JD Vance Goes Ballistic on Conservative Historian: ‘Moralistic Garbage’
Oliver Contreras/Sipa USA via AP Images
Vice President JD Vance apparently isn’t interested in nostalgic history lessons — especially when they’re used to attack President Donald Trump’s stance on Ukraine.
Early on Thursday morning, pro-Trump conservative historian Niall Ferguson provoked Vance’s anger by invoking former President George H.W. Bush’s famous condemnation of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 to criticize the Trump administration’s current approach to Ukraine.
Trump hardened his stance on Ukraine this week in a pivot that saw the country excluded from initial peace negotiations between the U.S. and Russia in Saudi Arabia. Criticism of Ukraine’s exclusion from the talks climaxed in the president branding Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy a “dictator without elections” and blaming Kyiv for Russia’s invasion, suggesting the country could have “made a deal” to avoid war.
The remarks have drawn condemnation from various European allies, Democrats, and even exposed a rift with Senate Republicans like Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD), Thom Thillis (R-NC) and John Kennedy (R-LA).
As commentators also weighed in, Ferguson tweeted a screengrab from John Meacham’s biography Destiny And Power featuring Bush’s “This will not stand” line, suggesting future historians will question why Republican presidents no longer treat invasions by dictators as a red line.
Vance was having none of it.
In a fiery and lengthy reply, he dismissed Ferguson’s argument as “moralistic garbage,” a symptom of what he called the “rhetorical currency of the globalists” and defended the administration’s Ukraine stance by arguing that Russia’s invasion “wouldn’t have started if President Trump was in office” and there was never a “pathway to victory” for Ukraine under the Biden administration.
Slamming Ferguson’s reliance on a decades-old Bush quote, Vance accused establishment conservatives of “reliance on irrelevant history,” rather than confronting the geopolitical realities of today.
He laid out what he sees as hard truths: Russia’s overwhelming manpower advantage, Europe’s faltering military-industrial base, and America’s dwindling stockpiles.
“What is Niall’s actual plan for Ukraine?” he jibed. “Another aid package?”
Vance’s defense of Trump’s foreign policy centered on what he called America’s true interests — not “moralisms or historical illiteracy.” He argued that the U.S. holds significant leverage over both Russia and Ukraine, but that the path forward requires negotiation.
“Given the above facts, we must pursue peace, and we must pursue it now,” he wrote, adding: “President Trump ran on this, he won on this, and he is right about this.”
