Kathrine Frich
The president’s eldest son used a single sentence to endorse JD Vance.
When a political campaign crashes and burns, the blame game usually starts behind closed doors.
Not this time.
As the dust settles on a brutal election night in Washington, the finger-pointing has spilled out into full public view, and it is coming from inside the family.
A brutal post-mortem
According to the Polish news outlet Onet, Donald Trump Jr. has publicly backed sharp criticism aimed at his father following the Republican defeat in the US midterm elections.
Rather than defending the White House record, the president’s eldest son used a single sentence to endorse a blunt assessment of why the party lost.
That assessment came directly from US Vice President JD Vance. On Wednesday, Vance published a long message on the social media platform X to explain the party’s painful losses in the congressional elections, Onet reported. He did not mince words about what drove voters away.
Vance pointed straight at the conflict with Iran as the root cause of the midterm disaster. “We lost because of the war. The president himself said so last night,” Vance wrote on X, as cited by Onet. With that remark, the vice president was pointing to a surprise appearance President Donald Trump made the previous evening in front of a ballroom currently being built in the White House East Wing.
Six years out
For Vance, the political trade-off was hard to ignore. In his post, reported by Onet, the vice president challenged those who still defend the military conflict despite the heavy cost at the ballot box.
“If you want to argue that it was worth it, that it was worth paying the price of losing the Senate majority for the next six years, then go ahead. Argue that it was a price worth paying. You can agree with it or not, but at least it will be fair (to raise the issue),” Vance wrote.
Even so, the vice president tried to end on a forward-looking note. According to Onet, Vance insisted that everyone already knows why the party lost, reaffirmed his belief in America’s future, and urged angry voters to channel their frustration into “further work to save the country.”
Then came the family co-sign. Onet reported that Donald Trump Jr. reposted Vance’s message on X and wrote, “Every word in this text is…” before adding three 100-point emojis to show his total agreement.
