At a closed-door Easter luncheon at the White House, President Trump decided to entertain the crowd by humiliating his understudy.<\/p>\n
Mr. Trump demanded an update on Iran peace negotiations from Vice President JD Vance. \u201cHow\u2019s that moving?\u201d Mr. Trump asked, in a video of the event the White House seemed to have accidentally posted online<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s going good, sir,\u201d Mr. Vance replied from the audience. Mr. Trump cut off the rest of his response.<\/p>\n \u201cDo you see it happening?\u201d the president asked, about a successful end to the war.<\/p>\n \u201cUh,\u201d the vice president replied, \u201cwe\u2019re going to brief it to you.\u201d<\/p>\n Then Mr. Trump delivered his punchline. \u201cSo, if it doesn\u2019t happen, I\u2019m blaming JD Vance,\u201d he said, to laughter. \u201cIf it does happen, I\u2019m taking full credit.\u201d<\/p>\n Does Mr. Vance still not realize that the joke is on him? The interesting thing is not that he keeps debasing himself but that he gets less and less in return each time. As his political fortunes dim, his soul has become a depreciating asset.<\/p>\n Over and over in recent years, Mr. Vance struck devil\u2019s bargains, first to gain a Senate seat and then to become Mr. Trump\u2019s No. 2. He embraced the anti-immigrant stances he once called \u201creprehensible\u201d and other dark elements of the MAGA movement in hopes of positioning himself as its next leader. <\/p>\n What once might have been a cruise to the 2028 Republican presidential nomination now looks more like a run through the Strait of Hormuz. Mr. Vance is experiencing a version of the pain experienced by other ambitious Republicans who embraced Mr. Trump only to see themselves used and (eventually) discarded by him.<\/p>\n The ethnonationalist right to which Mr. Vance tethered himself now appears to be faltering at home and abroad. The Iran war has exposed a rift in the MAGA movement, alienating those who believed Mr. Trump\u2019s \u201cI\u2019m not going to start a war\u201d promise \u2014 and then watched the \u201cAmerica first\u201d president bomb Yemen, Somalia, Syria, Nigeria, Iraq and Venezuela while threatening Cuba and Greenland.<\/p>\n Mr. Vance had turned himself into a leading \u201cAmerica first\u201d voice \u2014 he said in 2024 that war in Iran is \u201cvery much\u201d against the national interest. Then Mr. Trump saddled him with the war.<\/p>\n Polling shows that Mr. Vance\u2019s standing in public esteem is about as low as his boss\u2019s, now the worst of his term. The vice president\u2019s status as Mr. Trump\u2019s heir in the MAGA movement is slipping, as measured by last month\u2019s straw poll at the Conservative Political Action Conference. Secretary of State Marco Rubio surged to 35 percent from 3 percent last year, while Mr. Vance, though still leading, retreated to 53 percent from last year\u2019s 61 percent.<\/p>\n So Mr. Vance is responding as he always has whenever ambition calls: He\u2019s humiliating himself.<\/p>\n The vice president is scheduled to go to Hungary on Tuesday to campaign for the country\u2019s authoritarian leader, Viktor Orban, a Kremlin-allied white nationalist who proclaims that Europeans \u201cdo not want to become peoples of mixed race.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s not clear how much Mr. Orban would benefit from the visit. After 16 years in power, his party is trailing in polls, despite Mr. Trump\u2019s \u201ccomplete and total endorsement\u201d in next Sunday\u2019s vote, a February visit from Mr. Rubio and a reported proposal from Russia to bolster Mr. Orban by staging a fake assassination attempt<\/a>.<\/p>\n Mr. Vance may hope that the visit will distract from his Iran problem and lift his flagging fortunes in the MAGA movement. Trump supporters lionize Mr. Orban, whose party rewrote Hungary\u2019s Constitution to create an \u201cilliberal democracy\u201d and constantly feuds with the European Union over his anti-immigrant policies.<\/p>\n For an ordinary democratic leader, stumping for Mr. Orban would require a certain amount of nose holding. But Mr. Vance is no ordinary democratic leader.<\/p>\n He is vice president to a man he once referred to as \u201ccultural heroin\u201d and feared could be \u201cAmerica\u2019s Hitler.\u201d He\u2019s transitioned from public intellectual to social-media troll, using profanity to attack critics and accurate news reporting.<\/p>\n He has more than once dismissed criticism of fellow Republicans caught engaging in racist rants that included bigotry against Indians \u2014 even though his wife and children are of Indian descent. He has fueled conspiracy theories, most notably with his claim that people in his home state, Ohio, \u201chave had their pets abducted and eaten\u201d by Haitian immigrants.<\/p>\n For all his moral flexibility, though, there\u2019s probably nothing Mr. Vance can say to make Hungarians feel better. Their economy has been stagnating as Mr. Orban\u2019s family and friends have become rich.<\/p>\n Whether Mr. Orban wins or loses, his authoritarianism seems to have run its course and led Hungary to a bad place. Other right-wing nationalists suffered recent setbacks at the polls in France and, last year, in the Netherlands. Far-right parties in Germany and elsewhere have begun distancing themselves from Mr. Trump over a war that has made the president even more disliked among American voters.<\/p>\n