October 2, 2026
DORAL, Fla. (AP) — President Donald Trump said his vice president, JD Vance, was “philosophically a little bit different than me” at the outset of the war in Iran, even as he dismissed the notion of a disagreement between the two.
Speaking to reporters on Monday at his golf club in Doral, Florida, the president said Vance was “maybe less enthusiastic about going” but insisted that his decision to launch airstrikes in Iran alongside Israel was necessary.
“I felt it was something we had to do,” Trump said. “I didn’t feel we had a choice.”
Heading into a challenging election year, the war in Iran has stoked tension among Republicans, with some expressing reservations about how the operation fits into the “America First” movement the party has embraced during the Trump era.
Few have embodied that movement as prominently as Vance, who over the course of a decade rose from an author to U.S. senator and ultimately vice president. He's now considered a top contender for the Republican presidential nomination in 2028, giving him the opportunity to carry Trump's movement into the future.
Vance, a former Marine, has often reinforced Trump's vision of an America more focused on solving problems at home than intervening in conflicts abroad. In a 2023 op-ed in The Wall Street Journal that's garnered renewed attention after the Iran strikes, Vance wrote that Trump has his support because “I know he won’t recklessly send Americans to fight overseas.”
On the eve of the strikes, Vance told The Washington Post there was “ no chance ” that the U.S. would become involved in a drawn-out war as it did in Iraq.
Since then, the administration has provided conflicting messages about how long the war would last. Trump has said it could go on “as long as necessary.” Amid intensifying economic turmoil on Monday, Trump described the war as a “short-term excursion.”
Vance has been publicly supportive of the president since the strikes began. In a Fox News interview with Jesse Watters, Vance rejected comparisons of the Iran operation to earlier wars, including those in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“If you think back to Afghanistan, 20 years of mission creep, 20 years (of) not having a clear objective and 20 years (of) the United States trying to bring liberal democracy to Afghanistan,” Vance said at the time. “Iraq was a little bit shorter, but we were still in that country for nearly a decade with no clear mission, no clear definition.”
“What’s so different about this, Jesse,” Vance added, “is that the president has clearly defined what he wants to accomplish.”
On Monday evening, Vance was at Dover Air Force Base to attend the dignified transfer for Sgt. Benjamin Pennington, the seventh U.S. service member to die in combat during the Iran war.
And on Monday, Trump insisted there was no disagreement between him and Vance.
“We get along very well on this,” Trump said.
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