White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt on Thursday assured reporters that Vice President JD Vance and President Trump are “On the exact same page” with Iran after a reporter claimed that their messaging is contradictory.
Vance, who is leading negotiations with Iran, appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast this week and said that negotiations with Iran remain necessary to make a long-term deal.
This was after Trump declared the US-Iran ceasefire is “over” a week prior with harsh words for the Iranians after repeated violations of the memorandum of understanding signed last month. “I don’t want to deal with them anymore. They’re scum,” Trump said, describing Iranian leaders as “sick people” and “vicious, violent people.”
Vance told Rogan that he gets “frustrated with the people who say you should never negotiate with Iran,” noting that negotiations are needed for a long-term solution to ending the war and ensuring that Iran never builds a nuclear weapon.
“I’m very frustrated by the Americans and, frankly, by people in other countries who are like, ‘You cannot negotiate with the Iranians,’” Vance further noted. “Well, then, what is your proposal to get people to stop shooting at ships in the Strait of Hormuz? You can bomb them, you can take away their radar, you can take away some of their drones and some of their missiles, but it’s just too easy to fire at ships in the Strait, so you’ve got to actually be willing to talk and to try to figure out the problem.”
Still, “once the president makes a decision, so long as I think that it’s you know legal and ethical and all that stuff,” Vance said, “My attitude towards it is I try to make it as successful as possible.”
Vance further defended Trump’s use of the military as a tool to force negotiations with Iran and respond to hostilities in the Strait of Hormuz.
“What the president has done, I think, very, very capably, is said we’re going to use military force in the, in this situation, when it’s connected to something we’re trying to achieve. So, if you shoot at ships, we’re going to shoot at the facilities at which you used to shoot at the ships. But we’re not just going to do something open-ended indefinitely. We’re not just going to bomb and bomb and bomb. We’re going to try to use our military force as one of the many tools that we have to solve the problem,” Vance said, agreeing that it’s “exactly the right approach.”
He contrasted this with the approach of “conservative hawks” like Mike Pence, saying, “If you actually look at what they’re proposing, they just want the military campaign to go on forever, and they can’t actually identify what it is that they’re trying to accomplish. None of them can identify what it is they’re trying to accomplish.”
But the Daily Mail’s Elina Shirazi took one sentence from the interview to assert that Vance’s statements represent a “mixed messaging” and “contradictions” with the President.
Leavitt noted the two statements were made at “different times throughout this conflict” and said that Trump and Vance are “are on the exact same page about where we are right now in this conflict.”
“And the fact that you do see elements of what’s remaining in the Iranian regime that are more willing to make a deal, and then other elements who are not so maybe willing to make a deal, shows that Operation Epic Fury was incredibly effective because we neutered their ability to communicate with one another, and they are a fragmented system,” Leavitt continued.
“They are not the once very strong, powerful terrorist state that they were before this operation, which was one of the ultimate goals. So, we’ll continue to work through the process, and as I said, the president will hold them accountable when they turn their back on the words that they state to the United States, but he is always open to diplomacy at the very same time.”
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