Transcript: Trump Shivs Vance as MAGA Crackup over Losses Gets Vicious

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the November 5 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.The epic catastrophe the GOP suffered this week appears to be seriously straining relations between Donald Trump and JD Vance. The vice president posted an extraordinary statement on social media in which he blamed Trump’s war for the outcome, while carefully avoiding any direct criticism of Trump himself. Trump, meanwhile, fired quite a warning shot at Vance, in effect putting him on notice against distancing himself from Trump in any way. That will make it very hard for Vance to maneuver and get space between himself and the war.All this has really important implications for how our country can move forward and get past Trump. So we’re talking about all of it with Nick Grossman, who has a good piece discussing the centrality of Trump’s illegal war to the epic midterm loss. Nick, good to have you on.Nicholas Grossman: Great to be here. Great day to be here.Sargent: So let’s start with JD Vance. He put out a long statement on X that’s pretty remarkable. He admitted that the main problem in the election was that a whole lot of voters who had backed Trump and Vance in 2024 voted Democratic. And Vance said this: “The reason we lost is the war.”Vance then went on to strongly suggest that the war wasn’t worth losing Congress over. Nick, your reaction to that?Grossman: I’ve never seen a vice president do this before, of break with the administration. And I think he’s probably right, in that the Iran war was a major factor in Republicans’ loss. Another major one was corruption, and JD didn’t mention that at all. But it’s still remarkable for any vice president to kind of publicly shiv, even if indirectly, a president like this. And it might reflect something of also administrative infighting, or him positioning himself in the future. But it still shows the depth of the Republican midterm loss, and how quick Vance is to try to blame somebody else.Sargent: He understands that it’s an utter catastrophe for his 2028 chances. That’s what this really shows as well, doesn’t it?Grossman: It does, because Republicans are so much weaker in various places, and because Vance will be tied to the administration. But he seems to be trying to say that he wasn’t, that he wasn’t a part of the Trump-Vance administration, or at least he opposed whatever you don’t like about it and he did whatever you do like about it. And it’s also just so different from the way he was campaigning for Republicans just days ago.Sargent: That is a really good point. There was a really interesting moment as well where Trump was asked about JD Vance and the war, apparently in the context of these massive electoral losses. Listen to what Trump said.Donald Trump (voiceover): I mean, we’ll see what happens. You don’t know who’s talking about running. You can have people running. You can have a lot of people, maybe a lot of people running. Maybe nobody’s going to run. Maybe he won’t run. I don’t know who’s going to run. But I can tell you that, as far as that war is concerned, I would have done nothing different.Sargent: I read that as a serious warning that Vance has to be extremely careful about how he interprets these election results. What did you think of it?Grossman: I thought so too. Everybody in his administration, everyone in the Republican Party, is supposed to be defending him no matter what. That’s priority number one. And Vance is not doing that. He’s suggesting, at minimum, that maybe Trump did something that was wrong. And I don’t expect Trump to—well, if he did take that and kind of let it go, or take it to heart, this would be the first time.Sargent: It would. And I think Trump was really knifing Vance in the back very clearly here, letting all of MAGA know that it’s now open season for 2028, don’t you think?Grossman: Yeah, and it could be a lot of different people that are jockeying for a post-Trump Republican Party. And with these midterm results, that became something that now looks a lot sooner than it used to. Just, I don’t know, a year and a half or so ago, there was talk about, will Trump run for a third term, and he was playing coy with it. And now a lot of Republicans are treating him, at least in the immediate aftermath, as more of a lame duck.And Vance also mentioned being less supportive of Israel, which I noted was something that Trump said in the very last moments before the campaign, that he was going to reduce aid to Israel. And I doubt that would actually happen. But still, that seems to reflect a sense that the Republican Party is not happy with that, at least a faction of them. Vance, someone like Tucker Carlson too, is going to run against the Iran war and against supporting Israel.Sargent: You’re referring to Vance’s statement, in which he said that one way forward for Republicans to repair the breach with MAGA voters is to, “put America first and change our relationship to Israel.”I do think that that shows Vance essentially hoping to salvage a way forward for himself by attaching himself to the Tucker Carlson constituency within MAGA. I think he actually is really more desiring of doing that, and essentially changing the relationship with Israel, than Trump is. I think Trump couldn’t really give a shit one way or another. He’s perfectly happy to be as pro-Israel as he’s being.Grossman: The Republicans seem to be splitting on the question. There are still a lot of the hawks, the strong supporters of Benjamin Netanyahu. The white evangelical Christian support of Israel is in part tied up in prophecy and in part tied up in racism. And a decent amount of that is probably going to stay around.But the other wing, this kind of Vance, Tucker Carlson, nationalist America First—they’re also more openly white nationalists. You can think to the Charlottesville marchers saying Jews will not replace us, and also that great replacement conspiracy theory. Both Vance and Carlson have pushed that. So I think on the substance of it, Republicans will have this split. I don’t know which way it’s going to go, but people like Vance are going to try to do that.And it also gives them an excuse to not totally blame Trump for the war. As in, hey, I wasn’t wrong for supporting Trump, you weren’t wrong for supporting Trump, the problem was the Israelis Bibi and others made him do it. It’s kind of a stabbed-in-the-back thing, and that will get him out of it.Sargent: Nick, what exactly is the America First vision? You’ve been pretty good on this. I think we should talk a little bit about what utter bullshit it is, in a certain way, in the sense that there’s a tendency out there to interpret it as isolationist or even anti-war, but it’s not anything like that. It’s hyper-militaristic. It’s essentially, we’ll do whatever the fuck we want in the world, and you can screw off if you don’t like it, or maybe we’ll just blow you up if you don’t like it. And in fact, Trump actually does say that fairly regularly, right? He says something almost exactly like that.And it’s also a shrugging off of international alliances and commitments, human rights commitments, basically. It’s a declaration that we’ll just blow people up in the Caribbean with no due process if we decide it’s good for us. But so, what is this kind of foreign policy vision that fuses that with this anti-Israel ideology? What is it?Grossman: So I think for America First, probably sometimes it’s called, you know, “isolationist” or “anti-war,” and it really isn’t either of those. It’s probably best understood as anti-internationalist. So where this is, you know, throwing off a lot of those commitments, of not respecting things like international law or human rights, of being really disdainful of alliances, and especially of democratic allies, in part because those are also ones that uphold things, or at least advocate things, like law and rights. And yet also being very aggressive.And at times it seems like it just means somewhat similar to Trumpism: easy bullying victories, and not screw-ups or not hard things. So America First doesn’t seem to really object to, say, the boat bombings in the Caribbean, or the takeover of Venezuela and stealing of oil from Venezuela, and didn’t really object to the Iran war at the very start either. It was only once it turned bad that they ended up doing that.So no one who was actually anti-war would support Trump. But there is something about the simplicity of the slogan and the pitch of it that was read by people as, like, let’s not do the Iraq War again, what Obama did with Libya wasn’t great, and let’s just sort of avoid that. And that had some political appeal. But as an actual action, it’s just been internationalist bullying, nobody can tell me what to do, lined up with authoritarianism, and in some attitudes pretty fascist.Sargent: And how does the Israel piece of this connect to that?Grossman: The Israel piece is weird, because it depends on whether an American kind of sees them as us or them. There are some American hawks that really, especially on the right, that really see Israel as kind of an us—for example, us against the Muslims or something together. And there are some that see Israel as, like, the white evangelical Christians have seen it as sort of an us, in terms of in part biblical prophecy and in part things like racial or cultural or theocratic links between the two, or appeal between the two.So there’s some of that. But Israel itself fits in very oddly to that, because it does mean that compared to other U.S. allies—and Trump has broken a lot of these—the U.S. relationship to Israel is a lot more of the U.S. giving to Israel than Israel giving back.Sargent: Vance seems to think that he can actually find a way forward here by allying himself with the Tucker wing. He’s going to run into some trouble with the evangelicals and the hawks, who are, I think, maybe going to be—at least the hawks will be—somewhat emboldened by Trump’s failures, right? I mean, I think you’re going to actually start seeing some Republicans coming out and saying, we’ve got to stop playing footsie with Putin and Russia.And so I have trouble seeing how Vance goes forward here and represents the whole Republican Party, when there are going to be big-time knives out for the “America First” vision among some of these Republican hawks, and the white evangelicals may not even be on board either. What do you think of that?Grossman: To the best I can tell from afar, I think Vance is banking on the kind of white nationalism carrying the day. Vance has always been into that sort of stuff. And it is not totally unreasonable to look at the Trump era and say that those various—the hawks, maybe more establishment figures—that they’ll go along with whoever the Republican nominee is. So that as long as Vance can get the far right on his side, and get kind of the white nationalists and the racists and the bigots, and get that on his side, get the nomination, then the rest will come along.That’s probably his best shot at the nomination now, and at the presidency. I mean, I can’t think of a better path for him than that. So it’s basically either quit or try that. And it seems like he’s trying to get in early on.Sargent: So a lot of this is coming as Republican anger at Donald Trump is really mounting big time. Politico reports that Republicans are really starting to point fingers at Donald Trump over what happened here. There was a really striking quote from the failed Maine Republican gubernatorial candidate Bobby Charles, who said this: “I’m optimistic for the future, because Trump’s going to be gone in two years.”Now, I have a little trouble seeing how this is going to unfold, because Donald Trump is essentially saying, nobody will hold me responsible for anything that happened here. Nobody’s allowed to say that my war or my agenda or anything I’ve done has had any political consequences of any kind. Yet Republicans are now trying to figure out a way forward to rescue their party and rescue themselves. And Vance is doing that in his own way.So it seems like the tension here is not really resolvable in some fundamental sense. It’s just going to have to crack up. And I have trouble seeing how Vance manages that, because if Vance goes too far in pulling away from Trump, then Trump will just sink his political ambitions by saying, you can’t be the nominee. How do you see this unfolding?Grossman: I think that’s probably it. I mean, maybe this is being a little overly hopeful here, but it looks like a split, where the only options for them are either all of them abandon Trump, which I find extremely unlikely, or that they all rally around him again and sideline the ones that are critical. And given how bad this loss was for them, and how far we are into the Trump era, and how exhausted some people are from it, and also how strong the argument is that it really is his fault that they lost—I don’t know how that one would happen either. So it seems like they’re headed for a split.And psychologically, Trump has never been someone who either acknowledges error or admits any sort of mistake, or who is OK with anybody else being influential in the Republican Party anywhere near a level that he is. As much as he treats America now like his personal property, he’s been treating the Republican Party like it is his personal corporation for 10 years at least.And so this idea of Vance coming out and saying sort of it was him, or a governor candidate that lost saying it was him—that he and some of his people are going to push back on that, that they don’t want to, otherwise he’s a total lame duck and just slinks away, and it would be out of character. And so both hopefully, and it sure looks to me like this is the path for it, Republicans are going to react to this by splitting. And if the midterm was closer, they might have been able to better hold together.Sargent: I really wonder whether JD Vance actually ends up running. It strikes me that he’s deeply damaged goods at this point. And it’s easy to get a little seduced by the present, right? So I want to guard against that. Things can change, people can rehabilitate themselves, find new paths forward, they can rebound and so forth and so on.But here’s a situation where JD Vance very clearly placed a bet on the idea that MAGA was a culturally dominant force. He was going to ride that all the way to the presidency himself. And now that idea’s just been blown to smithereens. And it’s a little hard to see how he gets back on track after that. What do you think?Grossman: I don’t see how he can. I mean, he has always been somebody who lacks charisma, kind of doesn’t have the juice, in a way that, you know, say what you will about Trump, but one thing he’s always been good at is working a crowd and being able to interact with them and doing things that they think is funny, that they cheer. And Vance has all these awkward moments. So he doesn’t have the charisma.He’s tied to a lot of Silicon Valley stuff, and the opposition in this election also was to tech oligarchs, data centers, and AI was a component in it. And so that is who got him in the vice presidency in the first place. The only reason how he became a senator in Ohio and then the vice president was, Peter Thiel threw tons of money at the primary. It was many candidates. Vance squeaked by with less than a quarter of the vote, I’m pretty sure it was, and then still got the nomination because there were so many candidates. And then it was Thiel, Musk, Tucker Carlson, and apparently Don Jr. that were the big advocates for Vance as the VP.And so when you add his personal lack of charisma, his name is in the administration that is very unpopular and doing unpopular things, where he’s going to have to pick a lane in a Republican Party that seems to be splitting, and he’s tied to the tech oligarchs—I mean, I think that he might end up running anyway, because one is the delusion of, hey, maybe it’ll work. And two, because if it doesn’t work now, this is probably his best shot. Or at least he could think that. So I think he’ll take a shot at it.But no, I’ve never thought that JD Vance has the juice, and that kind of the only way that he could end up being president is either, you know, something like Trump dies in office, or that the Trump stuff in the Trump-Vance administration is popular. Like, the economy is really good and he manages to squeak by as sort of a Trump legacy person. But no, I think his political career is in quite a bit of trouble. And if anything, it’s possible to read his statement as an element of desperation, in that, about how, I better quickly get distance from this or I’m screwed.Sargent: And then Trump, of course, responds instantly by saying, you take one step away from me and you’re dead.Grossman: Mm-hmm. And Vance should know that, given who he’s been around this whole time and who he’s kissed up to this whole time. He could either run as Trump’s successor, or he has to take on Trump directly. And if he’s going to pick something big, like, your signature foreign policy is why we lost, then that means taking him on. And the weasely way—you know what, if anything, knowing him, he’s going to try to weasel his way through it and do both sides, and that’ll be even less appealing.Sargent: A hundred percent. I think we’re only seeing the very beginning of the bloodletting, man. Nick Grossman, always awesome to talk to you. Great stuff today. Thank you so much.Grossman: Yeah, it was a pleasure. Thanks for having me.