Fox News Panel Calls Out JD Vance for ‘Undermining’ Trump on Iran: ‘Not Helpful’

 

A Fox News panel called out Vice President JD Vance for “undermining” President Donald Trump by claiming an escalation of the Iran conflict could result in a “refugee crisis.”

As part of an Iran discussion during Saturday night’s edition of The Big Weekend Show, co-host Tomi Lahren rolled a clip from Vance’s July 15 appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast — in which the vice president warned against an escalation of the Iran conflict by citing the potential consequences.

“If you look at the end result of our Libya policy after [Muammar] Gaddafi was killed, Libya basically turned into a failed state,” Vance told Rogan. “You had a refugee crisis, you had a lot of violence, a lot terrorism come from that. How is it in the United States’ interest to have 94 million desperate people flooding into Europe, flooding into the United states, to have sort of the terrorist infrastructure that can get established when you fan terrorists all over the world? We’ve run this experiment before.”

“I don’t disagree with the vice president there,” Lahren said. “But I am a little perplexed at why he did that podcast and why he’s seemingly in some ways undermining the president.”

Fox News contributor Marc Theissen concurred.

“I 100% agree with you,” Theissen replied.

Lahren — who has been an increasingly vocal critic of the president and the administration on several fronts — went on to call Vance’s comments “perplexing.”

“I actually don’t disagree with his premise there I just find it odd that he did it,” Lahren asked Theissen. “Do you share the same concerns? Do you see the merit of his argument? Even if we both agree it was perplexing.”

“I agree with your premise,” Theissen responded. “He seems to be going off. Off base a lot and contradicting the president a lot in public lately and it’s not helpful.”

But Theissen went even further than Lahren and criticized Vance’s argument on its face.

“JD Vance keeps putting up these straw men,” Theissen said. “He says, ‘Well, the people who want President Trump to go back to war they want to send a hundred thousand 150,000 troops.’ And nobody’s saying that! Nobody is saying that at all. You don’t have to tear down straw men. We’ve liberated 400 million people during the Cold War without a single boot on the ground…President Trump has set an absolute goal. They cannot have a nuclear weapon. The Strait of Hormuz has to be open. If they’re not going to do that through an agreement, we have to do it militarily, and that’s going to take more force than we’re doing right now. And so he should be backing the president, not contradicting him in public.”

Watch above, via Fox News.

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Joe DePaolo is the Editor in Chief of Mediaite. Email him here: joed@mediaite.com Follow him on X: @joe_depaolo