Tuesday on the RCP podcast, RealClearPolitics White House correspondent Phil Wegmann broke down his back and forth yesterday about the Iran war with the president and vice president in the Oval Office yesterday, and his new piece reporting it. “I think he was a bit prickly – but no, reporters are not trying to drive a wedge between the president and the vice president. I’m interested in Vance as the heir apparent of the Republican Party. What does he actually believe?” Wegmann said about his question to Vice President Vance about how to square his support for this war with his past comments about Iraq. “He sort of explained away some of his adherence to anti-interventionism by saying, well, the difference between the George W. Bush and Barack Obama years and now is that previously we had dumb presidents. Now we have Donald Trump, who we trust.” “I love how he tried to play a little dumb when you asked that,” Tom Bevan added. “Dude? You’ve been like the anti-intervention guy for a long time. But to his credit, that was a pretty good response.” “To his credit? OK, so their thing is that Trump is smarter than George W. Bush,” Carl Cannon said. “We’ve had dumb presidents before? Did he mean Franklin Roosevelt?” “Vance has been a voice of skepticism, and he isn’t breaking with the president in public. That’s job number one for any vice president,” Wegmann added. “I think in the back of his mind, Vance has to know that a central tenet to his political brand is now gone. He rolled on the question of no new wars.” “The follow-up question there then is: Well, Iran was trying to get a nuclear weapon during the first Trump administration, and you guys launched an operation that was much more limited than this one. Why did you decide to throw the entire kitchen sink at it? Why are we now desperate for allies to come to our aid in the Strait of Hormuz?” Wegmann continued. “It’s a difficult political question for Vance, especially as he looks to 2028, and especially as this war that Trump hoped would end in a matter of weeks looks like it might have a longer shelf life.” “I think that’s fair. What we’ve seen from Vance thus far is the assertion that his pro-Trump, pro-war stance of today is not incongruent with the arguments that he was making on the campaign trail, when he was sitting down with Tim Dillon, with Tucker Carlson, with a number of these podcast hosts, going in depth and explaining why not just war generally, but war with Iran specifically, wouldn’t be in the United States’ best interest.” “If Vance gave a different kind of answer where he said, here’s where I was previously, I took a little bit of convincing, but facts on the ground changed – perhaps that would be a bit different,” Wegmann said. Andrew Walworth asked: “How do you feel you might have contributed to the first Vance attack ad in the primaries next time around if someone comes swinging outside? It’s a classic flip-flop, right?” “He and his team have to know that this attack is coming,” Wegmann said. “I think this administration’s real hope here is that victory will forgive a multitude of sins – that they will finish in a hurry and they’re able to call it a day.” “The president told me, though, in a separate press conference, when I asked him about some of the statements made by one of his crypto and AI advisers, David Sacks, who was urging him publicly on another podcast, of all things, to declare victory and leave, he said that that wasn’t a good option because then another president, decades from now, would be faced with the same challenge,” he said. “So Trump clearly sees this as a generational opportunity to deal with a historic enemy.” “If it’s a win, he can just say, well, Trump did the job and we won. If it’s still going on, or it lingers, or a lot of people die, then I think he’s going to have to find some daylight between himself and the president,” Tom Bevan opined. “And that’s going to be a very tough job for him, especially if he’s getting attacked by Tucker Carlson or somebody else from the left who’s running for president, saying MAGA promised no new wars and here they are. And so all of the people that are associated with this – JD Vance, Marco Rubio, everybody – they’re disqualified from leading MAGA into the future. And that could be a real rift that we see play out, again depending on how this whole thing goes.”
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