JD Vance Is on a Hell of a Losing Streak

Has anyone in the history of the world failed in more geographically disparate places in as short a time as JD Vance? Over the course of less than a week, the vice president traveled from Washington, D.C., to Budapest, Hungary, to Islamabad, Pakistan—a journey of roughly 7,500 miles—to be spectacularly humiliated. He returns to D.C. a truly defeated man—perhaps the Trump administration’s most defeated man, which is no mean feat when your boss is losing a pointless, reckless war that has accomplished nothing but skyrocketing gas prices.

Let’s check the scoreboard. One week ago, Vance flew to Hungary to help out his pal Viktor Orbán, the authoritarian, pro-Russian politician who was running for a fourth term as president amid growing opposition to his quasi-dictatorial reign. Vance’s appearance at an Orbán rally broke with long-standing precedent. “American presidents and vice presidents have seldom intervened so overtly in foreign elections,” wrote Isaac Stanley-Becker in The Atlantic. But Vance was determined to remind the Hungarian people that Orbán was good for something—namely being friends with President Trump.

True to form, Vance played the too-clever-by-half contrarian, accusing the European Union of election interference. “The bureaucrats in Brussels have tried to destroy the economy of Hungary,” he said, at a joint press conference with Orbán, who actually has interfered with elections. “And they’ve done it all because they hate this guy.” Orbán has long been a model for parts of the right because he neutered the liberal opposition, took over the media, and transformed Hungary into a hybrid democratic-authoritarian state. Vance was there to show support for their guy, but he was also there as a kind of flex: Trumpism is worldwide.

There were problems, however. Vance tried to call Trump twice during the April 7 rally and was sent to voicemail both times. (The same day, Trump picked up a call from an MS NOW reporter who wanted to know what he thought about his wife’s decision to declare, seemingly out of nowhere, that she had no knowledge of Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes against underage girls.) Then, on Sunday, Orbán and his party were wiped out in Hungary’s elections. In a landslide so great that the results could not be questioned, Péter Magyar’s Tisza party won a supermajority that could allow it to erase much of Orbán’s legacy.

Vance by then had moved on to his next humiliation, as the lead U.S. negotiator in talks to end the Iran war and reopen the Strait of Hormuz. That Vance had been tapped at all was itself a kind of humiliation. Since the start of the conflict in late February, there had been leaks to the press that the vice president was not a fan of the war and that he wanted to keep his distance from it—leaks no doubt provided by Vance’s own team, which is already strategizing for the 2028 presidential election. It was a characteristically cynical bit of P.R.: The stories uniformly showed him backing the war to a point—he believed it should be “fast” (doesn’t everyone?)—but trying to worm his way out of any potential blowback.

Vance was not being a team player. His reward was being sent to Islamabad to represent the United States in talks with Iranian officials to end the war. Alongside trade representative Steve Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, Vance endured marathon negotiation sessions. How close they got to a deal is up for debate. Iranian sources have suggested that one was near before Vance pulled the rug out, though that should be taken with a grain of salt. What’s clear, though, is that Vance failed miserably. After 21 hours of negotiations, he announced he had “bad news,” that “we did not reach an agreement, and I think that is much worse news for Iran than for the United States.” Not long after, Trump announced he was ordering a blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, to economically cripple Iran in retaliation for the economic damage the country has caused by closing the strait to trade involving Western nations.

Vance couldn’t end the Iran war. That may have been a tall order, but his failure has more immediate consequences for the ambitious vice president. He has spent the last six weeks doggedly trying to avoid any association with the war. He can’t plausibly do that anymore, after his failed assignment in Islamabad. It’s his war now too, and that may still be true come 2028.