614-word post blamed the war for losses but never backed it
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who is close to the White House, said of Vice President JD Vance on Wednesday: “A good bit of the luster has come off the bloom.” The Wall Street Journal reported that some Republicans were already looking to take Vance down that day.
The immediate cause was a 614-word social-media post Vance published Wednesday morning. The Wall Street Journal, in its Politics newsletter, described the post as a stunning repudiation of President Trump’s messaging on the Iran War and reported that Vance said Republicans lost the midterms because of the war. The post said many things, the newspaper reported, but it did not say he supported the war — not once.
The Wall Street Journal reported that the Iran War and the ensuing rise in gas prices have been the defining issue of Trump’s second term. It reported that Vance is seen as a GOP presidential candidate in 2028, and that with Trump’s low approval ratings and the Democratic rout in the midterms, Trump’s brand is damaged.
That left the question the newspaper put directly: what does Vance do — stick with the president and possibly lose the MAGA faithful, or cut himself loose?
The Wall Street Journal said it did not know whether Vance supports the war in Iran or supports Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and whether the post was a one-off or whether Vance will find new ways to distance himself in the weeks to come.
The newspaper compared Vance’s position with that of Trump’s first vice president, Mike Pence, who did not distance himself from Trump until Jan. 6, 2021, the final days of the Trump administration. The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump saw Pence’s actions that day as such an act of betrayal that Pence’s political career never recovered.
It drew a different comparison to Kamala Harris, President Biden’s vice president, who the newspaper said had a very difficult time distancing herself from Biden. The Wall Street Journal reported that Biden had poor approval numbers and struggled to convince Americans that he was in control, and that Harris was never able to really separate herself from his unpopularity and lost to Trump in 2024.
Whether Vance can carve out a lane for himself now — walking a tightrope that tries to stay inside Trump’s good graces while also seeming independent — is an open question, the newspaper said, and so is whether that is possible with Trump. It noted that Vance recently said that if he ran for president, Trump would support him, and that Trump immediately said this was not true.
The Wall Street Journal flagged one thing to watch: during the midterm races, Vance got into an extremely tense war of words with Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic Senate candidate from Michigan. El-Sayed won his race, and the newspaper said Vance is likely going to be charged with swearing El-Sayed in, a moment the newsletter called potentially seismic and one it said it would be watching both men handle.
The newsletter also reported that Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer made it clear he expects to be re-elected leader of Senate Democrats in the next Congress, though some of his newly elected colleagues are not fans.
Alaska and Mississippi were the two outstanding Senate races, and the newsletter described both as on a knife-edge.
A New York appeals court will hear arguments in Trump’s appeal of his conviction on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to conceal payments to porn actor Stormy Daniels, the newsletter reported.
The Conservative Political Action Conference, which has backed Trump and the MAGA movement, hosts its latest gathering in Florida, at Mar-a-Lago, according to the newsletter.
The newsletter’s calendar for Trump’s Thursday said the president receives an intelligence briefing that morning and will then hold policy meetings throughout the day.
On the midterms themselves, the newsletter said Democrats focused on the economy to secure what it called the party’s historic victory, and that candidates largely managed to keep the spotlight on the economy while driving home the message that Trump’s policies are hurting pocket books. The newsletter said they kept to that playbook even as a fight for the party’s direction continues to boil.
The newsletter also reported that America’s AI boom is threatened by an Election Day revolt: Americans’ vote for candidates and ballot measures to ban or slow data center development could rein in AI’s rapid growth, become a big business problem for the companies on the edge of technological progress and threaten to hobble a boom powering the U.S. economy.
In its own assessment, the newsletter said that after two years of unchecked power Trump is facing a new reality, and that within a span of a few hours on Tuesday the power dynamic for the remaining two years of the Trump presidency shifted dramatically. It said that if Trump wants to accomplish anything durable going forward, he will have to accept limits to his authority and compromise — things, it said, he has shown little interest in doing during his political career.