By Kristen Holmes, Kevin Liptak, CNN
(CNN) — With Vice President JD Vance, a one-time Iran war skeptic, now tasked with brokering a deal to end it, President Donald Trump has been monitoring his progress closely and inquiring with various friends and advisers how they’d rank his performance, according to three people familiar with the conversations.
The president has wondered aloud how they think Vance compares to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a potential rival for the 2028 Republican presidential nomination, these people said.
Never over the course of Trump’s second term has his second-in-command been more in the spotlight than in the past week, when a pair of foreign visits and a dust-up between the president and the leader of the world’s Catholics — of which Vance is one — placed him squarely at the center of Trump’s whirlwind.
For now, Trump seems to have full confidence in Vance’s negotiating abilities, with the vice president on standby to return to Pakistan to resume negotiations with Iran if a deal appears to be coming together, according to sources familiar with the talks.
But the president, who spoke by phone with Vance as many as a dozen times during the first round of talks in Islamabad last weekend, has made clear he’s watching carefully.
“If it doesn’t happen, I’m blaming JD Vance,” Trump said, somewhat in jest, of an Iran deal during an Easter lunch this month. “If it does happen, I’m taking full credit.”
As momentum builds for another round of talks with Iran, the White House voiced full support for Vance’s role.
“Vice President Vance continues to show why President Trump has tapped him to lead the Iran negotiations along with Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner. His ability to take on some of the biggest challenges head-on makes him an invaluable member of the Administration full of top performers,” White House communications director Steven Cheung said in a statement. Cheung traveled to Pakistan with Vance last weekend.
Navigating the fray poses a challenge for Vance. The staunch Trump loyalist has publicly defended a war he argued against in private, and backed Trump’s criticism of Pope Leo XIV, even amid outcry from some of his fellow Catholics.
Yet on both fronts, Vance has also offered positions that — while not at odds with his boss — allow for a degree of distinction.
Confronted by hecklers decrying the administration’s Middle East policy at a Turning Point USA event in Georgia this week, Vance deflected the criticism onto the Biden administration. But later in the event, he acknowledged the Iran war’s unpopularity.
“I recognize that young voters do not love the policy we have in the Middle East,” he told the half-empty arena. “I understand.”
In the lead-up to last weekend’s marathon talks with Iran in Pakistan, Vance downplayed his role in the negotiations as merely “answering a lot of phone calls.”
Yet when Trump convened a Cabinet meeting on March 26, it was Vance he turned to first for an update on the war, not his secretaries of state or defense. By then, the vice president had been in regular contact with Pakistan’s army chief, Field Marshal Asim Munir, to work through proposals to bring the hostilities to an end.
At the time of the Cabinet meeting, Vance’s initial hesitation about launching a new foreign war was well known. Trump had even acknowledged it, shrugging it off as a minor difference in viewpoint.
“He was, I would say, philosophically a little bit different than me,” Trump explained in early March. “I think he was maybe less enthusiastic about going, but he was quite enthusiastic.”
Still, some Trump allies say they have been watching carefully for signs of Vance placing any daylight between himself and the president, on Iran or other issues that have caused consternation among some conservatives.
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