Washington’s war pundits keep blaming JD Vance for the beating Republicans took while Democrats celebrate their new socialist-flavored majority.

One of them went on Fox News and called the Vice President disloyal for saying it out loud.

And Donald Trump Jr just answered him by name.

The President’s Oldest Son Named Names

Donald Trump Jr doesn’t usually waste breath on Washington Post columnists.

But Marc Thiessen earned an exception.

In a video clip that Bradley Devlin, politics editor at the Daily Signal, shared on X, Don Jr went straight at the commentators who insist the war in Iran played no part in the Republican wipeout at the polls.

“I’ve seen a few talking heads, guys like Marc Thiessen out there trying to claim the Iran war had nothing to do with Rs losing . . . DISGUSTING actually,” Don Jr said.

He didn’t stop at the insult. Don Jr ran through the record his father delivered, crediting the administration with record low poverty, record low violent crime, and a southern border that finally holds. Then he pointed at what changed in voters’ heads. The war pushed costs higher, gas prices climbed, and the kitchen table took over the ballot.

Devlin flagged the obvious problem for Thiessen. The Fox News contributor just spent days calling JD Vance disloyal for making nearly the same point.

So which is it?

Thiessen Built a Loyalty Test Only One Man Can Fail

Thiessen wrote speeches for Donald Rumsfeld and George W Bush back when the Iraq War steered the Republican Party into the 2006 and 2008 disasters that handed Barack Obama the keys to Washington. Lately he’s appointed himself the judge of who counts as loyal to Donald Trump.

He delivered his verdict on Vance on Special Report shortly after the election, once Vance posted that “The reason we lost is the war.”

“I was kind of shocked by that statement that Vice President Vance put out,” Thiessen told Bret Baier. “It was, quite frankly, disloyal to the president of the United States.”

And he didn’t let it go. Thiessen followed up with a Washington Post column titled “JD Vance’s stunning act of disloyalty,” which blamed the losses on a “failure to win” the war and hung that failure on the ceasefire memorandum Vance negotiated. He argued the post should cost Vance any shot at Trump’s 2028 endorsement.

Notice the sleight of hand. In Thiessen’s telling, the war didn’t cost Republicans a thing, except for the part where nobody finished it fast enough. And somehow that part belongs to Vance.

Now the President’s oldest son, who lobbied for Vance as his father’s running mate in 2024, says the same thing Vance said. Will Thiessen write a column calling Don Jr disloyal?

Nobody should hold their breath. The hawks who crowd the cable panels almost never turn their fire on Trump or Don Jr when the two of them share a view with Vance. They aim at Vance, because the Vice President stands between the establishment wing and the pre-Trump party it wants back, the one that brought the country amnesty pushes, job-killing trade deals, and endless wars.

Even the President refused to read from Thiessen’s script. Trump said the war “drove the gasoline up a little bit,” while standing by his decision to launch it. Presidents don’t talk that way about an issue that had nothing to do with the outcome.

A Spotless Report Card Leaves Only One Suspect

Here’s the piece of Don Jr’s argument the war crowd really can’t escape.

If poverty sits at record lows, violent crime keeps dropping, and the border holds, then voters didn’t fire Republicans over the record Don Jr listed. Something else moved them. Detectives call it process of elimination.

But the polling did most of the detective work before the first ballot got counted. An AP-NORC survey taken in mid-October found about 8 in 10 registered voters wanted the next Congress focused on lowering the cost of living, and roughly 7 in 10 put ending the war with Iran in that same top tier. Those two priorities meet at the gas pump. CNBC’s Voter Poll pegged the national average at $4.15 a gallon on Election Day, and 74 percent of voters told CNBC the war counted as a crucial or major factor in their congressional vote.

NBC News exit pollsters asked voters whether the US made the right or wrong decision in taking military action against Iran. Sixty-three percent called it wrong. Democrats carried 83 percent of that group, while 15 percent still stuck with Republicans, a sign the doubts reached well inside the GOP’s own coalition.

And Echelon Insights picked up the same signal among Trump 2024 voters who have cooled on him. Complaints about the wars outnumbered complaints about tariffs five to one.

Back in January 2026, Thiessen told readers, “There is no downside to striking the regime.”

Maybe that’s a cheap shot. Thiessen aimed that line at Iran’s ability to retaliate, not at swing districts in Ohio, and no columnist can see every turn of a war from a desk in Washington. But a man who sold the operation as cost-free might want to skip the loyalty lectures once the bill arrives.

Lyndon Johnson Already Ran This Experiment

Americans watched this movie once before. In 1966, Lyndon Johnson tried to pay for a widening war in Vietnam and his Great Society spending spree at the same time, and prices started creeping up at home. Voters handed Republicans 47 House seats that November.

Nobody needed a decoder ring to read that result either.

But the blame game in conservative media matters less than what comes next. Democrats now run both chambers of Congress, and their socialist wing already drafted its to-do list. The same AP-NORC poll found about three-quarters of Democrat voters who call themselves democratic socialists want investigations of the Trump administration near the top of the agenda. Not gas prices. Subpoenas.

The neocons pushed a war Trump’s voters never asked for, and now the Left gets two years to warm its hands over the wreckage.

And the hawks still want the conversation to center on Vance’s manners instead of their own forecasts.

JD Vance looked at the results and named the cause. Don Jr looked at the same results and named the people pretending otherwise. Neither one questioned the President’s record. Both questioned the war crowd’s alibi.

So the next time Marc Thiessen sits down to grade loyalty, will the President’s oldest son land on his list of the disloyal, or does that word only stick to JD Vance?

Sources: Bradley Devlin, X (video clip of Donald Trump Jr); Mediaite, “Fox News Contributor Accuses JD Vance of Being ‘Disloyal’ to Trump”; The Daily Beast, “Fox Contributor Whines ‘Disloyal’ Vance Is Backstabbing Trump”; The Washington Post, Marc A Thiessen, “JD Vance’s stunning act of disloyalty”; The New American, “Neocons Deny War Played a Role in GOP Disaster; Blame Vance, Other Issues”; The Daily Caller, “‘No Downside’: Iran War Hawks Get A Midterm Reality Check”; Associated Press, “Voters prioritize costs and Iran over investigating Trump for next Congress, AP-NORC poll finds”; CNBC, “Did the Iran war cost Republicans the midterms?”; Axios, “Vance says the Iran war cost Republicans the midterms”; Free Republic, Don Jr video thread