“The reason we lost is the war,” Vice President JD Vance posted on X on Wednesday, hours after the Democrats took the House and the Senate. “If you’d like to argue it was worth it, that losing the Senate for the next 6 years was worth it, then do so.”
Gladly. The Iran war was worth it. What lost the election was the political malpractice of the people whose job it was to explain the war to Americans and never did, Vance chief among them.
Vance certainly knows the president’s party almost always takes a beating in midterms. It lost House seats in 20 of the 22 midterms before this one, something he glosses over in his apparent zeal to lead the Woke Right rather than defending U.S. President Donald Trump and his policies. But it’s undeniable that the price of gas was a factor around which much discontent rallied.
So why was the war worth it? And why might a more honest communications strategy about the war have helped make this one of those rare midterm exceptions?
Iran has spent decades preparing to black out the United States. An official Iranian military textbook, Passive Defense, advocates a nuclear electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack in more than 20 passages. The only thing Iran lacks is the bomb, and before this war, its nuclear program had brought the bomb within reach.
A nuclear weapon detonated high above the United States doesn’t need to hit a city. The EMP surges through the power lines and burns out the equipment that runs our unconscionably unprotected, interconnected grid.
A small handful of warheads (some experts say even one) would shut off the electricity in your home, the water from your tap, the food on your grocery store’s shelves, the fuel in your car, the medicine in your pharmacy. Permanently.
It would fry beyond repair the circuits that keep your computers running and end modern communications. Instantaneously.
The U.S. grid’s backbone is about 2,100 large transformers. Each is built to order; four in five are imported; they cost a fortune; and lead times run three to five years each. We lack spares. We lack backup. The congressional EMP Commission estimated that before transformers could be produced and delivered, as many as nine in 10 Americans—more than 300 million—could die. “Worth it?” Is that a joke?
Washington has known this for at least two decades. The EMP Commission first warned Congress in 2004. By 2008, Congress had been told that Iran had practiced launching a missile from a vessel and had tested high-altitude missile detonations—exactly how an EMP attack would work. In February 2024, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard announced it had launched ballistic missiles from a ship.
Administration after administration and Congress after Congress did nothing. Utilities said defending the grid was Washington’s job, and Washington said the grid was privately owned. The first president to sign a comprehensive federal policy on EMP resilience was Donald Trump, in 2019. This year he went after the most imminent threat at its source. He went to war with Iran to keep Iran from murdering America. There is nothing more America First than that.
Americans should have heard that truth from the White House every day of the war. Instead, people around the president let his enemies and ours define the war. The stupidest, most self-destructive of the explanations is, of course, the oldest: It’s the Jews. Vance’s political allies declared it Israel’s war and Trump Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s puppet. Vance’s day-after post appears to align directly with that slander.
Anyone who knows the first thing about Trump knows how idiotic this is. But it’s the lie that America’s enemies pay to spread. This summer the Senate was told that China spends about $40 billion a year on such propaganda and influence operations calculated to destabilize America from within. Evidence of further billions from Russia, Qatar and other enemies of America abounds.
Vance has spent the year coddling those spreading our enemies’ lies. In September, asked about his friendship with Tucker Carlson—who defends Hitler and condemns America, has called for Trump’s impeachment and spouts the Iranian regime, Qatar, China and Russia’s anti-American propaganda—Vance said he would not “throw friends under the bus.” That seems a lot less like admirable loyalty than rank, soulless opportunism.
The president now says the war was right and he would do it again. His vice president dares anyone to defend it. Worse than political malpractice, this is mutiny.
America’s worst enemies and rivals are the big winners of this election and Vance is playing right into their hands.
Rather than help America understand the truth of the dangers confronting the nation, rather than show the slightest loyalty to Trump, Vance argues that America must end the war, focus on the cost of living, put America First and change our relationship with Israel. Translated, Vance wants America to surrender, lose and wait for Iran or some other enemy to kill us.
Every one of Vance’s positions is backwards. As the president said about the war on Wednesday: “Long term, it’s the only answer. You can’t let Iran have a nuclear weapon.”
A few months, even years, of high gas prices is a negligible price to pay to protect the homeland from what scientists and military strategists agree is a literal existential threat. Nothing is more America First than protecting 300+ million Americans from a brutal, ugly death.
As for Israel, Vance and his fellow travelers also have that exactly backwards: For 15 years, the Pentagon had a team dedicated round the clock to solving the Iranian nuclear threat. They developed a weapon to do so years ago but had no path to delivering it through Iran’s formidable air defenses. Israel’s extraordinary air force took all the risk and, in an offensive unparalleled in the annals of air combat, blew the doors wide open for American bombers to finally drop the weapon America created to protect our homeland.
Republicans now face the choice Democrats faced after losing 63 House seats in 2010: whether to chase the fringe malcontents who see America itself as the problem. Democrats did. We see where that has led. Republicans have their own version: the “Woke Right,” hostile to literally everything that makes America exceptional, great and good. Vance is leaping at the chance to be its face.
Maybe he doesn’t know. It is hard to believe the Vice President hasn’t been briefed on the greatest threat to Americans in our own homeland, but perhaps he hasn’t. If so, someone should brief him—maybe Secretary of War Pete Hegseth.
Then let Vance answer the essential question: What is his plan to stop an Iran-induced Black Sky Event, the collapse of the national grid? Ignore it? Send Tehran pallets of cash, as former President Barack Obama did? Or is he content to ride a wave of popular political antisemitism by indulging in infantile conspiracy theories?
His answer will show whether he cares about America or, like those now leading the Democrats, only about his own political power. If he changes course, he will experience firsthand the corrupt, disloyal character of Carlson and the rest, but he will have no stronger allies than genuine patriots he has spent this year undermining.
Meanwhile, America’s worst enemies and rivals are the big winners of this election and Vance is playing right into their hands. Beijing watched an American president act against an existential threat, watched his party punished for it over the price of gas and is now watching the vice president mount an apparent insurrection against him.
China knows our grid is unprotected, and it has the weapons to attack it. So do Russia and North Korea. They are watching to see whether the GOP follows Vance’s lead. There could be no greater mockery of the “America First” label these pretenders seek to seize from Trump.
It is not too late to tell Americans the truth or to protect them. The administration has started. On Sept. 30, Hegseth announced FORTRESS America, under which every major military installation in the country will generate its own power, independent of the civilian grid. If an adversary takes down the grid, Hegseth said, “Our bases stay lit.”
That protects the military. It still leaves over 300 million Americans vulnerable.
Fortunately, the President doesn’t need Congress. He can act by executive order with authorities and money the executive branch already has. For example, he can order protection of the most critical substations. Indeed, an Idaho National Laboratory expert told the Senate in 2018 that it would cost less than $4 billion to protect at least some of the grid.
He should also order what I call the Joseph Directive: A national reserve of food and water, so that order can be maintained and American families can eat and drink and survive if the grid goes down. An enemy that can’t count on America collapsing has less reason to try to collapse it.
China has reserves that include roughly half the world’s grain. America, meanwhile, via FEMA, has barely enough to provide a single meal on a single day to 8% of the population. After which, it’s all gone.
Make America Resilient Again should be a signature Trump deliverable at the heart of MAGA. In the two years the pundits will now call his “lame duck” period, Trump could do more to secure the American homeland than any president before him. Resilience is needed now more than ever, because it is not just Iran that threatens our grid.
Vance would then have the opportunity to show just what his real priorities are as we head into 2028.
