U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance on Wednesday offered an extraordinarily frank assessment of why he believes Republicans got clobbered in the 2026 midterm elections. He blamed the Iran war.

“The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night,” Vance said on X.

“If you’d like to argue it was worth it, that losing the Senate for the next 6 years was worth it, then do so. Argue it was a worthwhile cost to pay. Agree or disagree, that’s at least honest,” Vance added. “But everyone knows why we lost. And any honest conversation about where we go from here must start there.”

It’s not often that a sitting vice president comes out so forcefully against a defining policy decision made by his boss—especially when that boss is as notorious for punishing perceived disloyalty as U.S. President Donald Trump is.

But Vance, who is widely expected to be interested in running for president in 2028, appears to have calculated that the political cost of continuing to defend the Iran war outweighs the potential risk of drawing Trump’s ire.

In the lead-up to elections, polling consistently showed that the Iran war was unpopular among voters and that the cost of living was their top concern.

As Vance noted, Trump himself has acknowledged that the Iran war was a “piece” of what contributed to the historic defeat. But the president remains unapologetic about starting the war.

“I did the right thing. I would have done it again,” Trump told the Wall Street Journal.

Trump also blamed the quality of Republican candidates on the ballot, stating that some could’ve been “better.” In a separate interview with Fox News, Trump acknowledged voter discontentment over the war’s economic consequences, including high gas prices, but suggested the pain at the pump was worth it in the long run.

“People agree with what I’m doing on Iran, but they really, probably weren’t willing to do the short-term consequence of paying more for gasoline,” Trump said. “And, you know, I understand that. I don’t agree with it, and I would say to people, you know, ‘It’s a short-term problem but for long-term gain.’”

But Trump and Vance have never done a particularly good job of selling the Iran war to the American people. Since the very beginning, the administration has presented muddled and often contradictory explanations for why the United States needed to launch a full-scale war on Iran in February.

Even in his final speech on the eve of the election, Trump undermined the war’s main justification by saying that Iran’s nuclear program had already been destroyed by U.S. military action last summer.

“I hope people realize that when they go into the voting booth, because we had to stop Iran from having a nuclear weapon. If, if we allowed Iran to have a nuclear weapon, this country could never function the same way. The whole world would be a different place, so we’ve stopped that. We stopped that a year ago with those beautiful B-2 bombers, which hit every single mark, and just put hundreds of tons of rock on top of everything,” Trump said.

Vance is believed to have strongly opposed the war behind closed doors; yet he outwardly maintained support for it. It seems that American voters’ unequivocal rejection of the war has convinced him that he no longer has to pretend.