Vance says he was ‘less enthusiastic’ about striking Iran than Trump

Vice President J.D. Vance defended the administration’s decision to strike Iran, denied that Israel was driving it, and acknowledged the Trump administration “mishandled” the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files during a nearly three-hour appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast released Wednesday.

It was Mr. Vance’s second appearance on “The Joe Rogan Experience,” after a similarly long conversation a week before the 2024 election, when he was still a senator from Ohio and Donald Trump’s running mate. Mr. Rogan, who endorsed Mr. Trump in 2024, has grown increasingly critical of the administration, particularly over the Iran war and the Epstein files.

Asked whether he would have made the same call on Iran, Mr. Vance noted that Mr. Trump had publicly described him as “less enthusiastic” about the war than others in the administration, but said his job as vice president was not to be a “public commentator.” He said he would back any presidential decision he considered “legal and ethical,” and that the goal in Iran — preventing a nuclear weapon — was sound.

Mr. Vance also pushed back on the idea that Israel was the driving force behind the war, telling Mr. Rogan that Mr. Trump’s concern about an Iranian nuclear weapon was unrelated. 

“I think the president, completely separate from any influence from Israel, believes very strongly, and again I agree with this, that Iran should not have a nuclear weapon,” Mr. Vance said.

At the same time, he said he knew “beyond a shadow of a doubt” that elements within the Israeli government were trying to keep the war going “indefinitely” and manipulate American opinion against a negotiated settlement. Citing a Time magazine report on an Israeli-funded influence campaign targeting his diplomacy, Mr. Vance said of those involved, “Go to hell. I’m going to do what I have to do for the American people,” according to the Times of Israel.

On the Epstein files, Mr. Vance told Mr. Rogan the White House had botched the rollout. “We absolutely screwed up the comms of the Epstein files,” he said, adding that former Attorney General Pam Bondi had “overstated what we had and what we didn’t have” in trying to manage the political fallout, according to Axios. He said the delay was not an effort to hide anything, and that redacting victims’ identities from millions of pages of documents took time, per Forbes.

Mr. Vance went further than the files themselves, saying Epstein “clearly had connections to the upper, the highest levels, of American intelligence” and “the highest levels of Israeli intelligence” as well. The latter claim echoes conspiracy theories about Epstein’s ties to Mossad that have circulated since his 2019 death and have often shaded into antisemitic tropes; no evidence has surfaced to support it, and former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett publicly denied last year that Epstein worked for Israeli intelligence, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported. Mr. Vance said he was one of the “O.G. Epstein conspiracy theorists” but called the notion that Mr. Trump had been blackmailed over the files “crazy.”

The two men found more common ground on the subject of socialism. Mr. Rogan, who has described himself as “politically homeless” under Mr. Trump, said the rise of democratic socialists in this year’s midterm primaries left him shaken. Mr. Vance agreed, arguing that 40 years of offshoring jobs and unrestricted low-wage immigration had hollowed out the middle class and left young Americans unable to afford homes. “Unless you go down that pathway of allowing young Americans to own something, socialism is the inevitable outcome,” he said, according to a Fox News report carried by 930 WFMD. He credited the administration’s border crackdown with helping stabilize housing costs.

The conversation also touched on space travel, a favorite subject of Mr. Rogan’s. Mr. Vance said he wants to see humans colonize Mars but worries that human biology “does not function as well” outside Earth-style gravity — a problem he said scientists have yet to solve, The New York Times reported.