Ian Ward

I think he's privy to that dynamic and sort of savvy at navigating it.

He was deputized very early on, even before they took office, to shepherd some of Trump's more controversial nominees through the Senate to get people like Pete Hegseth or RFK Jr.

or Tulsi Gabbard through the nomination process, despite some of the hiccups they run into.

The Constitution of the United States.

So that was a big win for him, I would say.

A second one was his trip to Europe early on.

He gave two very notable speeches there.

One at the Munich Security Conference, where he basically torpedoed 50 years of transatlantic collaboration.

And one in Paris, where he laid out the administration's view on AI.

And those both showed that he was willing to enter into these spaces and disrupt what he perceived as a status quo, a status quo that in his mind wasn't working.

Zelensky was in town to finalize a critical mineral deal.

Thank you very much.

It's an honor to have President Zelensky of Ukraine.

The meeting in the Oval Office between Trump and Zelensky and Vance and a couple other cabinet members very quickly devolved into Trump and Vance berating Zelensky.

Vance has an idea that Europe has benefited tremendously in the past half century or so from the international order governed by American military and economic hegemony.

At the same time, I think he thinks that that international order has harmed the type of working class blue collar American that he grew up with in Ohio, right?

These are the people who actually fight the wars.

They're the people who've borne the brunt of the deindustrialization that's accompanied economic globalization.

So I think in his mind, Europe and Ukraine by extension are sort of freeloaders who are leeching off the economic and actual well-being of working class Americans and not thanking them for it.

All signs indicate that behind the scenes, he was advocating against direct U.S.