The day after the midterms, Vice President JD Vance started posting about why his party lost as if he were an uninvolved pundit and not the vice president.

The Republican Party’s losses in the House and Senate, he said, could be blamed on Trump’s war on Iran and America’s relationship to Israel. His “smartest data guy” said so.

“The reason we lost is the war,” Vance wrote. To turn it around, he said, the Republican Party must do four things:

1. End the war
2. Focus on cost of living/inflation
3. Put America First
4. Change our relationship to Israel

Vance, an Iraq War veteran, has long claimed a more isolationist position than even his boss. But he hasn’t shied away from supporting America’s foreign wars when it’s politically expedient for him to do so. “A lot of people recognize that we need to do something with Iran—but not these weak little bombing runs,” he said on Fox News the day after he was selected as Trump’s vice presidential candidate in 2024. “If you’re going to punch the Iranians, you punch them hard.”

In positioning himself as the party’s future Vance took a different tack. He also neglected every non-Iran reason voters might have been uninterested in the Republican Party’s platform this cycle: its wildly unpopular and violent immigration policies, its systemic destruction of anything resembling a social safety net, its promotion of a government that does nothing for its citizens.

But just as in 2008—as the disastrous US-led war in Iraq unraveled—no viable candidate for president in 2028 will be able to take a pro-war stance. And Vance isn’t alone in recognizing that. John Bolton, a man who has been agitating for war with Iran since well before this year’s first-time voters were born, also chimed in.

American voters “are not happy to be in another seemingly endless war,” Bolton said. A late October CBS/YouGov poll showed that 62 percent of Americans considered ending the war “very important” as they prepared to vote. But it’s a surprising thing to hear from Bolton, who has over the past two decades argued repeatedly that Iran should be bombed as much as possible. But now that the bombing is also raising Americans’ gas prices, and thus making the Republican Party unpopular, Bolton, like Vance, is distancing himself from the war.

Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son, also chimed in. He reposted Vance’s takes: “Every word of this is .” And Trump himself responded amiably, too.

“I thought it was good,” he said of Vance’s statement.

This post was shared from Mother Jones.