Michael Goodwin: Vance’s baffling statements on Israel & Epstein should disqualify him from 2028 GOP ticket
From the moment in 2024 when Donald Trump picked JD Vance to be his running mate, I believed it was a good move.
Vance, a first-term Ohio senator, was popular among Trump’s base, which is why he was given the task of concentrating on Midwest swing states during the campaign.
His surgical dismantling of blowhard Tim Walz during the veep debate was a thing of beauty, and it bears remembering that Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin all flipped for Trump.
While the president clearly deserves most of the credit, Vance certainly did his part.
I’ve also viewed Vance as a solid vice-president.
He’s been loyal, smart, calm and persistent, making him an effective opponent for the leftist media cabal during interviews.
For those and other reasons, it’s not a surprise that most early polling has him leading the GOP field to be Trump’s successor and win the 2028 nomination.
The very capable and savvy Secretary of State Marco Rubio is running a close second.
‘Who is this guy?’
Alas, the appearance of smooth sailing in all things Vance came to a crashing end with his shocking interview with Joe Rogan last week.
His comments on Israel alone have me asking, “Who is this guy?”
And not in a nice way.
He was so bad that I entertained the wild possibility he was floating the idea of switching to the Democratic Party.
That’s because his acid comments about the Jewish state echoed some antisemitic themes, and happened to come on the same day that half of House Dems took the extraordinary step of voting to end all aid to Israel, military and humanitarian.
The move failed because of strong Republican support for the Jewish state.
Yet at the same time, here was the Republican vice president of an administration that has twice joined Israel in a war against Iran bad mouthing our crucial ally in ways that rhyme with the conspiracy theories of the Dems’ socialist wing.
Specifically, Vance accused people “within Israel’s system” of trying to manipulate American public opinion to prolong the war with Iran “indefinitely.”
That is not far from the false charge by The New York Times and others that Trump was persuaded by sinister Israeli pressure to enter the war, as if he had never said he would not allow Iran to get a nuclear bomb.
Vance also bemoaned what he called a heavily funded Israeli campaign to derail the negotiations with Tehran, which he is now leading.
“I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that there have been people within the Israeli government who are trying to, like, actually shift us away from [negotiations] because they want to continue the military campaign,” Vance said.
“Again, not towards any objective, but just indefinitely.”
Addressing those criticizing his approach, presumably in Israel, he said: “Go to hell. I’m going to do what I have to do for the American people. I represent Americans first.”
That was bad enough, but he wasn’t finished. Vance also wandered deep into the woods of Jeffrey Epstein theories, admitting he was among the “Epstein conspiracy theorists.”
He proved it by declaring, without offering any evidence, that the dead pedophile “had connections to the upper, the highest levels, of American intelligence. He clearly had connections to the highest levels of Israeli intelligence,” Vance told Rogan.
Deep-web echoes
Although he cited the known Epstein association with Ehud Barak, a former Israeli prime minister, he didn’t note that Barak insisted he engaged in no wrongdoing and said he regrets the relationship with Epstein.
Vance didn’t stop there, saying, strangely that “As much as I know, you know, Prime Minister Netanyahu, not a particularly popular person in the United States of America right now, Epstein seemed to be connected to the elements of the Israeli deep state that were left of center.”
His remarks are not far from the belief in deep-web dungeons that Epstein was a Mossad agent.
On a roll, Vance added, that, in America, Epstein was “connected across the board, he had Republican friends, he had Democratic friends.
He had much deeper connections to the Israeli left of center than right of center.”
He wisely did not mention his boss, whose long relationship with Epstein has convinced Dems there is political profit to be made by lobbing endless accusations about the president.
The closest Vance came was when he confessed the administration “absolutely screwed up” its communications of the Epstein files, and singled out former Attorney General Pam Bondi.
He said Bondi’s claim about having binders of documents on her desk “made people mistrust the entire effort,” adding that Bondi “overstated what we had and what we didn’t have.”
The incident surely played a key role in Trump booting Bondi.
Vance’s turn against Israel reminds me of a conversation several months ago with a friend who is active in Jewish causes.
A long-time donor and supporter of Vance, he mentioned reports he was hearing that the veep was sounding like Tucker Carlson, a close Vance friend who broke with Trump and routinely denounces Israel.
Although I knew that Carlson had lobbied Trump to make Vance his running mate, my friend’s warning about a creeping anti-Israel bias by Vance didn’t sound right to me.
That was my mistake.
Ridiculous comparison
With Trump making near-daily headline-grabbing comments on the war, I missed that Vance last month used a ridiculous comparison to describe Israel’s conflict with Hezbollah in Lebanon.
He called it a “chicken and egg problem” and said all nations have a right to defend themselves.
Stop right there — Hezbollah is not a nation. It is an occupying force of terrorists in Lebanon to further Iran’s goal of eliminating Israel, and that’s why Israeli forces are trying to root it out.
And that is why Israel objected to America’s willingness to include its Hezbollah conflict in the cease-fire.
I would expect such an ignorant view from a Kamala Harris, but how could Trump’s vice president not understand the essential facts?
The Rogan interview convinces me that Vance really has moved far along the Carlson path.
When it comes to Israel, he’s closer to Dems than to the heart of the GOP.
For example, a Washington Free Beacon poll shows that likely Republican primary voters remain deeply supportive of the war and Trump’s handling of it.
The outlet reported that those voters want a 2028 candidate who supports a strong US-Israel relationship by a margin of 57 percentage points.
They also want one who forcefully denounces antisemitism by a margin of 52 percentage points.
As of now, JD Vance is not that guy.