JD Vance seeks redemption in Iran after a week of internal crisis with MAGA, religious dilemmas and political failures

Instead, he found a stadium three-quarters empty — fewer than 2,000 people in an 8,000-seat venue — boos from the stands and protesters shouting “Jesus Christ does not support genocide” as he tried to explain his view of the Iran war.

The Turning Point USA event, which should have served as a balm for a more than difficult week, turned into something close to a public humiliation. The symptom of something more serious.

Vance was left alone on stage because Erika Kirkwidow of Charlie Kirk and current president of the organization, canceled her presence hours before due to “serious threats.”

The vice president had to improvise a defense of the war that not even he himself seems to fully believe.

Vance is the politician who has most privately opposed intervention in Iran and has been warning Trump for months of the danger of ending up in “an endless military conflict.”

Now, he has to sell a war that fails before a hostile public and at a time when his own political credibility is on the floor.

When someone from the audience asked him directly why they were “killing children,” Vance responded with data on humanitarian aid that no one asked for.

The contrast with his previous appearances at Turning Point could not be more brutal: in October 2025, at the University of Mississippi, just a month after Kirk’s death, he promised that Trump “did not want to get into a war of regime change.”

Six months later, the war is here and Vance is forced to defend what he swore would never happen.

And the fractures within the MAGA movement have become evident in recent weeks: Trump has been attacking Truth Social for days Tucker Carlson y Alex Jonestwo of the communicators who most helped him come to power, precisely because of their growing opposition to the war in Iran.

Carlson has gone so far as to say that “it’s all Israel’s fault,” while Jones openly accuses the Administration of having been “hijacked by the neocons.” It’s more than likely that Vance thinks exactly the same thing… but obviously he can’t say it in public.

Between loyalty to Trump and loyalty to the Pope

As if that were not enough, Vance’s faith has become an unexpected political problem in recent days.

The vice president converted to Catholicism in 2019, at the age of 35, and has announced the publication of Communion: How I found my way back to faitha 304-page book about his religious experience that he has been writing for seven years.

Now, the open confrontation between Trump and the Pope Leo XIV The Iran war has placed Vance in an impossible situation: choosing between his political leader and his spiritual leader.

Trump has been attacking the Pope for weeks, calling him “terrible in foreign policy” and “very weak in security”, while Leo XIV continues to call for an end to the war and has even said that “God does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war.”

At the Georgia event, Vance attempted an impossible balancing act: “I like that the Pope advocates peace, but… how can you say that God is never on the side of those who wield the sword?”

The underlying problem is that Vance is Catholic in a movement that is mostly evangelical and that views any authority other than Trump’s with suspicion.

Catholics represent just 20% of the Republican electorate, compared to 40% of evangelicals, and the relationship between both traditions within the party has never been easy. That the vice president publishes a book about his religious conversion just when Trump is attacking the Pope is, at the very least, a timing problem.

Vance has attempted to qualify his positions—on Monday he said in Fox News that “it would be better for the Vatican to limit itself to moral issues and let the president dictate American policy”—but each statement distances him further from his coreligionists and brings him closer to a position that satisfies no one.

The discomfort even extends to his private life: several conservative media outlets have criticized that his wife Usha—of Indian origin—”is not sufficiently supporting” her husband’s positions.

Usha Vance is pregnant with her fourth child—a boy due in July—and has started a podcast called Stories with the Second Lady to promote reading among children.

The weight of Orbán’s defeat

On an international level, the defeat of Viktor Orbán Last Sunday also dealt a blow to the credibility of the vice president, who had traveled to Budapest in the previous days to campaign for the Hungarian prime minister.

Vance called on Hungarian voters to “defend Western civilization” and vote for Orbán because he “represents sovereignty and democracy.”

The result could not be more categorical: Péter HungarianOrbán’s pro-European rival, won two-thirds of the parliamentary seats. Vance’s personal bid for Orbán—which included a speech at Budapest’s MTK Sportpark stadium and a loudspeaker call from Trump—turned into a fiasco.

Vance’s strategy of building an international network of populist leaders is falling apart piece by piece. The vision of an alliance of “Christian democracies” defending “Western civilization” is being revealed as a chimera.

Orbán was the key piece of that strategy, the most experienced leader and the most ideologically committed to “Trumpism.”

The “conservative revolution” that was supposed to spread from Budapest to Washington has run into an unexpected obstacle: European voters, including conservatives, do not seem to want the authoritarian model that Orbán represented.

Vance’s message in Budapest—”are you going to defend sovereignty and democracy?”—rang hollow to an electorate that considered Orbán to have eroded both.

From an internal point of view, the electoral result is also a problem for Trump’s image: it suggests that the far-right populist model has limits and that the electorate can punish those who stray too far from democratic norms.

Redemption in Islamabad

All in all, this series of defeats could be forgotten if Vance achieves the only thing that can save his political career right now: peace with Iran.

The vice president returned from Islamabad on Sunday without an agreement after 21 hours of negotiations, but talks continue and Administration sources consulted by Axios They assure that there is “progress” towards an agreement framework.

For Vance, closing an agreement would be a personal and political demand of the first order. It would allow him to say that he was right from the beginning and that the diplomatic route works better than the military route.

The terms on the table are not simple. The United States demands that Iran destroy all of its enriched uranium—some 400 kilograms of high-grade material buried in underground laboratories—and accept a 20-year moratorium on its nuclear program.

Iran offers five years and wants security guarantees and war reparations. The difference is enormous, but the US vice president believes there is room for agreement.

“The people we sat down with wanted to come to an agreement,” he said Tuesday at the Georgia event. “I think there’s good faith on their part.”

The problem is time. The legislative elections are seven months away, gasoline prices remain high due to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, and Trump’s patience with diplomacy has known limits.

The president blocked all Iranian ports on Monday and insists he holds “all the cards.”

Vance knows that if there is no deal soon, Trump will opt for a military escalation that could be devastating.

He also knows that if he fails as a negotiator after having failed as a builder of international alliances and as a media figure, his political future will be greatly damaged.

Peace with Iran is not just a matter of foreign policy: for Vance, it is the last chance to demonstrate that it serves more than just justifying decisions he never wanted to make. An opportunity that runs out with every day that passes without news from Tehran or Islamabad.