JD Vance’s awkward defence of Trump’s Iran hit proves it

As President Donald Trump eases into his new role as a wartime leader, his ambitions and plans regarding Iran continue to shift. On Sunday night, he caught many of his senior officials entirely off guard by suggesting on social media that he was now even flirting with the idea of seeking “regime change” in Tehran. “If the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn’t there be Regime change?” he asked.

That came as a surprise, given the scale of the pushback Trump is facing from within his “Make America Great Again” and “America First” movements. Anger is growing among prominent Trump supporters after he abandoned his Inaugural Address pledge to be “best remembered” for the “wars we never start”. The notion that “regime change” might be on the table advances the possibility that, like past presidents, Trump could get sucked in to a nation-building quagmire in Iran that is anathema to many of his loyalists.

In the hours after Saturday’s attack, his top lieutenants attempted on Sunday to walk an uncomfortable line in efforts to soothe the administration’s grassroots. Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth told reporters that the US attack on Iran was not designed to topple the country’s government. “This mission was not and has not been about regime change,” he assured reporters, although the tenses he used would prove sufficiently malleable to accommodate Trump’s possible change of heart hours later.

Vice President JD Vance made strenuous efforts to assure the Maga faithful that the Iran attack was somehow consistent with Trump’s promise to avoid fresh episodes of military adventurism. He told NBC News that he empathised “with Americans who are exhausted after 25 years of foreign entanglements in the Middle East. I understand the concern. But the difference is back then, we had dumb Presidents, and now we have a President who actually knows how to accomplish America’s national security objectives”.

Sensing difficulties ahead, Vance sought to assure Republican voters that the President was wise to the worst-case scenarios being floated by his critics. The conflict with the Iranian regime “is not going to be some long, drawn-out thing”, he insisted. “We’ve got in, we’ve done the job of setting their nuclear programme back…we’re not at war with Iran. We’re at war with Iran’s nuclear programme.”

But several prominent Republicans are not buying what the Vice President was deployed to sell them. Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who last week urged Trump not to attack Iran, spent Sunday arguing that the President should remain laser-focused on the home front instead of Tehran. In a lengthy post on X, she vowed to “support President Trump and his great administration on many of the great things they are doing while disagreeing on bombing Iran and getting involved in a hot war that Israel started. That’s not disloyalty. Critical thinking and having my own opinions is the most American thing ever”, insisted a Congresswoman who has previously argued that Jewish-controlled space lasers are responsible for some of California’s forest fires. She vowed to pray “for an end to the constant demand for America to go to war”.

Congressman Thomas Massie of Kentucky was more outspoken. In a series of television appearances, he accused Trump of acting unconstitutionally by attacking Iran without seeking congressional approval first. He also warned that dismay among grassroots Republicans was spreading so rapidly that any extended involvement in Iran could be the beginning of Trump’s end.

In America’s mid-term elections next year, Massie warned, Republicans “could lose the majority over this one issue, because people become disillusioned, disaffected, apathetic and don’t show up to vote”. In language that infuriated Trump, he warned that Democrats could return to power on Capitol Hill “and end up impeaching him again”.

Late on Sunday, the website Axios reported that Trump – who described Massie as a “pathetic loser” – was launching an effort to unseat the wayward congressman. A top Trump aide said he was authorised to spend “whatever it takes” to replace the incumbent, in an effort designed to warn other Republican sceptics to avoid sparking the President’s displeasure.

Outside the party Steve Bannon, the former Trump adviser who now runs an influential podcast, pointed out that many Americans were opposed to intervention in Iran and criticised the President for thanking Benjamin Netanyahu after the strikes. Israel had “essentially forced President Trump’s hand” by starting a war with Iran, he said on the War Room.

Trump’s capacity to quell the splits among his supporters may no longer be entirely in his control. If Iran tries to close the Straits of Hormuz to oil tankers, prices will start rising immediately at petrol stations in the American heartland. Any Iranian military response that targets US troops in the region may also harden opposition to Trump’s Iranian gambit.

Trump’s decision to enter conflict is already threatening to split his base. Any deepening involvement in the region may split Maga asunder.