Trump and top official 'trapped in dead ends of their own humiliating creation'

“As the world endures the economic nightmare sparked by Trump’s war,” writes Simon Marks of the i Paper, “watching his flailing efforts to identify an exit strategy is like watching Groundhog Day.”

Part of that involves President Donald Trump’s social media posts, as every day seems to bring a new round of his raging online attempts at extracting concessions from Iran while “re-posting memes about his own personal greatness.” At the same time, says Marks, Trump has also placed his Vice President JD Vance into a cycle of humiliation, where each morning the country’s second in command wakes up to a new embarrassment.

“Vice President JD Vance,” writes Marks, “in his second full year a heartbeat away from the presidency, surely knows his own aspirations to sit behind the Resolute Desk are evaporating with each passing day. Just a month ago, Vance was in the catbird seat, leading a delegation at peace talks with the Iranians in Islamabad and hoping to bring home a piece of paper that would prove more resilient than the document Neville Chamberlain brandished after his September 1938 talks with Hitler in Munich. In the event, Vance returned with nothing. “

More humiliation was to come, “as he spent days in Washington standing by for the chance to return to Pakistan for subsequent talks, while Tehran toyed with him like a cat with a mouse. One month on, Vance — who assured the ‘Make America Great Again’ faithful that Trump would never lead the country to war against Iran, arguing that it would be ‘massively expensive’ and ‘a huge distraction of resources’ — is completely unable to capitalize on his 2024 campaign trail prescience.”

This has many of his own followers accusing him of betraying “America First” principles, and “worse still, Trump no longer even pretends that Vance is a central player in the Iran drama. Negotiations appear once again to be the preserve of Special Envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, the president’s wealthy real estate mucker and his son-in-law respectively.”

And then there was Vance's recent trip to Hungary to back now-former Prime Minister Viktor Orban, which resulted in a high-profile failure that seemed to presage the very doom of MAGA. It also sent Vance tumbling in favorability polls, even among his key voting blocs.

Marks asserts that none of this bodes well for Vance’s or Trump’s political future.

“Both men are now trapped in dead ends of their own humiliating creation,” concludes Vance. “For Trump, there is no way out of the Iran conundrum unless he bows to at least some of Tehran’s demands. For Vance, there is no path to succeed Trump unless the Iran crisis abates and other events create rapid opportunities for him to exploit. Bound together, Trump and Vance are two sides of the same increasingly tarnished coin.”

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