Replace Vance With Kamala And Read It Again

President Trump’s America First is about America being strong at home and abroad.

President Trump remains America First. He spent his weekend warning Iran not to screw with the United States or our allies, or there would be consequences. Secretary of State Marco Rubio spent his weekend working the phones to help destroy the Iranian proxy Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Meanwhile, Vice President JD Vance spent the weekend looking weak in front of the Qataris, the Pakistanis, and most of all, the Iranians. I’ve never seen a weaker look from a Republican politician. It is not peace through strength. It is war through weakness.

Get the amateurs back on the bench and the professionals back in the game.

President Trump spent the weekend trying to reestablish U.S. deterrence: “Peace through strength,” which he’s been pushing for literally decades. Rubio spent the weekend trying to end the Iranian proxy group Hezbollah over in Lebanon, because that’s part of peace through strength.

I want the war in Iran to end. I’ve said for months that it is not worth waging war if you don’t win it. The ends were spelled out by the administration from the outset: No nuclear enrichment, no ballistic missiles, no support of terrorism, and the Strait of Hormuz open.

Those were the goals. Those are still the goals. Even if we pretend those are not the goals, those are still the goals.

The administration wants oil prices to go down because of the economic impact of high prices heading into the midterms. The only way to keep the Strait of Hormuz durably open is through strength, because otherwise the Iranians will jerk us around, as they have been doing for 50 years.

Over the weekend, President Trump appeared to know that.

Vance, not so much.

For America’s sake, I would love for the vice president to do well abroad. I would love the whole administration to do well. I would love every administration and every politician in every administration to do well by representing American power with peace through strength.

But the lack of American strength in the room in Switzerland over the weekend was devastating. When America has the most dominant military on the entire globe, there is simply no excuse for American weakness.

Over the weekend, the president became highly annoyed with the Iranians. Why? Because they keep threatening to shut the Strait of Hormuz, and because they keep activating their friends in the terrorist group Hezbollah to attack Israeli troops.

As I have said, the goal for Iran — sensing weakness in the United States — is to ratchet up conflict in Lebanon by activating its terror group, Hezbollah, to attack the Israelis in the hope that the Israelis would then retaliate. And then Iran would say they’re shutting the Strait of Hormuz, and it’s all the Israelis’ fault. They would hope that President Trump would then yell at the Israelis.

That’s a win-win for the Iranians, because either they end up with Israel taking casualties in Lebanon and in Israel, or they end up with the administration pressuring the Israelis, the Israelis refusing, and then alienation between the United States and Israel, which is what Iran wants. That is the entire game for them.

It’s not a complex game. It’s a very simple game. But the president had had enough of it over the weekend. On Sunday, according to Fox News, President Trump said in an interview that he had spoken with Iranian officials on Saturday night and warned them not to close the strait. “You close it and you won’t have a country,” he warned. “You won’t even make it back to your f*cking country if you close the Strait.”

The president wrote on Truth Social, “Iran must immediately stop their highly paid proxies in Lebanon from causing trouble. If they don’t, we’ll hit Iran very hard again, just like we did last week, only harder.”

This is a Trumpian foreign policy. If you screw with us, if you screw with our allies, you get hit. If you interfere with American interests in the Strait of Hormuz, you get hit. We’re not going to just hand you things.

Marco Rubio has been very quiet. I think he’s been quiet about the memorandum of understanding because it is poorly written and because the vice president did a bad job of negotiating it. Rubio is actively managing the situation in Lebanon, attempting to put together a coalition against Hezbollah between Israel and the Lebanese, while not including Syria. Rubio is a pro.

But there is one member of the administration who did something that was pretty humiliating for the United States over the weekend. And that was the vice president.

Quick hypothetical coming up in a moment.

Let me be clear: I don’t care about the names in these situations. I just care about the policy. I want America to be strong. I want America to show greater interest in the Middle East. I want an open Strait of Hormuz. I want Iran defenestrated as an actual military threat to the United States.

So I don’t care who the person is who’s doing the dumb thing. If they’re doing a dumb thing, they should be called out for doing a dumb and weak thing.

Here’s the hypothetical: I’m just going to switch the names. Vice President Kamala Harris heads over to Switzerland for negotiations with Iran. There, she says that she loves Pakistan.

She then takes a picture, being given orders by an Iranian cutout. Then she emerges from negotiations with a deconfliction agreement that actually doesn’t de-escalate anything and doesn’t include any of the parties to the actual conflict.

But hey, at least she also got stiffed on camera by a bunch of foreign politicians.

Okay, so that didn’t happen to Kamala Harris. (Although it wouldn’t be surprising if it did.)

It did happen, but to Vice President JD Vance, which makes it like a thousand times worse. Why? Because it would not be surprising if Kamala Harris were weak. It would not be surprising if Kamala Harris looked as though she were being given the runaround by America’s enemies.

But I would not expect this from Donald Trump’s vice president.

You would also expect this kind of weakness from Democrats desperate to avoid any sort of conflict with the Iranians. But we just spent months destroying Iran’s air force, navy, ballistic missile facilities, nuclear facilities, and army.

This is like going to a meeting with the Japanese and bowing before them between Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We already clocked the hell out of them. What are we doing here?

Vance spent the weekend getting dunked on.

First of all, the Iranian delegation refused a joint photo with the United States team. We should have refused a joint photo with them. They are murderers. But it was the United States that apparently wanted a joint photo.

Normally, when it comes to protocol, the people who want it more show up early. The people who are the big dogs show up late. The United States was there waiting around. The vice president was waiting around for the Iranians to show up, and they stiffed him on a photo op.

And then they showed up late.

The negotiators from Qatar walked right by Vance, but they greeted their Pakistani friends.

It got worse. Qatar is a cutout for Iran and works hand-in-glove with it; they share oil fields with Iran. Thus, they feel indebted to the Iranians and are constantly doing their work. That is the reason why Hamas was stationed in Qatar for literally a decade.

Qatar is one party. Pakistan is another party, an Islamist state with nuclear weapons, allied with the Chinese government. You had a Chinese cutout, an Iranian cutout, and the Iranians there, and the vice president holding a press conference in which he bragged about how Pakistan was awesome.

If the Democrats had done this, there would be screaming. Not a single word Vance said for the entire weekend would have been foreign coming out of the mouth of Barack Obama.

Peace through strength is what President Trump stands for.

And he didn’t get it.