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Mike Pence should have been a warning to J. D. Vance about the inevitable abasement in store once you join a ticket with Donald Trump. Before he became Trump’s running mate a decade ago, conservative Christian values were the center of Pence’s political identity, but in October 2016, he reluctantly stood by Trump after the release of the tape in which Trump boasted about grabbing women “by the pussy.” It was a sign of things to come. Pence became vice president, and for the next four years, he defended his boss through moral abominations and deficit explosions that cut against his fiscal conservatism, flinching only when Trump asked him to help steal an election. His reward? Trump did nothing while a mob threatened to hang Pence.
All of this was common knowledge when Vance agreed to run with Trump in 2024. No one lands on a presidential ticket if they’re not outrageously ambitious—nearly every veep for at least a century has fancied themselves a future president—but Vance is particularly brazen. Becoming Trump’s running mate required a yearslong effort to ingratiate himself with a guy whom Vance had, in the pages of this magazine, referred to as “cultural heroin” and elsewhere called “America’s Hitler.” Maybe Vance’s ambition blinded him to Pence’s lesson, but the war in Iran is teaching it to him the hard way.
For the first year of Trump’s presidency, Vance’s Faustian bargain looked like just that: a bargain. Though smart, Vance is not an especially talented politician. He won election to the Senate from Ohio only with Trump’s endorsement, and he lacks anything like Trump’s charisma. By signing on with Trump, however, he not only ended up one heartbeat from the presidency but also became the heir apparent to Trump’s political movement and the presumptive GOP nominee in 2028. Trump has often lavished praise on Vance, and Vance’s clearest rival, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, told Vanity Fair that he won’t run if Vance does. (Vance isn’t taking any chances. “I’ll give you $100 for every person you make look really shitty compared to me,” Vance joked to the magazine’s photographer. “And $1,000 if it’s Marco.”)
But Trump’s recent military policy has complicated this easy ascent. Vance has built a political profile around his opposition to foreign intervention, which he traces to his own disillusionment while serving as a Marine in Iraq. That meshed well with Trump’s first-term image (if not his reality), but it clashes with the imperial ambitions of his second. Vance was conspicuously missing when Trump launched the January raid to abduct Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. He’s also been scarce since the start of the Iran war, which threatens to turn into a quagmire with record speed.
The Iran campaign shows, as my colleague Idrees Kahloon wrote recently, that “within the Trump administration, Vance’s opinions seem to matter less and less.” Even worse for Vance, Rubio is ascendant. MAGA gadfly Laura Loomer noted that when Trump spoke in Vance’s home region last week, the secretary of state received gushing acclaim from the president. All Vance got was short shrift.
Vance has begun making public statements in support of the war, but they appear to emerge from clenched teeth. Bolstering this impression was what sure looks like an intentional leak to Politico on Friday that Vance “was skeptical of the U.S. striking Iran in the leadup to President Donald Trump’s decision to launch the war.” This report was greeted dismissively in some quarters as a frantic attempt by Vance to distance himself from a doomed war, or, as The New Republic’s Alex Shephard put it, “a Machiavellian and astonishingly self-serving maneuver.” One can never rule this out with Vance, but I think it’s just as possible that the story is less a strategic ploy than Vance reacting in frustration to being so ignored by the president.
Insofar as Vance has any sincere beliefs in anything other than himself, his opposition to military intervention seems to be one. Though he has changed many of his positions in the past decade, he has remained consistent on this, and he seems to say the same things in private that he does in public. When an administration official mistakenly added Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic’s editor in chief, to a Signal chat about a strike on Yemeni militants last year, Vance was dubious about American action. “I just hate bailing Europe out again,” he wrote. (Turnabout is fair play: Now Europe seems unenthused about bailing Trump out in the Strait of Hormuz.)
What Vance is learning now is that serving Trump doesn’t mean just compromising on some ancillary issues that you care less about, or keeping a straight face during his nonsensical digressions. Instead, Trump will humiliate you even—or especially—on your most deeply held views. Just as Pence found himself obliged to defend Trump’s least socially conservative tendencies, Vance is now defending his war in Iran. Vance may have thought he was getting a cheap ticket to the pinnacle of power. The price, it turns out, is much higher than he realized.
Related:
Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:
- What happens now to Kristi Noem’s warehouse jails?
- Trump reaps what he sowed in Europe.
- David Frum: Democrats can’t stop it, so lead it.
- Iran’s war is not only with the West.
Today’s News
- President Trump said that “numerous countries have told me they’re on the way” to help reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Germany rejected calls to deploy warships; the U.K. and the EU have said that they are still discussing options.
- Israel said that it has begun “limited and targeted ground operations” in southern Lebanon against Hezbollah, adding that residents in the area will remain displaced until it considers its northern border secure.
- A rare Level 4 out of 5 severe-weather threat is affecting the mid-Atlantic from Maryland to South Carolina. Forecasters are warning of damaging winds, hail, and possible strong tornadoes.
Dispatches
- The Wonder Reader: Isabel Fattal explores stories on the art of taking smart risks.
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Evening Read
What 100 Million Volts Do to the Body and Mind
By Jacob Stern
What does it feel like to be struck by lightning?
There is no easy analogue. A defibrillator delivers up to 1,000 volts to a patient’s heart; inmates executed by electric chair typically receive about 2,000. A typical lightning strike, by contrast, transmits 100 million volts or more. But lightning races through the body in milliseconds, and therefore often spares it. Some people black out instantly upon being struck. Others recall the moment vividly, as if in slow motion: the flash of light whiting out all vision; the sound, which many survivors say is the loudest they’ve ever heard. The pain, for some, is excruciating, yet others feel no pain at all. “It felt like adrenaline, but stronger,” one survivor reported. “I felt an incredible pulsing,” another said, “a burning sensation from head to toe.”
More From The Atlantic
- A possible upside to the Iran war
- The peptide boom is getting out of hand.
- A 79-year-old freshman senator?
- A hilarious—and poignant—Oscars moment.
- The college-educated working class
- Glimpsing victory in Iran
Culture Break
Explore. This year’s Oscars managed to celebrate two equally beloved front-runners, David Sims writes.
Watch. Michael Tedder on the clever insight of the Saturday Night Live sketch (streaming on Peacock) about a so-called MAGA hospital.
Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.
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