As much as I dislike citing Maya Angelou—and absolutely loathe using a single plural pronoun to describe a single noun—one of the late activist-poet’s famous quotes is so spot on that it bears repeating: “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”
This certainly applies to U.S. Vice President JD Vance, who illustrated it most recently on “The Joe Rogan Experience.”
Yes, during a nearly three-hour chat with the most-streamed podcaster on Spotify, Vance yet again showed us just who he is.
Not that it was tough to do with a host like Rogan, who didn’t challenge a word his interviewee said. Oh, other than asking him what “MoU” stands for and expressing surprise that “dove” in the political context is the opposite of “hawk.”
Where blaming the Jews and Israel for the doomed memorandum of understanding with the Islamic Republic was concerned, there was no pushback. On the contrary, Rogan goaded Vance to keep going down his embarrassing rabbit hole of conspiracy theories.
These included the groyper line about sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s deep ties to the Mossad or the CIA. It was as though anti-Israel political commentators and podcasters Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens prepped the VP for the one-on-one. They undoubtedly were pleased with his performance.
Take the following passage, for instance:
“I definitely think you have seen this very discreet, extremely well-funded campaign to try to derail the negotiation and derail the deal,” he said, referring to the MoU with the Islamic Republic that his boss, U.S. President Donald Trump, had declared dead in the water mere days earlier.
Nonetheless, Vance continued in this vein, totally omitting two facts: that Tehran has been blitzing the Gulf (his only mention of the countries in that region is to say that they’re gung-ho for the MoU); and that Israel has been totally out of the fray for many weeks.
“There’s this TIME article that came out yesterday,” he went on. “A friend sent it to me; it’s worth reading, because it lists a bunch of people who have quite literally been paid by a former Trump campaign person who was himself paid by certain elements within the Israeli government. And those people are attacking me viciously for quite literally trying to accomplish the negotiation objective that the president set for the country.”
Never mind that the piece in question was worse than disingenuous. It was actually full of distortions, the main one being that there was a nefarious push by the Jewish state to undermine U.S. policy. The person in question is Brad Parscale, whose P.R. firm was hired legitimately to combat the onslaught of online antisemitism.
It’s no wonder, then, that as soon as the podcast went up on Wednesday, critics emerged in droves to refute Vance’s claims and call him out for what smacks of Jew-baiting. Though Trump didn’t respond, he did address the nation on Thursday evening and declared, “We are winning big in Iran, and you will see the fruits of that labor very, very shortly.”
It was a quick nod to the U.S. military’s renewed strikes on Iranian targets, including civilian ones, in an otherwise lengthy statement focused on Chinese interference in American elections. Nothing to do with Israeli pressure or interests.
There are numerous excellent rebuttals to Vance’s disgraceful assertions. But one point that’s getting sidetracked by the justified concern about the possibility of Vance’s becoming president in 2028 is the role that his competition with U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio may be playing in his calculations about which sector of the conservative electorate he needs to woo from now until then.
The increasingly radical Democrats don’t enter into the equation, despite their sharing a dim view of the Jewish state, to put it mildly, with the far-right. Ironically, however, Tucker and his ilk have turned on Trump and abandoned the Republican Party.
Meanwhile, Jewish and non-Jewish pro-Israel Republicans are rooting for Rubio—and with good reason. But it’s not, as Vance would suggest, because they believe that Israel “kills its way out of every situation.”
On the contrary, if anyone has been successful at promoting the “Make America Great Again” agenda on the international stage, it’s Rubio. Indeed, it’s Rubio, unlike Vance, who has been successful at brokering a tricky deal: the one between Jerusalem and Beirut to disarm Hezbollah, Iran’s cherished murderous proxy.
If Vance is banking on beating Rubio in the Republican presidential primary, he’s likely to be in for the disappointment he deserves. Perhaps we ought to thank him for serving as a perfect example of Angelou’s astute observation.
