TRUMP V SLAUGHTER – A CRUCIAL SCOTUS DECISION THAT HANDS THE TRUMP REGIME THE KEY TO DICTATORIAL POWER

 

My thanks to Martin "Mick" Andersen for sharng this illustration

Anyone who still cares, even a little, about how the Trump Era is undermining democracy and turning the US into an authoritarian regime, with the aid and comfort of the six so-called “conservative” justices on the Supreme Court, need only read the brilliant dissent of Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in the case of Trump v Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, with which her liberal democratic colleagues, Justice Elena Kagan and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson both concurred.

In summary, this is the issue, which is now  a legal precedent, thanks to the six far-right justices and their apparent Project 2025 agenda: The Court’s majority decision in Trump v Slaughter has effectively handed Donald Trump the blueprint for authoritarian rule by dismantling any and all independent oversight over the Executive Branch, thus enabling the transformation of any office of the federal government into a patronage system based on personal loyalty to the supreme leader, rather than on constitutional duty and service to the people of the United States.

Hitler himself could not have come up with a better surrender of the judiciary to the whims of the Führer than Trump v Slaughter. And indeed, history tells us (if anybody bothers to read it, nowadays) that Hitler was unable to establish complete dictatorial control over power in Germany until he managed to compromise the judiciary. He did this by systematically dismantling the independence of Justice, and turning it into a vindictive tool of the Nazi state. This was achieved through a combination of purges, institutional restructuring, and ideological subversion, often carried out in the guise of legality. Sound familiar?

Trump is having an easier time of it, because in nearly every major decision that reverberates in increased Executive power, this Supreme Court has had Trump’s back. It began with a decision  that made him immune to prosecution even if he commits indictable crimes in office. This was the same sort of lenient appeasement that permitted him to run for president again in 2024, despite having been found guilty by a jury of his peers of thirty-four felonies, as well as having been indicted on numerous federal charges, which were forcibly dropped when he won a second term.

A 'friend' of the Court

In the specific case of Trump v Slaughter, what the majority of the Court (ahistorically and undemocratically) posits is that, as president, Trump has the executive authority to fire without cause anyone and everyone that he feels like firing in the federal bureaucracy. This includes what until now have been independent agencies that were not subject to political influence. In particular, it includes Justice Department employees, federal regulators, and inspectors general and their offices, whose job descriptions as such have always, logically, included independence from all political considerations. That is because one of the main specific jobs of these State bureaus is to keep administrations honest by holding them to standards that have historically foiled corruption and despotism.

In her scathing dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor slammed the Court’s decision for making President Donald Trump even more powerful than a king. “No Kings” has never had greater significance, since the Supreme Court decision on Trump v Slaughter is a slap in the face to the great majority of Americans who have been seeking to remind the nation through massive public demonstrations that the Founders’ main premise for rebellion was rejection of absolute monarchies and the abuses they encompassed. One of the main founding principles of the Republic was, then, the definitive rejection of kings and the embracing of representative democracy with three co-equal branches of government.

Instead, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has scrapped Humphrey’s Executor v United States—a precedent that empowered Congress to limit a president’s ability to fire officials at independent federal agencies—and has allowed Trump to remove Rebecca Slaughter, a Democratic commissioner on the Federal Trade Commission.

According to Sotomayor and her two liberal colleagues, “The text of the Constitution, along with its history, the longstanding practices of the political branches, and the precedents of this Court, make clear that Congress may limit the causes for which the heads of Commissions like the FTC can be removed by the President…In holding otherwise, the Court gives the President a power unknown even to the English Crown against which the Founders revolted, elevating him above his once-coequal branches by transforming a duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed into a license to act in defiance of those very laws.”

Sotomayor warned that the Court’s majority decision has just made Trump even more powerful than the despotic English monarch against whom the US colonies revolted, since, back then, the British Parliament “often restricted the Crown’s ability to remove even high-level royal officers.”

Sotomayor argued that there was simply no way that the decision in Trump v Slaughter could be considered constitutional. So true was this, she wrote, that the country’s founding Framers had clearly “never intended to give the President the complete set of powers that the English Crown held, let alone more.”

In effect, this hijacked Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. Rebecca Kelly Slaughter will surely be remembered historically not as a simple technical dispute over a president’s power to remove a specific federal employee, but rather, as the most consequential transfer of constitutional authority to the Executive in American history. By overturning nearly a century of precedent established in Humphrey's Executor v. United States, the Court’s conservative majority dramatically expanded presidential authority over independent federal agencies—institutions specifically designed by Congress, ironically enough, to restrain executive overreach.

In authoring the liberal democratic dissent, Justice Sotomayor fully recognized the gravity of what had occurred. Her warning was not procedural or technical. It was constitutional and structural.

Her central argument can be summarized simply: The Court has now given the president (this president and thus all presidents in the future) power over institutions deliberately designed to remain independent from the Oval Office.

Capturing the full force of the danger to which this situation exposes American democracy, she wrote: “The result is a President who emerges with far greater power than ever before. It is a power, however, that neither the People, nor Congress, nor the Constitution bestowed upon him.”

These are some of the grave and direct consequences of the Court’s ill-advised but intentional decision on Trump v Slaughter:

1. The Court’s decision, in one fell swoop, gutted independent oversight of the Executive. The modern American administrative state was deliberately constructed so that certain institutions would remain insulated from direct presidential control. Not anymore. These bodies included bureaus like the Federal Trade Commission, the National Labor Relations Board, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, Securities and Exchange Commission, and the  Federal Election Commission. The Court has now declared that the President can remove officials in many of these agencies at will. That means the agencies designed to check presidential misconduct now answer to the President himself. Those independent offices are now at the mercy of Trump’s cronyism and dishonest dealings, since anyone not toeing the Trump line will be gone. In simple, understandable terms, the referee is now subordinate to the player.

2. The Court’s decision in Trump v Slaughter has, overnight, undone Constitutional rule and institutionalized a “Loyalty State”. In her dissent, Sotomayor repeatedly emphasizes that independent agencies have existed until now precisely because certain government functions should not depend on partisan loyalty.

She writes: “For most of this Nation’s history, Congress and the President together have decided that some Government functions should operate at a distance from partisan politics.” The far-right majority of the hijacked Trump Supreme Court has unilaterally reversed that principle. And the practical implications are enormous. A president no longer needs competent administrators. He can simply surround himself with loyalists and sycophants. In other words, the Supreme Court, which is supposed to uphold American traditions and democratic institutions is, instead, adopting Trump’s cronyism and disregard for checks and balances as the new model for presidential empowerment.

This opens the door to systematic purging of career officials who demonstrate independence, and their replacement with individuals whose primary qualification is obedience to the head of state. This is not theoretical. It mirrors the logic of systems historically associated with authoritarian governance, including a patronage State, a one-party bureaucracy, and a personalized executive regime.

In short, the State bureaucracy ceases to serve in accordance with the Constitution and serves, instead, at the pleasure of the ruler.

3. The Court’s decision has also reversed traditional checks and balances. And that is institutionally grave. The entire US constitutional system was designed around one foundational assumption: namely, that power must check power.

Under this effective system, Congress creates institutions, the courts interpret the law, and independent agencies enforce statutory mandates insulated from political interference.

But this ruling kicks over the table on all of this, fundamentally altering the playing rules so that the game is fixed in favor of a single player. In more technical terms, the SCOTUS ruling embraces an extreme version of the so-called “unitary executive theory.” In other words, from now on, Congress can create all of the formerly independent institutions it wants, but, in the end, the Executive has been handed the authoritarian power to dominate them completely. This signifies a direct transfer by the Supreme Court of institutional sovereignty from Congress to the Executive.

In her dissent, Sotomayor warns that the Court has “distort[ed] the structure of Government to fit the majority’s theory of unitary, total executive control.”  And that phrase, “total executive control” is constitutionally devastating. Because once independent institutions are no longer independent, separation of powers implodes and all power is handed to one office.

4. In short, the Supreme Court decision creates fertile conditions for the establishment of de facto dictatorial power. History demonstrates that dictatorships do not usually begin with abolishing elections. They begin, instead, when leaders eliminate independent institutions capable of constraining them. This ruling creates precisely that possibility. A president can now systematically and summarily remove officials who investigate corruption, enforce campaign finance laws, regulate his or her corporate cronies, protect labor rights, prosecute regulatory violations, or resist compliance with unlawful executive orders.

The end result is that this MAGA Supreme Court, through this one ruling, has returned the country to the bad old days of boss rule and “machine politics”. Perhaps the best and most applicable example of this was the Tammany Hall machine run by William “Boss” Tweed in the second half of the nineteenth century in New York. This is the era of rampant corruption and violence so well depicted in Martin Scorsese’s now classic 2002 film Gangs of New York. Under "Boss" Tweed in the 1860s and 1870s, his Democratic Party doled out citizenship, municipal jobs, food, and housing to newly arrived, mostly Irish and Italian immigrants in exchange for unquestioned electoral loyalty. This structure funded massive graft, such as inflating the costs of the new New York County Courthouse by millions of dollars. It was graft so iconic that the building would be commonly known as “the Tweed Courthouse.”

William "Boss" Tweed

The Court has, then, now institutionalized the tools for the recreation of corrupt boss rule, since, thanks to Trump v Slaughter, it is, since that partisan ruling, the president, ironically, who controls the tools that were designed to restrain presidential abuse.

In classic political science terms, this is the very defining characteristic of authoritarian government: Not a formal dictatorship as such, but the intentional re-tooling of the rules, and of the law, so as to foster a functional dictatorship.

5. As devastatingly major as this ruling is, it is actually a complement to the Court’s earlier expansion of presidential immunity, which had basically given Trump impunity to do whatever he wanted and to go unchecked for as long as he and or his regime is in power. Trump v Slaughter, then, cannot be viewed in isolation. It must, rather, be viewed as part of a far-right Court agenda aimed at removing any and all guardrails against dictatorial presidential power.

In the earlier Trump v United States, the same Court granted presidents sweeping criminal immunity for official acts. Famously writing, “With fear for our democracy, I dissent,” Justice Sotomayor warned with unequivocal clarity, “The President is now a king above the law.”

But with Trump v. Slaughter, the Court has doubled down. The 2024 ruling shielded the President from indictment or punishment. The 2026 ruling gives the President power to neutralize institutions that might expose his wrongdoing in the first place.

Together these rulings have established a very dangerous Executive formula:

Immunity from consequences.
Control over investigators.
And, control over the bureaucracy through enforceable vows of loyalty, not to the Constitution, but to the authoritarian ruler.

That combination is the veritable architecture for unchecked executive rule, and it now has the Supreme Court stamp of approval on it.

So there you have it, the combined effects of Trump v United States and Trump v Slaughter have created the perfect storm by which  federal government can now be converted into Trump’s personal political machine. Historically, civil service reform in the United States—especially after the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act—has sought to end the “spoils system.” It had become a merit system in which government jobs were no longer being used as rewards for personal loyalty. This ruling fully revives that danger, and you can bet that Trump will put it to bad (the worst) use.

A president now has unprecedented constitutional authority to fill key governing structures with ideological loyalists whose allegiance is personal. Loyalty not to Congress, not to the law, not to the American people, but to the person of the president, the individual, not even to his branch of government.

That fundamentally and profoundly changes the democratic nature of the Republic.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor understood perfectly what was at stake in this nefarious decision. Her dissent is not simply a disagreement over administrative law. It is a warning to the American people that the Supreme Court has radically altered the constitutional structure of the United States. By allowing the president to dominate agencies created to remain independent, and as oversight for unbridled Executive power, the Court has enabled something profoundly dangerous: the conversion of our constitutional government into a personalized executive regime—in short, an autocracy.

As Donald Trump—in his delusional state of psychopathic fever—sought ever more seriously to be the most powerful despot in history, many of us said, “Never fear. There are checks and balances in the system that will never allow that to happen.” We were naïve. I was naïve. We did not count on a GOP dominance of Congress or on its total surrender to a tyrant. Nor did we count on a Supreme Court majority whose self-interested loyalty to a despot would prompt it to betray the Constitution and the integrity of American democracy, and to facilitate authoritarian rule.

In practical effect, the Supreme Court has ripped away the power of the institutions meant to investigate, restrain, and regulate presidential abuse and subordinated them to the president’s whim and will. The corrupt Supreme Court majority has, in a very real and tangible sense, betrayed the democratic history and traditions of the United States, and granted Trump all of the raw authority necessary to make his life-long wet dream of unchecked and unlimited personal power and impunity come true.

And we are all the worse for it.

 

HAS JD VANCE SEEN THE WRITING ON THE WALL?

 

Many opponents to the Trump regime have argued that even if, whether through impeachment or enactment of the twenty-fifth amendment, Donald Trump should be removed from office, Vice-President JD Vance would be just as bad or worse. In terms of the damage he could do, I don’t completely agree. Not because I think Vance is any more democratic than Trump, but rather because JD Vance is not Donald Trump.

He’s not a particularly popular person even in Republican circles—indeed polls tend to show he’s the most unpopular VP in history. As such, he would never get away with bullying Congress and the Supreme Court the way Trump does, and could never break the Constitution and federal laws daily like Trump does either, without being consistently called on it. My guess is the Trump dictatorship will end with Trump, whether by impeachment, removal for incompetence, completion of term, or act of God.

So it is not that Vance is any more presidential than Trump is. Indeed, Democratic Georgia Senator Raphael Warnock recently described Vance as “one of the most craven politicians on the American political scene.” The only reason, then, that a Vance presidency would be different from Trump’s is that JD Vance is a flagrant opportunist who, lacking Trump’s cultist backing, would have no choice but to more closely read political climates and appetites than his current boss does, and to act accordingly. And it appears he is currently doing just that, fearing that his own political ambitions for the future will, otherwise, die with the Trump regime, which, by all appearances, is sinking into a period of decline and agonization. 

But Vance’s pusillanimous nature, contrasting with his rank opportunism, have served him incredibly well. In 2011, Vance was a law student and political nobody. But while studying for his law degree at Yale, he attended a talk by billionaire German-American venture-capitalist Peter Thiel—who, since very recently, is holed-up with his family in Argentina, as a means of fleeing proposed taxes on billionaires in his former home of California, because he feels aligned with the radically libertarian ideology of Argentina’s current president, Javier Milei, and because he sees the Southern Cone as  a remote future safe haven in which to hedge against

Vance pictured with mentor Thiel

global instability, the possibility of nuclear war, and artificial intelligence meltdowns in the Northern Hemisphere.

As an aside, having lived in Argentina for half a century myself, I think Thiel might be in for a major surprise when it comes to the instability question. Argentina has proven over recent decades to be one of the most politically and economically unstable countries anywhere. But then maybe impunity rather than stability was the word he was looking for.

Anyway, following that talk, Vance, against all odds,  managed to buttonhole Thiel, and to hit it off with the magnate. Vance seems to have impressed Thiel—perhaps with an ambition and lack of empathy to match the billionaire’s own—and in short order, Thiel took Vance under his wing and made him his mentee. It’s not like this was a something-for-nothing mentor-mentee relationship. Clearly, Thiel planned to turn Vance into his political Pygmalion, the kind of young and ambitious politician who would be willing to do anything necessary to get ahead that a libertarian tycoon could love. And that’s just what Thiel did.

Not-so-long story shorter, Thiel was the key financial architect behind Vance's rapid political ascent. He not only set Vance up in venture capital management from early on, but also later contributed an estimated fifteen million dollars to his protégé’s  2022 US Senate campaign in Vance’s native Ohio.

Thiel pictured with Trump sycophant and 
libertarian Argentine president Javier Milei

It has been widely reported that it was Thiel who encouraged Vance to write what became his massive bestseller, Hillbilly Elegy, published in 2016, at the start of the Trump Era. It was with that book that JD Vance went from being a nobody to being a household name in his Ohio, and indeed in other parts of the US as well.

Thanks to that book, which provided Vance with a public persona (an albeit fake one, since Vance was not the Appalachian hillbilly he portrayed himself as but a middle-class Ohioan), and to Thiel’s deep pockets, that a best-selling author emerged from the political woodwork to burst onto the scene as an Ohio senatorial candidate. This was in the run-up to his 2022 win (by a six percent margin) over Democrat Tim Ryan, in the race for a seat left vacant by Ohio Republican incumbent Ron Portman, who was retiring.

Thiel’s tutelage largely molded Vance’s worldview. Thiel is a techno-libertarian with far-right populist ideas. Both he and Vance share a conviction that American elites have failed, and they have both pushed back actively against institutions like the mainstream media and universities. That and Thiel’s vouching for him made Vance the perfect choice for Donald Trump’s vice-presidential candidate. So, with a scant two-year political career, JD Vance was suddenly the VP after Trump’s Grover-Cleveland-style election win, and the definitive breakup with his first VP, Mike Pence, whom he incited MAGA rioters to almost lynch during the J-6 Insurrection in 2021.

That said, the truth is that although JD Vance would probably do no more than Trump to protect democracy, his actions might be mitigated somewhat by virtue of the fact that, as I said before, he is JD Vance, not Donald Trump. But indeed, according to advances on the new book, Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, about to be released by New York Times investigative reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathon Swan, it was Vance, during the ICE occupation of Minnesota, who took the nefarious Assistant Chief of Staff (and Trump Rasputin) Stephen Miller’s cue in passionately backing the idea of invoking the Insurrection Act and sending troops to that state to put down mass peaceful protests against the federal government invasion.  Note that, to date, Haberman and Swan have been so accurate in their reporting that the White House is now claiming that they could not have been so spot on about what went on in the Situation Room unless they had managed to record the sessions involved.

Three faces of US neo-fascism

Again, however, it is less often ideology that triggers Vance’s actions than it is opportunism. His plea for martial law could well have been no more than a ploy to win points with the nefarious Stephen Miller, who is the chief architect for Trump’s most neo-fascist policies.

Compare this to Vance’s public viewpoint in the two years that he was a senator, when he positioned himself as a never-Trumper, and went as far as to describe Trump as “America’s Hitler”. He would, of course, later seem to forget all about his aversion to Trump’s politics when his handler, Thiel, got him a shot at the VP slot.

Now, it would appear, he is repositioning himself once more, this time to be one of the first rats in line to abandon ship, as the Trump regime sails into ever stormier weather. His recent public behavior suggests a politician engaged in a familiar vice-presidential calculation. He is remaining outwardly loyal while gradually differentiating himself from a damaged president whose controversies, legal vulnerabilities, policy failures, and declining popularity will likely threaten the future ambitions of everyone closely associated with him. Perhaps the most significant differentiation to date is reporting that suggests his strong opposition to the war in Iran. So much so that one wonders if leaks to investigative reporters might have come from his camp.    

Whatever the case might be, some of his recent statements and actions have tended to demonstrate that Vance isn’t going as far as  seeking a public confrontation with Trump, but he is quietly but definitively seeking to put distance between himself and his boss—and, clearly, between himself and hardcore MAGA politicians as well.

Once again, advanced releases of excerpts from Haberman and Swan’s new book suggest that JD Vance has been adamant about a full release of the Epstein Files and transparency regarding the entire Epstein scandal. There were reportedly bitter arguments between Vance and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles.

Wiles is reported to have argued that the release of many of the files would be devastating for the president and needed to be covered up. Vance reportedly posited that everyone was already aware that Trump had been found civilly liable for sexual assault, that he had revealed that he grabbed women by the vagina and kissed them without their permission and got away with it because he was a star, and that he walked in on naked beauty queen contestants whenever he felt like it because he owned the pageant. According to Haberman and Swan, Vance pointed out that Trump had done all of this with political impunity. So how would the Epstein files make any difference? It would be worse, he argued, to be caught covering it up—something about which, so far, he has been right. But Trump reportedly agreed with Wiles and ordered the cover-up to continue.

Vance tells KC workers, "Vote against crazy."

Perhaps the most telling case of separating himself from Trump lately was a baffling statement he made to a crowd of workers and supporters at Milbank Manufacturing in Kansas City, Missouri. At one point in his stump speech, Vance said, “What I will ask you is, if you wanna make America great... if you want to rebuild the American dream for the next generation, vote against the crazy leadership in Washington, D.C.

If it hadn’t been an audience of cheering sycophants that he was addressing, the obvious question to ask would have been, “Wait a second, JD, aren’t you part of the ‘crazy leadership’ in Washington, DC?”  But maybe he figured since he was in KC and not, say, Washington, or New York, or even among his senatorial constituents in Cleveland, he could get away with it. And except for the independent liberal media that jumped on it with both feet, he may have been right, if that’s what he thought, because it seems to have been largely ignored by the corporate news outlets and even by Trump himself.

Perhaps it was just so off the wall that a lot of people jumped to the conclusion that he had simply misspoken. But if that was the case, it was one humongous Freudian slip.

But except for this particular incident, there seems to be no evidence of open rebellion on Vance’s part. Rather, he seems to be engaging in strategic hedging. It’s a strategy that doesn’t muster a great deal of scrutiny, since it is taking place in a regime in which contradictions are the norm. Trump contradicts himself from one year to the next, one month to the next, one day to the next, and, increasingly, from one hour to the next. Indeed, he will sometimes contradict himself from what he says at the start of a single sentence in a social media post before he reaches the end of that same sentence. Especially when he’s tossing out dozens of them, one after another, in the middle of the night.

As mentioned earlier, one area in which Vance is growing especially cautious is in foreign policy—particularly as regards US military intervention abroad. From the outset in his campaign for the vice-presidency, Vance bought into Trump’s prince-of-peace lie. Again and again Trump sought to portray the Democrats as hawks—ignoring the fact that the most prolonged war in US history began on a false premise entertained by a Republican administration. But Trump’s promise to voters was that he would not only not start any wars, but would also end ones that were already ongoing. He even went as far as to say he would halt Russia’s war against Ukraine “on day one.”.

Yet, early in the 2.0 phase of his regime, Trump, disappointed at not getting a Nobel Peace Prize—ignoring the fact that the solution of eight wars that he has repeatedly claimed to have been responsible for, appears to exist only in his head—carried out a rocket attack, apropos of nothing, on Venezuela and sent in commandos to kidnap the Venezuelan president and his wife and spirit them away to jail in New York. He then began threatening to invade Cuba and, finally, ordered attacks on Iran that have gone exceedingly badly for the United States and ended in a clearcut US retreat.

Historically, Vance built much of his national profile around skepticism toward this sort of foreign intervention. Yet Trump’s second administration has become increasingly entangled in military escalation.

In an interview back in February, Vance emphasized:

“I think we all prefer the diplomatic option.” He added, “There is no chance the United States will be involved in a drawn-out war.”

You could say, in twenty-twenty hindsight that this was wishful thinking. Unofficially, reports from within the White House suggest that Vance was vociferously against Trump’s war in Iran from the outset, agreeing with some of the top military officials that it was a disastrous idea. If the president thought a few bombing runs would bring Iran to its knees, he was mistaken. And if that wasn’t the plan, then the US would be in for another forever-war in the Middle East. In the end, however, Vance was in the minority in Trump’s yes-man (and woman) cabinet, and the US has since suffered a humiliating defeat and weakened its position on the world stage, with the senseless Wild West “diplomacy” of Trump and the self-styled “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth taking the lead.

Vance’s language in public statements is, nevertheless,  politically revealing. Rather than fully embracing Trump’s aggressive posture, Vance has repeatedly framed himself as the administration figure emphasizing restraint — preserving his long-standing anti-interventionist credentials with populist conservatives. But then, as the Washington Post would point out, the VP didn’t have a lot of choice. Trump had put him, as the Post said, “in a bind, supporting a war that could cost him politically.” This couched public language was, then, the classic political language of insulation.

JD Vance is also separating himself from Donald Trump by engaging in appearances designed to broaden his image beyond simply being Trump’s lapdog. Perhaps the best example was, once again, that Missouri appearance before workers and supporters at Milbank Manufacturing, where he almost said the quiet part out loud: Dump Trump!

But a much more high-profile move was his decision to appear on a premier anti-Trump TV talk show, ABC’s The View. Earlier this week, Vance sat down with the co-hosts of The View, Joyce Behar, Whoopie Goldberg, Sunny Hostin, Sara Haines, Alyssa Fara Griffin and Ana Navarro, ostensibly to promote his new book, Communion touted as a return-to-faith work. The show is designed to be confrontational, and this, in that sense, was a typical interview. But unlike Trump’s appearances on even mildly opposition shows, in which he always ends up insulting the interviewer, calls their media fake news, stomps on mics and storms off the set, this one was completely civil. It was like a civilized debate in which the two sides agree to disagree but continue to discuss the issues anyway in a calm and collected fashion.

He did particularly well in separating his stance on the Epstein files from that of the Bondi and Blanche DOJ, which has done everything it could to cover the Epstein affair up. Vance’s response to this was to say more or less, “don’t believe everything you read in the paper,” but at the same time confirming that he wanted the files out there in full and in compliance with the law. He managed to elevate his figure above the fray, while still protecting his boss by pointing out that the Epstein transparency legislation was signed into law by Trump and that “Trump threw Epstein out” of Mar-a-Lago, and “reported him to the police,” for “being a creep.”

Navarro calls out Vance on Epstein

Ana Navarro pushed back saying the breakup between Trump and Epstein was over real estate, not pedophilia, but Vance insisted that the media always forgot that Trump reported Epstein to the police. When another host tried to interject something, he calmly said, “Wait, Ana made an important point and I’d like to answer it,”  thus defusing what could have turned into a he-said-she-said confrontation.

The tensest moment was when Whoopie Goldberg and Sunny Hostin double-teamed Vance, asking him to explain where black people fit into his administration’s vision for America. They grilled him over Trump’s systematic erasure of black history and black heroes, and Whoopie sought to get under his skin by reminding him that he should have a better understanding of what people of color go through in the US since he had “people of color in your family,” clearly referring to the VP’s East Indian wife, Usha, and their children. Vance danced around these questions, pretending he wasn’t sure what they were referring to, which obviously didn’t fly, but managing to make it through that segment without demonstrating anger or an open unwillingness to respond.

"You have people of color in your family."

It was clearly his weakest moment, but he kept it civil. At no point was he rude or short-tempered. Throughout, he fielded questions with relative calm, if not always believable responses. He also eschewed Trump’s mindless triumphalism and made it clear that there were a lot of campaign promises that the Trump camp had made and had so far failed to produce, but “we’re working on it.” The overall good interview in clearly hostile territory was sure to contrast Vance as a “rational, tolerant figure,” perhaps even “the adult in the room,” compared with Trump’s consistently irate, prevaricating and scandalous public appearances.

In short, The View provided Vance with a golden opportunity to present himself as independently electable, as seeking to normalize his image with moderates, and as atypically willing and able to engage with Americans beyond the MAGA media ecosystem.

Vance and family in India

This appearance was, in short, a major move in Vance’s personal brand construction. At the same time, he has subtly opened the door to a possible run for the presidency once the midterm elections are over.  Indeed, according to Forbes Magazine reporting, Vance has explicitly said, “I’ve thought about what that moment might look like after the midterm elections.”

Why does this matter? It matters because, once a vice-president begins planning a presidential campaign, his or her political incentives change. It means that JD Vance’s political interests no longer mesh perfectly with those of Donald Trump.

And as if a studied opportunist like Vance needed it, he has the example of Kamala Harris to refer to. Harris came very close to matching Trump in the popular vote in the 2024 presidential race, but not close enough to win. Among other reasons—and racist and misogynist considerations aside—as an incumbent VP, Harris remained loyal to her boss and friend, President Joe Biden, to the bitter end. It was an ethically laudable stance, but it was political suicide, since her campaign failed to make it clear that she was Kamala Harris, not Joe Biden, and that she had a separate set of ideas and ambitions that had nothing to do with the administration she currently represented. This led much of the all-important independent vote to see her as “just more-of-the-same,” and thus to vote for Trump.

Now the situation is the same for Vance. Trump has become toxic and is highly unpopular, particularly among independents that gravitated away from Harris and toward him in 2024. Even many Republicans who have stood by Trump up to now are having their doubts because they realize how badly Trump’s regime is hurting people like them.

An indication of the climate Vance is living in was provided earlier this week by the ultra-conservative National Review, the famous publication founded in 1955 by the late conservative icon William F. Buckley Jr.  Conservative anger was encapsulated in an editorial headline in the Review that read, The Trump Administration Thinks We’re Imbeciles.  Carrying Andrew McCarthy’s byline, the piece was a scathing attack on Trump’s so-called Memorandum of Understanding with Iran to end a war Trump himself started and to open the Strait of Hormuz which was never closed before Trump began bombing Iran.

This is a major issue that Vance must be considering in his effort to de-align himself from Trump, since he must ask himself: Which Trump controversies could damage me? Which policies are or might become unpopular? And, more complex and more important still, how do I inherit the movement without inheriting all the Trump baggage?

Trump too is apparently seeing the writing on the wall in his relationship with Vance. As early as February of 2025, Trump publicly stated he did not necessarily view Vance as his successor. This was politically significant, since it made it clear to Vance from the outset that even if he swore loyalty and had Trump’s back, the president didn’t have his. Indeed, the president’s pick to succeed him could very well be someone like Don Jr., or some other more sycophantic choice who might allow Trump to still have a hand in setting policies of personal convenience.

Once Vance understood that Trump was unwilling to guarantee him succession, the rationale behind the VP’s political strategy (as an attentive student of Peter Thiel’s tactics) was sure to change. Why should Vance remain completely tied to Trump if Trump could well abandon him?

The Washington Post as early as April of this year said that Vance was, “Praising Trump while subtly differentiating himself.” And Bloomberg Government posited in a headline that, “Vance searches for fine line between (his) current role and (his) ambitions.”

The idea of a “fine line” reflects the balancing act Vance is currently performing in remaining loyal enough to retain MAGA support, but separating himself enough to politically survive a post-Trump future.

Donald Trump is eighty, and—at least according to the Constitution—cannot have another run, even if he were in condition to accept one, which he isn’t, since this is his second term.

But JD Vance is only half his boss’s age, and, at least in his mind, his political career is just beginning. Vance, then, apparently understands what many other vice-presidents with political ambitions before him have understood. Namely, that when a presidency begins to display a high level of toxicity, the only way to survive politically is to distance yourself from it. 

The evidence strongly suggests that Vance has foreseen the future, and knows that Trump is becoming more of a liability than an asset. The trick for Vance, then, is the one Kamala Harris’s ethical stricture forced her to ignore.That’s not a problem for an opportunist like Vance and he is already engaging in the long and incrementally gradual process of ensuring that when history judges the Era of Trump, it won’t judge the VP as inseparable from Trump’s enormous failures.

 

TRUMP FINALLY HANDED IN HIS HOMEWORK…HE FLUNKED

The ill-advised military action against Iran, which turned into a hundred-day shooting war, was both started and ended by Donald Trump. He didn’t care how it started, and he obviously didn’t care how it ended.

It was a war that never should have happened. It did not have congressional approval. In fact, Congress was never consulted. Trump simply went to war, like he has done everything else in this Trump 2.0 version of his regime, because he felt like it. And in doing so, he dragged both the United States and the world into its consequences un-consulted.

Trump’s war began with war crimes and ended in surrender. Not the surrender of Iran, but the surrender of Donald Trump. However laden with Trump’s fingerprints this disaster might be, however, he, unfortunately, represents the United States as the country’s head of State. And so, Donald Trump has handed his defeat and capitulation to us, the American people and our representatives. And thanks to his hijacked GOP’s acquiescence and complicity, the defeat is ours to bear. And the shame of it in the world rests on our reluctant shoulders.   

In 2016, on taking office the first time, Trump vowed that he would tear up the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the Iran nuclear deal that the Obama administration before him had so painstakingly negotiated along with five other nations including three allies and two rivals: Germany, France, the United Kingdom, China and Russia, as well as the European Union. It was, then, a deal that had the signed consensus of the most powerful nations on earth.

Just as he had promised and eventually achieved the destruction of the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obama Care, that had brought health insurance to millions of Americans who had never had it before, Trump did, in 2018, effectively tear up the JCPOA. Trump and his sycophantic MAGA-led GOP didn’t do either of these things because they were bad deals—although that was the excuse. They did it, to the cheers of their white-supremacist supporters simply because these were major achievements of the administration of the first non-white president in the history of the United States.

In both cases, Trump promised that he would replace the ACA and the JCPOA with something much better and stronger. In neither case has this promise—like so many other Trump promises—come true. Like the wanton—and also un-consulted—destruction of the historic East Wing of the White House, which Trump also ordered, all that remained where something good had stood before, was rubble. It was, in short, a unilateral pissing contest in which Obama refused to participate. Instead, the former president has sat back and watched as Trump keeps urinating on democracy and diplomacy while digging himself into a deeper and deeper hole.

The 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) stands as one of the most significant diplomatic achievements of the twenty-first century because it accomplished something exceedingly rare in modern geopolitics: It peacefully neutralized a major nuclear proliferation crisis through multilateral diplomacy, verifiable enforcement mechanisms, and international consensus, without firing a shot. By contrast, the newly revealed 2026 Iran Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) negotiated under the administration of Donald Trump amounts to an extraordinary strategic retreat that delivers Iran major concessions while extracting virtually nothing that was not already achieved more effectively more than a decade earlier. In effect, it is not a diplomatic victory for the United States, but capitulation dressed as negotiation through military might.

In this sense, the JCPOA and MOU could not be more contrary in their effects and substance. While it should be pointed out that the MOU is basically a negotiation to negotiate, it will be impossible for the US under the Trump regime to achieve a better deal than the JCPOA—unless  Trump manages to get Iran to sign a carbon copy of the deal he tore up nearly a decade ago. It is, indeed, thanks to that willful and malicious action on Trump’s part that we are where we are today, since the JCPOA was working, and working well. All Trump had to do was leave it alone, or, appeal to proper diplomacy—with regional experts, attorneys, career diplomats and the secretary of state doing the negotiating, rather than Trump’s son-in-law and some real estate guy—to seek even better terms. Instead, as is his “solution” for everything, he bulldozed it.

The JCPOA succeeded because it imposed the most intrusive nuclear verification regime ever negotiated with a non-nuclear state. Iran agreed to reduce its stockpile of enriched uranium by 97percent—and only started enriching beyond the limits of the Obama agreement again after Trump pulled the US out of the pact—to slash operating centrifuges by roughly two-thirds, to cap enrichment levels at 3.67 percent, to redesign the Arak reactor to prevent plutonium production, and to submit to continuous monitoring by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). The agreement extended Iran’s estimated “breakout time”—the time needed to produce enough fissile material for a nuclear weapon—from only a few months to roughly one year. Independent fact-checking organizations note that these provisions were functioning and compliance was repeatedly verified before US withdrawal.

Former Secretary of State John Kerry

This was diplomacy operating at its highest level. The agreement was not a bilateral improvisation like the MOU. It required coordination between the United States, Iran, Britain, France, Germany, Russia, China, and the European Union. At a moment of escalating regional hostility, the Obama administration, with Secretary of State John Kerry at the head of the negotiating team, demonstrated that adversaries with fundamentally opposing ideological systems could still reach enforceable agreements serving mutual security interests. Few, if any, diplomatic achievements this century can claim a similar level of complexity or effectiveness.

Then came Trump’s unilateral withdrawal in 2018. The stated rationale was that the JCPOA was “the worst deal ever negotiated.” Critics argued it failed to address Iran’s ballistic missile program, regional proxy activity, and contained sunset clauses. But history has rendered a harsh verdict on that decision: Abandoning the deal produced none of the promised strategic gains. Instead, Iran gradually ceased compliance, expanded uranium enrichment dramatically, deployed advanced centrifuges, restricted inspections, and moved materially closer to nuclear threshold status. Even critics of the original agreement now acknowledge that, however imperfect, the JCPOA “bought time” and successfully constrained Iran’s nuclear capabilities. Backing out of the deal gave Iran an inducement to expand its nuclear program because of the hostility emanating from Washington under the Trump regime.

The irony is profound: After spending years denouncing the JCPOA as weakness, Trump has now negotiated a memorandum that is dramatically weaker than the one he destroyed. The newly proposed  MOU commits the United States to lifting sanctions, unfreezing Iranian assets (a hundred times more assets than those freed up by the Obama administration, which, at the time, drew shouts of indignation from the GOP), easing restrictions on oil exports, reducing military pressure in the Persian Gulf, and—the cruelest cut of all for Americans—providing the bloody dictatorial regime in Iran with reconstruction funding estimated at nearly three hundred billion dollars. One conservative pundit described this last as akin to “giving the Marshall Plan to Germany while the Nazis were still in power,” which is spot-on accurate more than hyperbole.   

In exchange, Iran merely reiterates, as it had already agreed in the JCPOA, that it will not pursue the creation or acquisition of nuclear weapons, and that it agrees to enter into a vague sixty-day negotiation framework for future talks. Critically, the agreement contains no durable new enforcement architecture—Trump says it isn’t necessary—leaves missile programs untouched, leaves proxy militias active, and fails to substantially dismantle Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. In other words, core strategic issues remain entirely unresolved.

The central contradiction is that Donald Trump, on a personal whim, withdrew from a functioning agreement that imposed concrete, measurable, internationally verified restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program, only to re-enter negotiations eight years later offering broader concessions for weaker commitments. In strategic terms, Trump destroyed the leverage the United States once possessed, and he now appears willing to pay enormous economic and diplomatic costs simply to restore a lesser version of the status quo.

Worse still, this substantially strengthens Iran’s radical, repressive, Islamist regime itself. Think tank analysts this week warned that the draft MOU leaves Tehran in a “stronger strategic position.” To say nothing of the fact that it flies in the face of Trump’s broken promise to liberate the Iranian people through democratic regime change. Economic relief—the lifting of sanctions, the enormous injection of formerly frozen assets, and a three hundred billion-dollar reconstruction bailout—will enable the hostile Iranian regime to stabilize its domestic economy, replenish State revenues, and potentially redirect resources toward the very regional networks Washington has long opposed, including Hezbollah and broader “Axis of Resistance” alliances. Rather than weakening Iran’s regional influence, the agreement risks financing its resurgence, in detriment to US regional allies.

From a Middle East power-balance perspective, this weakens US credibility dramatically throughout the region. America’s Gulf partners are confronted with an uncomfortable reality: Washington abandoned a strong agreement for ideological reasons, pursued years of coercive pressure that failed, and, after basically losing Trump’s war, ultimately returned to negotiations from a far weaker bargaining position while granting greater concessions.

The broader lesson of all this is unmistakable. The JCPOA demonstrated disciplined statecraft: multilateral cooperation, rigorous verification, and peaceful conflict management producing measurable security gains. Trump’s MOU demonstrates the opposite, destroying a working framework, squandering leverage through maximalist rhetoric, and then settling for substantially worse terms while irrationally proclaiming “victory”.

In the end, history will not only judge the JCPOA as a highly successful nuclear agreement, but also as a case study for how diplomacy can solve problems that war cannot. Meanwhile, it will judge Trump’s MOU as proof that ideological grandstanding, delusional thinking and a might-makes-right foreign policy can destroy strategic advantage. It also shows that the neighborhood bully’s loud-mouthed promises of “strength” by brute force nearly always end in whimpering surrender.