successfully “blew the hell out of” our base in Bahrain and will doubtless have an easier time targeting other American bases in the region going forward because of our munitions shortage.

 

And now imagine doing all of that amid headlines that the war could plausibly go on in fits and starts for the rest of Trump’s presidency, scrambling oil markets for years to come and sucking U.S. military personnel out of other theaters and into the region indefinitely. When Vance addressed the conflict last night, he did so knowing that it could still be a live issue when he accepts his party’s nomination in 2028. Defending it on camera would have been political suicide.

 

Under the circumstances, pointing to the spirit of Charlie Kirk as if he’s Yoda at the end of Return of the Jedi and insisting that he wants you to go on voting GOP in spite of everything was the least bad argument available to him.

 

Rigged or unrigged?

 

J.D. Vance sold his soul to Trumpism hoping to establish himself as a “serious” postliberal populist and instead finds himself saddled with Bushian Middle Eastern misadventures on the one hand and grotesquely unserious MAGA slopulism on the other.

 

That probably explains why he also didn’t waste time in his speech last night defending his boss’ inane plan for a $5,000 “dividend” for American adults if the GOP holds the House and Senate in November. The idea is so half-baked (“incredibly desperate” with “zero chance” of passing, even according to Republicans) that Trump resorted to arguing in an interview on Thursday that he doesn’t need congressional action to issue that “dividend.”

 

If he doesn’t need Congress, what the hell was the point of this bribe in the first place? There’s no need to vote Republican this fall if the president can cut a check on his own authority.

 

Of all the slopulism Trump has pushed on Americans, little of it has been as sloppy as that. “This entire incident exposes how completely out of ideas the entire Trump political project is,” Reason’s Eric Boehm wrote of the “dividend” proposal. “This is the inevitable end of all populist movements, which begin by promising easy solutions to complex problems and eventually collapse when those ‘solutions’ are revealed to be grifts or oversimplifications.”

 

That’s true, and it’s equally true of the Iran war. The White House promised an overly simple four- or five-week conflict after which the regime would capitulate à la Venezuela—despite many warnings to the contrary beforehand—and ran out of ideas almost immediately after “bomb harder” didn’t work. Vance will inherit a populist movement whose credibility will be completely shot by 2028, insofar as it isn’t already. Just deserts have rarely been so just.

 

I’ll leave you with this happy thought: Try as he might, the vice president won’t be able to avoid a conflict with his friend Tucker Carlson forever. Carlson is already signaling that he expects Republicans to lose in November, and that when they do he’ll blame—what else?—Trump’s alliance with Israel as the cause. The “rigged election” nonsense won’t fly with the far right this time, in other words. They’re keen to make the point that Americans hate war and so they’ll insist that the GOP lost fairly, and deservedly.

 

Vance won’t have that luxury. He’ll need to humor Trump’s conspiracy theories about Democratic cheating (Charlie would want him to!), which will pit him against Tucker in the crucial foreign policy debate over whether interventionism is an electoral loser for the GOP. Maybe their “friendship” can survive that, or maybe it can’t. Before they know it, they might be arguing about all sorts of things that are important to postliberals—whether the election was rigged, whether Israel controls the U.S. government, whether algebra is “fake math” that only “good little goy slaves” take seriously.

 

I didn’t enjoy the first iteration of “Stop the Steal” but the second promises to be much more entertaining. Bring on the blue wave.