‘We don’t need a deal’: Trump yanks JD Vance off Iran war talks

Detailed summary

After reports Vance was considering new direct negotiations with a senior Iranian official, the president has decided that time would be better spent fighting another battle – against the Democrats.

Washington: US President Donald Trump directed Vice President JD Vance to shift his focus away from the Iran war and instead devote himself to fighting what the president says is corruption and crime in Democrat-controlled cities and states.

Vance, who served as the lead negotiator for a short-lived truce in the eight-month war, has been blunt in blaming the war — and the economic reverberations it has caused — for Republicans’ sweeping losses in last week’s midterm elections in the US.

But Trump brusquely told the vice president in a social media post on Thursday to shift his energies away from the Iran war to what he argues is a more pressing — and perhaps more politically salient — issue after Republicans were trounced at the polls.

“We don’t need a deal with Iran,” Trump said in the post. “Those days have long since passed. We’ve got their money, Hundreds of Billions of Dollars, and we’ve got their Strait!”

Trump this week said that he believed the war “militarily is effectively over”, and appeared to double down on that message by pointedly directing Vance “to focus his complete and total attention” on his anti-fraud campaign.

Democrats have promised intense oversight of Trump’s business dealings and other targets when they take control of Congress in January after voters identified corruption as one of their top concerns. Trump’s post about Vance and the Iran war was, in part, responding to a flurry of reports about Democrats’ plans.

But it also came after The Wall Street Journal reported that Vance was weighing engaging in a new round of direct talks with a senior Iranian official.

The vice president’s office did not respond to a request for comment. The White House press office responded to a query by highlighting that Trump made clear in his post that he sees no need to negotiate with Iran.

Vance, who had long advocated for restraint in US military interventions overseas, was lukewarm in his defence of the conflict after Trump launched it and became the face of an…

Opening of the article, excerpted from The Sydney Morning Herald. To read the rest, open the article on the publisher's site.