The following is a lightly edited transcript of the June 17 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.JD Vance is having a moment. He’s selling his new book and he just appeared on The View, where the hosts worked him over pretty hard. In a telling exchange, Vance found himself defending Trump in the context of the Iran war in a way that will come back to bite him later. Indeed, there are several other signs that Trump world is setting up Vance to take the eventual fall on Iran in a number of different ways. New leaks from inside the administration are making Trump’s Iran deal look even worse, and they’re also shedding light on what this shivving of Vance really entails.We’re talking about it all with one of the best observers out there of the intersection between politics and culture, New Republic contributing editor Virginia Heffernan. Hey, Virginia, always nice to have you on.Virginia Heffernan: Hey, Greg, same here. I like being on the show.Sargent: Well, we like that. So let’s start with JD Vance’s appearance on The View. He took a hammering on a number of fronts. I want to highlight one exchange, though. They’re talking about inflation. JD says, we’re doing all we can. Then one of the hosts points out that Trump recently said, I love the inflation. Listen to this.JD Vance (voiceover): We’re doing a lot to make it better. It’s going to take a little bit of time. There’s a lot more work to do. But the president knows that a lot of Americans are struggling. In fact, he ran on that, he talked about it, and we’ve done some things and made some good progress on that point.Host (voiceover): He just said he loves the inflation.Vance (voiceover): What he said, Anna, what he said is that he loves the fact that the inflation is going to come down when this war is over. That’s what he said.Joy Behar (voiceover): Are you his—wait, are you his interpreter or are you his vice president?Vance (voiceover): Well, look, look—what the president said, people were asking about the inflation, they were asking about the affordability problem, which again is very real. And what he said is, I love the inflation because it’s going to come down when the war is over.Sargent: So Joy Behar got a good dig in there saying that Vance is just functioning basically as Trump’s propagandist and not leveling with people, although she said it in a way that kind of kept it light. Virginia, what did you make of the exchange?Heffernan: Well, I mean, I think—I don’t know, do people still say mogged? I do think that JD Vance got mogged by the women of The View. They were all on top of him. I know he had said on Fox News the day before, or maybe earlier this morning, that he was trying to prepare for a civil conversation, but he knew he was going into the lion’s den.The inflation question is going to be really interesting to View viewers, right? JD Vance has this book come out about his Christian faith, about his Catholic faith, and he really wants everyone to focus on his religious journey because he believes that he can bond with the suburban women who sometimes lean Republican, especially on issues like crime, and he might get to them by The View, right? So he wasn’t going into the lion’s den for no reason. He was going into it to promote a book. And indeed they gave the QR code so you could buy the book at the end. They did their part. And they gave him a onesie for his forthcoming newborn that says The View on it. But—Sargent: Yeah, I have to ask—do you think that JD Vance and Usha are going to put that onesie on their baby?Heffernan: I was wondering about that. I thought, maybe that’s just another mogg moment. Like, we’ll brand your baby with The View. I mean, we don’t want to get too symbolic about it, but there was a lot going on and it’s a lot to watch.And Whoopi and some of the other hosts of color were especially incensed and didn’t give any ground. And there was something satisfying about seeing that because we’ve seen Trump attack so many women over and over again in interviews, walk out of interviews, call women nasty, call them piggy, call them whatever. And so just saying, we’re not really going to entertain the idea that there’s a kumbaya here with you, and making it very clear with their expressions that they weren’t going to entertain it.Sargent: JD was really on his best behavior, though. We should point that out. Now, what do you think of the inflation exchange? Because I want to clarify for people that the inflation exchange is really about inflation from the war. That’s what Trump was talking about when he said, I love the inflation. And it kind of maneuvered Vance into a position where he was essentially forced to defend what Trump said there. What did you make of the exchange?Heffernan: So what Vance says is he didn’t mean he loves the inflation, he meant I love that the inflation is going to go down after the war. And for some reason, everything these days is reminding me of this moment in The Simpsons. I can’t remember what season it is, but I think that Sideshow Bob or someone who’s trying to kill Bart has “Die Bart Die” tattooed on his chest. And when it’s revealed—”Die Bart Die”—he says, no, this is just German. “Die Bart Die.”And I love that because no, he didn’t say I love the inflation. He said I love that the inflation is going down. “Die Bart Die.” Like, there’s no way that that’s what he was saying. Everybody knows that’s not what he was saying. And for JD Vance to introduce doublespeak, to introduce propaganda, really shows how he’s on his back foot.Sargent: I want to add something about that exchange as well. As you say, it’s a stretch, as Vance said, that Trump was claiming that he loves the fact that inflation will come down after the war. I think Trump was more saying, I don’t give a shit about the inflation because the problem’s going to magically go away because I say it is, and that’s it, and you should make it go away in your head. That’s what he actually meant.But seriously, there’s another vulnerability here, which is that Vance is tying himself to the idea that costs will come down significantly after the war. In other words, he’s endorsing that idea and aligning himself with it. And that’s going to take a while. And whatever actually happens with costs, I’m not sure the public’s going to feel good about costs anytime soon. So Vance has kind of been maneuvered into a position where he’s tied to defending that—essentially that big, big, big thing about the Trump term, which is a very, very tough thing to defend.Heffernan: It’s asking people to pay more for groceries in exchange for some foreign policy goal that keeps shifting, that we don’t understand. And that, by the way, frankly, the administration did nothing to gin up support for. So we don’t even have a narrative about why we’re in Iran. They weren’t building nukes—or were they? Nobody is following this enriched uranium conversation or whatever JD Vance is saying this new Iran deal is, which sounds like the last, or good, Iran deal, except worse.And nobody understands what we’re doing there. Just as they didn’t understand Venezuela and they didn’t understand the first attack on Iran. This has not been sold to the American people, and yet we’re asked to make a sacrifice for it. We’re asked to pay more for groceries while he keeps telling us affordability is a hoax and that he loves inflation. And I think this is the signature piece of foreign policy, clearly.And I think it reads to the American people as, we’ve gone to war for Israel and we don’t know why. And nobody has a stake in figuring out this nuclearized Iran because we keep not understanding it. The only thing we understand is we’re paying more, something about the Strait of Hormuz, and this is all Trump’s fault. And we have then no faith in him. There’s not even a strong base that’s trying to spin up support for it. What they just say back is, it’s a hoax, or, you’re nasty for asking questions about it.Sargent: A hundred percent. And I think there are clear signs that Vance is getting set up now to take the fall for the Iran deal if it goes south. Axios reports that CIA Director John Ratcliffe told Trump and other top officials that the intel agencies seriously doubt that Iran will ultimately make the concessions that Trump will demand in terms of constraints on its nuclear enrichment program.And this is a really key thing. I want to read it. “In internal discussions, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth both expressed concerns and raised questions about the memorandum of understanding announced Sunday, while Vance and U.S. envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner advocated for it, according to two of the sources.”So, Virginia, that’s strongly suggestive. People around Trump who expect—rightly, I think—that he’s going to have serious trouble pinning Iran down when the talks on nukes get going, want it very clear that Vance internally rooted for this deal. And we’re talking here about people who are sympathetic to Hegseth and Rubio. What do you make of that?Heffernan: As you said before, I think he’s being shivved. I think that the person who is least confident in Trump’s decisions around foreign policy—as we’ve seen from his past disputes with Trump and Hegseth, and pretty aggressive, meaningful isolationism—is having to defend those things and then just babble about how bad Obama was, about whatever comes into his head, because the details of the deal have never been fully exposed. We don’t know what they are.But we don’t even know what our objective is. The objective of the first deal was to prevent supposedly breakout capacity from Iran so that they couldn’t turn what they had into nukes. And that was a deal that the UN was invested in with its non-proliferation treaty. It was a deal that Iran was ultimately invested in because it got a lot of goodies and that it complied with.But now, are we trying to prevent breakout capacity? What’s the time horizon? What are the things that an ordinary diplomat would ask about with this deal? No, it’s just Trump trying to humiliate people or be humiliated himself. And as we know, Iran has gone to psychologists to say, what is it like to deal with—remember with Nixon, he was exercising the madman option? Well, I think that Trump’s madmanness is non-optional. He is a madman. He’s not choosing, am I going to act like a madman? He just is.And this isn’t a question of Democrats saying he is crazy. This is a question of, if you are negotiating with this person, how do you talk to an actually insane person? Like, how do you say, flatter his ego, do XYZ? And Iran is very likely to get away with some pretty hideous things with JD Vance scrambling to defend him, being shivved by the president, and the president himself insane. And Hegseth pretty insane.Sargent: To pick up on this idea of JD Vance getting shivved and this idea that you mentioned of Vance being somewhat of a skeptic of some of this stuff—he’s kind of getting screwed in two ways. Not only was he initially kind of skeptical of this thing, but now he’s got to be the one to defend the deal sort of in a more frontal way than anyone else. Everybody knows that vice presidents are on the hook for that as a general matter. They’re supposed to go out and take a lot of shit for the president, and that’s just sort of part of the role. Everyone knows that. And now he’s got to go out there and defend this deal when everyone knows it’s a complete joke and nobody else has to be as frontal as him.Heffernan: It really would be Marco Rubio who should be talking about it. But Trump is way more threatened by JD Vance’s future career than he is by Little Marco’s. And so he wants Vance out there and he wants Vance to have to do the doublespeak that he’s getting him to do. And also speak for something that he doesn’t know about, because nobody has seen this deal. This deal is like Pam Bondi’s “I have the list of Epstein’s people on my desk.” There may be a piece of yellow paper with some Sharpie scribbles on it, but we don’t know what this piece of disposable diplomacy is.And so he’s just going to end up making no sense. It’s like hang Mike Pence, right? The version of hang Mike Pence for now is hang JD Vance out to dry.Sargent: Exactly. Very well put. And there are more signs of Vance getting set up here. Joe Perticone of The Bulwark highlighted a number of statements from Trump-friendly people. For instance, Senator Lindsey Graham, who’s a staunch Trump ally, described Vance as “the architect of the deal.” Very, very clear. This is Vance’s deal, says Senator Lindsey Graham, who probably hates the deal and thinks it’s going to fall apart later. That’s a key point, right? Senator Lindsey Graham, who’s a real Iran hawk—I hate that phrase, but whatever—he’s an Iran hawk who expects this deal to not produce any real results later. And he’s saying that JD Vance is the architect of this deal, which will fall apart later. That really screws him, I think.And Trump himself recently said that JD Vance will probably be at the signing ceremony instead of him. We’ll see how that pans out, but it’s really obvious where all the arrows are pointing.Heffernan: Yeah. I mean, I don’t think Lindsey Graham cares about getting out of Iran. He probably would be happy with forever war. It seems to be his sweet spot, and certainly Pete Hegseth. But Trump does have trouble on his hands if this—every day this war continues, it’s expensive. It’s very, very, very unpopular. And so he wants a way to back out of it, but he doesn’t want to make something called “the Iran deal,” because an Iran deal is supposedly what made Obama seem weak, seem like a globalist, seem like he didn’t understand hard power. And so here he is making an Iran deal in order to back out of the optional war of choice that he started for no reason to get attention.Sargent: Trump wants it to be Iran’s surrender. That’s what he wants.Heffernan: He wants an Iran surrender and they are not—there is no white flag from Iran. I mean, the other thing is we haven’t had this kind of open collision with Iran ever. And we’re starting to see their cards. And they have played the propaganda war very well. I mean, the Lego videos have mostly been taken down, but those were really influential. And “Your Government Is Run by Pedophiles,” their hit song of the summer—you can still find that. It was on Spotify and rising up the ranks.So Americans have paradoxically acquired at least some understanding, if not sympathy, for Iran. For Iran being a closed rogue state, defined as the most hated nation on earth for all this time, and suddenly people have started to think there’s schoolgirls there. There’s schoolgirls that were killed by a bomb. And the consequences of this for geopolitics are going to be felt forever. And it’s just on somebody’s whim. What a nightmare.Sargent: You raise a really interesting point there. And there’s the global economy as well, which is going to continue to be in a really ailing state because of all this.Down the line, let’s sort of spool this forward and see what it looks like. So down the line, maybe Trump reaches this stupendous deal with Iran in two to three months before the midterms. I don’t think that’s likely. I think it’s more likely to drag out and the Iranians have every incentive to drag it right up to the midterms to hurt Trump as much as possible.And so we start to get into next year, and then that’s when the presidential race starts. And at that point, Trump is really checked out. He’s passing from the scene. And so next year you’ve got JD Vance as the frontman to defend all of the legacy of the Iran war. We’re talking about the global economy. We’re talking about potential trouble that they run into with getting Iran to constrain its nuke program. We’re talking about the money that’s going to start flowing to Iran, which when Obama did that, it was this huge betrayal of America according to Trump. How does Vance manage all this in, I don’t know, March or April of next year?Heffernan: I mean, as you point out, there are Republicans who hate the Iran deal—or want to see it fail, like Lindsey Graham—because they’re hawks, because they are really invested in this idea of Iran as a rogue state in opposition to Israel as a democracy and an ally in the region, which has also shifted in popular imagination, and yet that’s something that a Lindsey Graham is going to hold on to. So you have old-school Republican hawks who are going to hate that there’s a deal at all.And then you have people for whom the deal is bound to fail. At very least, even when you talk about this perfect deal idea—the first Iran deal was close, it was a B-plus, right, as a deal at least—it takes a while to bear out, to bear fruit. Well, you can call it a failure at any given time because you could say, well, they’ll have this breakout capacity in 10 years, 15 years, we should have gotten it in perpetuity. They can always be flexing. We can suddenly say, the uranium is enriched to 68 percent, so it’s a failure.There’s absolutely no way that an Iran deal of any kind is going to play as a success with the American people. The only way that this could come to a soft landing for them is if prices go steeply down, if affordability goes up, if the strait is completely open and free, and if we have a complete surrender by Iran. And none of that is possible either.So they’re not going to get their—Jamelle Bouie says that they reiterate the logic of domination in these wars. What they want to see is Iran crying in pain. And that seems like a fool’s errand. It’s not a very Iranian position. And they have shown that they’re refusing to do that.So this is an impossible position. JD Vance is so in a corner. I don’t know—it’s impossible for him to make a friend. Tucker Carlson is just going to hold him responsible. Tucker Carlson, who hates this war, who broke with Trump over this war, who begged Trump not to go to war, and now opposes Trump and is sort of the leader of this particular—and maybe running for office himself, right? We shouldn’t rule that out. If JD Vance had been able to stay with Tucker Carlson and have that group of people on his side, he might have had a chance in 2028. But he’s tarred with—you know what it is? He’s tarred with the brush of the war and he’s tarred with the brush of the deal. That’s as bad as it gets. Both things are going to cling to him and both things are huge failures.Sargent: Right. Just to really boil this down, basically every major element of the MAGA coalition will dislike whatever emerges here, so they’ll dislike Vance for it. And all the constituencies that Republicans, especially Trumpy Republicans like JD Vance, need to win majorities—young people, working-class non-white—they’ll also hate it. So that’s where Vance is.Heffernan: That’s where Vance is. Yeah. I mean, I’m not going to say I feel sorry for him, but just strategically, he is in a very, very bad spot. And I don’t see a way out of it for him. I don’t see where his reputation is at the end of this.Sargent: I don’t either. Virginia Heffernan, awesome to talk to you. Thank you so much.Heffernan: Thank you.