Conservatives have been attempting to launder the image of a leading 2028 presidential contender, according to one reporter, but the project seems doomed to fail, on account of him being "a massive moron."

Vice President JD Vance has long been viewed as the default frontrunner for the GOP nomination in 2028, but his historic unpopularity has cast significant doubt on his chances. As President Donald Trump also becomes toxic with voters, some within the Republican Party and the broader conservative political movement have attempted to rehabilitate his image by pushing him as a "peace candidate," emphasizing his behind-the-scenes opposition to the disastrous war in Iran.

This plan might be facing long odds for success, however.

On Tuesday, the popular X account, FactPost, shared a clip of Vance discussing the intention behind the recent "peace deal" reached between the U.S. and Iran, giving some insight into what Trump views as its real purpose.

"So, I think what the president has told us to do is to use this [memorandum of understanding] to sort of refill the world's oil economy," Vance said during an interview with Michael Knowles. "Refill some stocks, and then to see where the hand is."

In response to that clip, writer and journalist Pedro L. Gonzalez argued that Vance appeared to be giving the game away, revealing the real "cynical logic" behind the Iran deal and jeopardizing his own bona fides as a peace candidates.

"The American Conservative crowd has been trying so hard to repair Vance's image for 2028 as a 'peace' candidate but they did not account for him being a massive moron and publicly confessing the cynical logic behind the MOU, which is not grounded in anything like principle but concerns over midterms," Gonzalez wrote.

Trump has heavily positioned Vance as the face of the peace talks with Iran, and has been quite open about his own cynical reasons for doing so. Last month, Trump, perhaps only half-jokingly, revealed how he plans to approach the peace deal, depending on how it works out.

"If it works out, I’m going to take the credit,” Trump said at a June press conference. “If it doesn’t work out, I’m blaming JD.”

Vice President JD Vance has the bad luck of trying to sell another book at the same time that he's being put in charge of a much-maligned deal to end the war in Iran. But one strategist thinks the real intention is to cover up who the actual architect was.

CNN's Audie Cornish closed her Thursday show talking about President Donald Trump's comment during his G7 press conference, during which he said he'd blame Vance if the memorandum of understanding (MOU) fails.

Democratic strategist Meghan Hays asked if anyone truly believed that Vance was the one who negotiated the Iran deal.

Hays, the former Joe Biden White House director of messaging, asked: "Are we just trying to hide that Jared Kushner was actually the one negotiating this deal, who does not work for the United States government?"

"I mean, I just think that maybe Marco Rubio will end up better when he's trying to run for president," Hays continued. "But I don't think that Donald Trump cares who gets blamed as long as it's not him. But I don't think the American people are that stupid to [not] realize their gas prices went up because we went into a war of choice by Donald Trump."

A report from The New York Times in May said that Trump wanted to give Iran a $300 billion "bribe to back out of a war he never should have waded into," as The New Republic characterized it. The Times said that an Iranian official put the reconstruction of Iran at $300 billion.

The idea came from United States Special Envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff and the president's son-in-law, both of whom are real estate investors. The two had also pitched a kind of real estate investment fund that would help provide financial incentives for developers in Iran. Kushner is already being investigated by the House Judiciary Democrats for cashing in on foreign investment funds while working on behalf of the United States government.

If Democrats win in November, the Trump administration believes that investigations will promptly begin, The Hill reported.

The Jerusalem Post noted that Israeli right-wing figures are attacking Witkoff and Kushner as "losers" over the plan.

The federal government keeps claiming there is massive fraud in its medical aid programs, but has been less than forthcoming about where it is and what's being done about it. Moreover, officials argue that if fraud were stopped, the federal deficit would disappear.

Instead, an outwardly partisan anti-fraud campaign has featured Vice President JD Vance in the starring role of tagging Democratic states as uncaring or incompetent about finding fraud. It all seems especially galling when the examples that Vance promotes generally are the result of already-run state investigations or the prospect of fraud possibility, inevitably involving programs by or for immigrants already barred by law from receiving benefits.

What's missing is an actual, evidenced accounting of what is supposed to be wrong rather than jumbled, unevidenced assertions that billions of public dollars are being wasted. Much like the fabled but discredited findings by Elon Musk's DOGE efforts a year ago, there is a lot of talk about fraud without the evidence to back up Vance's oft-repeated claims.

Indeed, news accounts of Vance presentations feature him or Dr. Mehmet Oz, head of the agency overseeing Medicare and Medicaid, discussing the possibilities of finding fraud without showing new cases.

As TalkingPointsMemo.com notes, Donald Trump used his State of the Union address to offer "an absurd, fantastical and quickly debunked claim: Once Vice President JD Vance had a chance to root out fraud from (blue states') social services programs, the federal budget would be balanced and the deficit would disappear."

Nope. Despite the hype, there is still a huge, quickly increasing federal debt and no list of fraudsters.

The White House has decided that Minnesota, California, and now Maine are either purposely (for political reasons) or incompetently ignoring Medicaid eligibility or fraudulent reporting of child-care reimbursement programs. Apparently, fraud that continued under the first Trump administration should not count.

The campaign started in earnest after Trump decided to attack Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and other state officials there who oppose Trump's deportation efforts over reports—some true, some not—that there had been fraudulent child-care schemes in that state. Trump made it all political by connecting those schemes—which had been prosecuted after state investigations—to efforts by Walz to shield Somali immigrants involved to gain their electoral support.

Quickly after naming Vance to head a White House effort to investigate fraud, the government has singled out blue states as bad actors in the filings of government reimbursements.

Last week, Vance hosted Republican attorneys general—Vance did not invite Democrats until the last minute, so they boycotted the session—and made clear that he will use this anti-fraud commission as another weapon in the retribution campaign Trump is waging against blue states by withholding federal funds as a form of punishment for various, nebulous offenses.

Vance said states should target Medicaid's social services spending and said the Health and Human Services Department would be reviewing how states use their Medicaid Fraud Control Units—ironically the very people who most often prosecute cases of Medicaid provider fraud. Indeed, states note that widespread cuts to Health and Human Services have made fraud investigation much more difficult.

While there is agreement that some fraud exists in federal spending, there is no evidence that it is as rampant as Team Trump claims nor only in blue states. To even keep deficit spending unchanging, for example, the amount of fraud would have to be triple what the Government Accounting Office estimates.

These public fraud charges are largely about suppliers who charge the government for a childcare facility that is not staffed, as an example from Minnesota. Medicare/Medicaid itself says the largest source of "fraud" is in overhyped medical prescriptions that result from the labyrinth for doctors to have to check the right boxes for reimbursement.

Just this week, ProPublica published an analysis showing upwards of $100 million a year spent for medically questionable vascular procedures for mildly affected patients.

But this campaign from Vance wants to pin blame on lack of Democratic state oversight for spending illegally on or for undocumented migrants or on allowing classes of ineligible aid recipients.

The GAO released a study in 2024, during the Joe Biden years, that estimated government-wide fraud was between $233 billion to $521 billion between 2018 and 2022 (including COVID years). The GAO collected data from prosecuted cases, from inspector general reports and confirmed fraud reported to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) by agencies. It used 46 fraud studies to build its model and to conclude that annual fraud losses amounted to between 3 percent and 7 percent of government spending. That is what the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid report as well.

Vance keeps telling reporters that in "just two months" the anti-fraud task force he has led for the Trump administration has "exposed billions of dollars in benefits that have been stolen from the American people." Vance claims the task force has deferred funds from fraudsters seeking small business loans and Medicaid reimbursements and recovered funds "stolen" from COVID relief programs.

Much of what Vance reports either already has been prosecuted or stopped or is believed to be the possible source of fraud. It is not new investigative gold. Vance placed a six-month hold on new hospice and home healthcare enrollments and shutdown of 780 hospice centers and asserted that he stopped $1.3 billion in fraud. How is that evidence? The task force referred $22 billion in small business loans for review, another $6 billion in government contracts, and $60 million in student aid payments. Calling them fraud doesn't make them fraud, a crime. Vance asserts that California and Minnesota are ignoring increases in fraud that he estimated in the billions without listing the who, what and how.

For the moment, assume all of it is true. For comparison, the federal cumulative deficit is estimated to be around $24 trillion, with growing costs of social services programs, interest, and, of course, tax cuts. GAO's estimates of fraud are nowhere near enough to balance that deficit.

It is an issue that can prove insurmountable for a presidential campaign, and, in fact, it was credited with sinking one of the most high-profile candidates in recent memory: unshakeable proximity to a majorly unpopular president. Now, according to a new Politico report, it appears likely to sink MAGA's heir apparent as well.

For all the commendable things Kamala Harris was able to do with her abbreviated and unprecedented 2024 campaign, experts and pundits now largely agree that she just could not get past being the vice president for Joe Biden, a president who was disliked by a vast swath of the electorate. In fact, some still point to an appearance on The View in which she failed to separate herself from her boss enough as a huge misstep for her campaign. Even without that, however, it might have been impossible for her to convince voters that she would be different from Biden, given her work in his administration.

Looking ahead, these same headwinds already seem to be buffeting Vice President JD Vance, who, despite being remarkably unpopular, is still considered the favorite for the 2028 GOP presidential nomination, making him also the de facto heir to President Donald Trump's MAGA throne.

That throne is hardly as stable as it once seemed, however, as Trump continues to reach new lows in voter approval, with a Washington Post/ABC News/Ipsos poll published over the weekend finding that 65 percent of Americans disapprove of his handling of the economy and 76 percent disapprove of Trump’s handling of cost of living issues, two things that are dominating voter concerns heading into the midterms and 2028. Efforts by Trump and Vance to blame everything on Biden are only getting them so far, as the same poll found that 45 percent of Americans feel Trump bears some responsibility for the dire state of the economy.

"Vance’s fate is unavoidably linked to President Donald Trump’s," Politico's Tuesday report explained. "He’ll either carry the mantle of Trump’s accomplishments all the way into his own term in the White House — or be dragged down by Trump’s dismal approval ratings, which have spiraled amid an unpopular war in Iran and voters’ economic pessimism."

The Vice President made his first stop in the key presidential primary state of Iowa on Tuesday, appearing at a campaign rally for Republican Rep. Zach Nunn, who is considered to be in a battleground district. While he notably avoided any talk of 2028, the specter of Trump's agenda clouded the proceedings nevertheless.

"He credited the president repeatedly for tariffs, tax cuts and agriculture industry aid," the report added. "But his association with Trump’s agenda presents a high-risk, high-reward proposition that could make or break his political future, operatives and rallygoers said."

“That’s the risk of being part of an administration,” Iowa GOP strategist David Kochel said. “This is the Kamala Harris problem.”

This proximity issue is likely to confront many of the other names considered to be at the top of the 2028 list for the GOP, given that they are also currently working in the Trump administration. Along with Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio is said to be gaining momentum within the party, with some whispers suggesting that he is preparing to exit the role soon to focus on his 2028 campaign, and to get as much distance as possible from Trump's flailing presidency.

Less than a month out from the first ouster of a Cabinet member in his second term, President Donald Trump is seemingly prepping to throw another one under the bus, according to a new analysis from The New Republic.

Early last month, Trump announced his removal of Kristi Noem as Homeland Security Secretary, after she reportedly angered him by suggesting he approved an expensive and controversial ad campaign. This was the first high-profile firing of his second term as president, which has been marked by a much more stubborn refusal to cut major officials when compared to his first.

In a piece published Thursday, The New Republic's Edith Olmstead argued that Trump appears to be preparing to throw his "number two," Vice President JD Vance, under the bus if a ceasefire deal cannot be reached with Iran. She highlighted an exchange between the two from an Easter luncheon on Wednesday, where Trump called

“He’s working on the deal, right? How’s that moving? Is it OK? The big deal?” Trump said.

“It’s going good, sir,” Vance said from the audience.

“Do you see that happening?” Trump pressed.

“We’re gonna brief you too,” Vance said.

“So, if it doesn’t happen, I’m blaming JD Vance. If it does happen, I’m taking full credit,” Trump responded. “No, I think it’ll be uh. I think it has to happen. I think they’re desperate."

Despite Trump's suggestion, Olmstead noted that there is little indication that Iran is actually "desperate" for an end to the conflict. Citing a recent New York Times report, she wrote that the country "believes it is still in a strong position and is not currently willing to engage in substantial negotiations to end the U.S. and Israel’s military onslaught." She also noted that Trump has been contradicting his repeated claims that all military objectives have been completed in Iran, given that he also said bombing will continue for at least a few more weeks.

Numerous reports have emerged since the start of the war in Iran, suggesting that Vance, a staunch isolationist, was among the voices closest to Trump most opposed to the conflict. Trump has also reportedly been attacking his likely 2028 successor over the stance, with Zeteo reporting that he has directed "snide, annoyed comments" towards the vice president due to his "skeptical" take on the war.

President Donald Trump has decided that his latest scapegoat is Vice President JD Vance, columnist Dana Milbank pointed out while asking how much more humiliation he can take.

In a column for the New York Times, Milbank pointed to the awkward conversation between the president and Vance at a closed-door Easter lunch last week.

Business Insider politics reporter Bryan Metzger captured a video of Trump's full speech at the event, which the White House has attempted to remove. The event was supposed to be "press-free," which was supposed to mean no coverage, but it was made public, only to be quickly deleted. It didn't matter, reporters were still able to save the video and have uploaded it to ensure it is still available.

“It’s going good, sir,” Vance replied from the audience after Trump demanded his update on Iran.

“Do you see it happening?” Trump asked, wondering if the war would end.

“Uh,” the vice president scrambled. “We’re going to brief it to you.”

Milbank noted that's when Trump delivered his punchline. “So, if it doesn’t happen, I’m blaming JD Vance. If it does happen, I’m taking full credit.”

The crowd laughed.

On Tuesday, the humiliation deepened as Vance was in Hungary, taking questions from the press, when Trump posted a Truth Social update threatening Iran, "a whole civilization will die tonight."

"I don't have an update from Steve Witkoff," Vance told reporters, pulling out his cell phone.

"Oh," Vance paused, before revealing that Witkoff did send him a message. He said he wouldn't reveal anything without reading it in full and thinking about it for a moment.

Milbank asked if Vance had figured out that "the joke is on him."

While Vance keeps "debasing himself," he seems to get "less and less in return."

Vance has made it no secret that he's got presidential aspirations, but he'll likely have to face off against Secretary of State Marco Rubio who is far more popular in political polls. Milbank noted that it's dimming Vance's political future.

The columnist explained that over the years, Vance has consistently made "devil’s bargains" on issues he once claimed were red lines for him, and, much like his predecessor, Vance is getting nothing for it.

"What once might have been a cruise to the 2028 Republican presidential nomination now looks more like a run through the Strait of Hormuz," wrote Milbank. Meanwhile, "the ethnonationalist right to which Mr. Vance tethered himself now appears to be faltering at home and abroad."

Vance is responding to the ordeal the way he has in the past, said the columnist, "he's humiliating himself."

White House officials "let it be known" that Vance has been skeptical of the war in Iran as an "America First" loyalist. Now, however, Milbank wrote, "Trump has cut off that route of escape, saying Mr. Vance was 'maybe less enthusiastic about going, but he was quite enthusiastic.' Mr. Vance is reduced to maintaining that war is OK now because 'we have a smart president whereas in the past we’ve had dumb presidents.'"

Milbank closed by saying that he thinks Vance isn't a fool, but his eagerness to be "Trump's punchline" is "tragic" because he could have "used his office to be something more."

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