Maggie Haberman Says JD Vance Was the Only One ‘Rattling the Cages’ With Trump on Iran — And it ‘Irritated’ Trump

New York Times journalist Maggie Haberman told Meet The Press Sunday that J.D. Vance was the only person really “rattling the cages” with President Donald Trump on Iran.

Haberman and co-author Jonathan Swan spoke about the dynamic between Vance and Trump as put forth in their new book, Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump.

NBC News’s Ryan Nobles, in for Kristen Welker, read a passage that said, “Vance believed a regime change war with Iran would be a disaster. In front of his colleagues, he warned Trump that a war with Iran could break apart his political coalition and would be seen as a betrayal by many voters who had bought into the promise of no new wars.”

“How did Vice President Vance, his willing to push back, affect his standing with Trump?” Nobles asked.

“So, It’s an interesting dynamic because he was not the only person who opposed this war in Trump’s world, to be clear,” Haberman began. “In our reporting, and we write about this in the book, none of Trump’s senior advisors, none of his Cabinet, thought this was a good idea. But we should make clear that the people who were let into these discussions were so tiny as a group that it excluded the Treasury secretary and the Energy secretary, the people who would have to manage the after effects of an energy fall-out from this war, because they were concerned about leaks.”

Haberman continued:

But Vance was the only one who really vocally took issue with this with Trump. And it irritated Trump, it cost Vance with Trump, but he was the only person who was really sort of rattling the cages. There were other advisors who did make cases against this. We should note that Dan Caine did lay out the scenarios for what could happen, munitions depletion, which clearly the U.S. has seen in a real way despite the fact that the administration keeps insisting otherwise.

The fact that Iran could close the Strait of Hormuz. So, the president will keep saying he wasn’t warned — he absolutely was warned. But Dan Caine is not Mark Milley of Term 1. He is not engaging in these angry arguments with Donald Trump, and you see that play out.

Her interview came shortly after Trump branded her “Magot” and said her book with Swan was “mostly made up.”

Watch the clip above via NBC News’s Meet The Press.

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