According to JD Vance:
“So, this is not going to be some long, drawn-out thing. We’ve got in, we’ve done the job of setting their nuclear program back. We’re gunna now work to permanently dismantle that nuclear program, over the coming years.”
This is a man who cannot wait more than two sentences to contradict himself. A perfect candidate to succeed Donald Trump.
But JD isn’t alone in his bold, two-faced double-speak. Trump’s top supporters are all exposing themselves as ludicrous liars.
In 2024, Laura Loomer denounced Nikki Haley for wanting to bomb Iran. In 2025, she praises Trump for bombing Iran.
Perhaps even worse than Loomer are the Hodge Twins, who claim that the “Jews start all the wars” on Twitter, and then claim that Israel is our ally on Facebook.
According to the twins, their Facebook post was written by a social media manager using ChatGPT. They claim to have fired that manager and apologized. But this is the problem: MAGA cares so little about the truth that their biggest influencers (3.3 million followers) are just throwing out random ChatGPT slop to the boomers for likes and clicks. There’s no integrity, no fact checking — the slop must flow.
Let’s check back in JD Vance. Point blank, he was asked, is the United States at war with Iran? His response:
No, Kristin, we're not at war with Iran, we're at war with Iran's nuclear program.
Trump and MAGA don’t deserve all the blame (or credit) for this kind of rhetoric. We live in a world where politicians lie all the time — this is the expectation, not the exception.
The post-truth world reflects a crisis of authority, which began when the Christian church lost its monolithic hold on truth. That gaping wound was bandaged by scientific experts, who offered a new sense of secular certainty centered on the nightly news, textbooks, and publishing houses.
What destroyed American confidence in these secular authorities was the one-two punch of Middle Eastern wars and financial recession.
The general decline in trust from 1964 until 1994 reflects three decades of declining church attendance. Without a common religious framework, truth cannot be decided, and every man is for himself. After 1994, a new secular framework emerged which restored trust, briefly, before it sharply collapsed again in 2004.
Trump was nominated as the Republican candidate in 2016, 2020, and 2024 to reshore jobs, reduce immigration, and stop wars in the Middle East. Tulsi Gabbard claimed that Trump would stop WWIII. If Iran continues to pursue a nuclear weapon, will there be a new movement to return to “true MAGA”? Or will voters simply become more cynical, more detached from reality, more aimless and conspiratorial?
Elon’s accusation that Trump is a pedophile may be looked back on as a breaking point. How many times can voters hear from billionaires that the president is a pedophile before their brains break? And maybe their brains are already broken, but the consequences have yet to bear fruit.
How long can a country last where no one believes anything that anyone says?
America has inertia behind it, and stored up capital. Its citizens may not trust the government, but globally, the American dollar is still seen as trustworthy. So long as the dollar has value, the Federal government can continue to print dollars and keep interest rates low. Americans don’t trust the government, but they trust the money printer to keep the grocery store stocked.
When unemployment breached 10% in 1895, it led directly to the nomination of the populist William Jennings Bryan in 1896. Bryan was re-nominated three times, until 1908. Even though the American economy had recovered by that time, the populist wave continued on its own inertia for 13 years.
The disaster of the Iraq War alongside the depths of the great recession reached a fever pitch in 2011. 13 years later, America re-elected Donald Trump.
It’s difficult to say if or when America’s fortunes will run out, when the crisis of authority reaches an hour of decision. In the meantime, I am highly skeptical that Iranian uranium has been eliminated. What Vance is selling as a quick “drive-by shooting” may require a decade of “follow up” where the Iranian regime is constantly being bombed as it attempts to rebuild its facilities.
Even if there is regime change, there’s nothing to ensure that this new regime will remain friendly to America. If I were a secular Iranian, my goal would be to integrate more closely with Russia and China and obtain nuclear weapons, just as the North Koreans have done.
In the best case scenario, nothing will continue to happen indefinitely, and there will be no $6 a gallon gas, and there will be no civil war in Iran, and there will be no Iranian nuclear bomb. I always err on the side of nothing ever happening, so while I did not like these strikes, I do not think they are likely to lead to boots on the ground. Still, in the long term, conducting foreign policy with large performative strikes and no coherent plan for peace is a net negative.
“So, this is not going to be some long, drawn-out thing. We’ve got in, we’ve done the job of setting their nuclear program back. We’re gunna now work to permanently dismantle that nuclear program, over the coming years.”
Where’s the “contradiction”? He’s obviously differentiating between the process of “setting back their nuclear program” in the short term and “permanently dismantling” it in the long term as two separate goals. You can disagree and say that those two are inseparable and are therefore really one thing, but that doesn’t make his statement a contradiction on its own terms.
This is stunningly obvious from no further context than the provided quote itself.