Fox’s Bret Baier Presses Vance on Trump’s ‘Mixed Messages’ About Regime Change

Fox News anchor Bret Baier confronted Vice President JD Vance over the potential “mixed messages” in President Donald Trump’s remarks about “regime change” in Iran.

Vance was a guest on Monday night’s edition of Fox News Channel’s Special Report, seconds after Trump announced a ceasefire in the U.S.-Israel-Iran war.

During Baier’s exclusive interview with Vance, the anchor pressed the VP about Trump’s controversial message encouraging regime change after Vance and others had seemed to rule that out as a policy goal:

BAIER: Yesterday, were you speaking on the president’s behalf when you said he was not interested in regime change?

VANCE: Well, Bret, what I have said is the American military, that is not our mission, is regime change. Our mission was to destroy the nuclear facilities and the nuclear program of Iran, which we, of course, did.

I think what the president’s also said is, if the Iranian people want to make a decision about regime change, that’s between the Iranian people and the regime. Of course, we support freedom fighters all around the world, but our mission was to destroy the nuclear facilities, and that’s what we did.

BAIER: So you don’t think there’s any mixed message when he goes to TRUTH Social and says: “It’s not politically correct to use the term regime change, but if the current Iranian regime is unable to make Iran great again, why wouldn’t there be a regime change? MIGA”?

VANCE: Well, I think what the president is saying very clearly, Bret, is if the Iranian people want to do something about their own leadership, that’s up to the Iranian people.

What the American national security interest here is very simple. It’s to destroy the nuclear program. That’s what we have done. And now that the 12-day war appears to be effectively over, we have an opportunity, I think, to restart a real peace process.

And, Bret, this is not just about two countries, Iran and Israel. All of these Gulf Arab states, they want peace. They want to invest. They want to build artificial intelligence hardware. They want to sort of come into the new economy. And that was impossible when you had Iran that was, as the president said, acting like a bully across the Middle East.

We really think that if the Iranians are smart about the path forward, this could be a new dawn of an economic age of prosperity, of course, for our Gulf Arab allies, for us, for the Israelis, for everybody, but it’s going to require the Iranians to play it smart from here.

Watch above via Fox News Channel’s Special Report.