“For a summer parlor game, let's play "Who said that?" No asking ChatGPT.
1. "I said, 'Bibi, you better be careful, or you will be on your own very soon.'"
2. "I told him, 'Bibi, . . . you and I are going to have a come-to-Jesus meeting.'"
3. "You're a country of nine million people. You can't just kill your way out of solving every single national-security problem that you have."
4. "We're now in a war, which is in the process of destroying the United States economy and getting Americans killed, because Israel pushed the United States president, who caved."
5. "We have launched war with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, who seems to be pursuing a completely different set of objectives, and President Trump is unwilling or unable even to rein in Netanyahu."
The answers in order are: President Trump, President Biden, Vice President JD Vance, Tucker Carlson and Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
For months, the president's critics on the far right and left have charged that Mr. Netanyahu dragooned him into war with Iran. They claimed the war would precipitate an economic catastrophe. These same voices have argued for years that the U.S. should cut off military aid to Israel for defending itself.
Now Messrs. Trump and Vance sound as if they agree. The president last week rationalized his decision to cut and run from Iran by saying the alternative would have finished oil reserves in weeks and triggered another Great Depression.
Never mind that job growth over the past few months has been the strongest of his second term, and oil prices were falling as markets came into rough balance.
About 20 million barrels of oil a day flowed through the Strait of Hormuz before the war. Energy Secretary Chris Wright said on June 12 that the U.S. military was escorting ships carrying about 7 million barrels a day out of the Persian Gulf. Another 5 million barrels a day had been rerouted through pipelines. Output outside the Middle East had increased by 1 million barrels a day. Chinese demand had fallen by 4 million barrels a day as its petrochemical industry switched to coal. International drawdowns from strategic reserves made up most of the remaining stranded supply.
Iran's economy was under more pressure from the U.S. blockade than the other way around. But Mr. Trump isn't a man of patience, as the ayatollahs inferred. He was feeling political pressure as his approval rating declined and his critics on the right like Mr. Carlson amped up their attacks.
At the start of the war in early March, a Fox News poll showed Americans evenly split on the president's military actions. As the war dragged on, support waned. A Fox News poll last week showed that voters disapproved of his handling of the war by 64% to 35%. Note, though, that his marks on the economy are worse, 68% disapproval and 31% approval.
Americans might have cut the president more slack on Iran if he hadn't launched blunderbuss trade wars with allies that raised prices. Or so often acted like a bull in a china shop, such as by threatening war with Greenland. Or hadn't projected at the outset that the military operation would last four to five weeks. With no clear end in sight, the war began to recall the Covid lockdown mantra "15 days to slow the spread." You can't blame Americans for concluding that the president arrogantly blundered into a war without a strategy to finish it other than to apply his deal-making prowess.
Enter the vice president, who, as Ms. Warren might say, was pursuing a completely different set of objectives than the president. Mr. Vance has spent the Trump presidency trying to curry favor with Mr. Carlson as part of laying the ground for a 2028 presidential run. That includes a trip earlier this year to Hungary to stump for Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who lost.
The vice president's diplomatic outreach to Mr. Carlson is bizarre given how the pundit has made common cause with the far left. In a New York Times interview last month, Mr. Carlson accused the president of being a slave to Israel. Terrorist groups Hezbollah and Hamas, he added, "are not a bigger problem than the behavior of Citibank."
Mr. Vance has been eager to take credit with Mr. Carlson and his acolytes for bringing the war to an end. His thinly veiled threat last week -- echoed by Mr. Trump -- to cut off military support for Israel after it responded to Hezbollah's aggression is aimed at soothing the Carlson crowd's criticism. Americans might observe, however, that the vice president sounded eerily like Mr. Biden in demanding that Israel show restraint in the face of hostility -- and not too different from progressives who accuse Israel of war crimes.
As is his habit, Mr. Vance brushed aside criticism of the president's peace deal by swatting at straw men and presenting a false choice, rather than addressing the merits of the critics' arguments. They want the war "to go on until every bomb has been dropped, or until every Iranian is dead," he said. No one is arguing for that.” [1]
Except Israel.
1. Life Science: Donald Trump and JD Vance Echo the Anti-Israel Left. Finley, Allysia. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 22 June 2026: A17.
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