Vice President JD Vance accuses Mark Levin and Marc Thiessen of promoting Iranian propaganda about the MOU
Vance: “Why do they believe Iranian propaganda only about one thing, the peace deal? They don't seem to believe Iranian propaganda — rightfully so — about anything else.”
Published
Vice President JD Vance accuses Mark Levin and Marc Thiessen of promoting Iranian propaganda
Citation
From the June 16, 2026, edition of SiriusXM's The Megyn Kelly Show
MEGYN KELLY (HOST): OK, so here's some of the reaction. Marc Thiessen said if the deal terms are accurate, as has been leaked, it's a complete disaster. He's calling this, by the way, the Vance deal.
JD VANCE (GUEST): I wonder why he doesn't call it the Trump deal.
KELLY: I wonder too. There is Ben Domenech, who was on Special Report last night, called this a hillbilly Obama deal.
VANCE: I wonder who that's a reference to.
KELLY: Seems to be a shot at you, sir. Not bold foreign policy. There's a guy named Yinon Magal, who is an Israeli journalist who's very close with Netanyahu, who is basically his mouthpiece, who called you a lowlife, called Donald Trump a loser. The Israeli ambassador to the United States called this so disappointing.
Then there's Mark Levin, who's been rage-tweeting about it every five minutes. He demands to see the memorandum. He demands that this be treated like a treaty to where now you have to get congressional approval for the MOU. The Constitution does say you need approval to declare war, which Trump doesn't think he did and didn't seek. But now — and they, and he defended him on that — but now that we're ending it, which you definitely don't need congressional approval for, he wants this treated like a treaty and is demanding you go before Congress, sir.
VANCE: Well, to be clear, I don't think that congressional approval was required. I really firmly do believe that. The president, this is not — was was never a full scale war in the conventional or legal sense of it, so we definitely made sure that we dotted our I's and crossed our T's here. So I wanted to defend the administration on that point.
But it is kind of ironic that they're really, really worried about stopping this thing, but they were completely gung ho about starting this thing. And look, I want to be responsive and charitable to some of these concerns. So first of all, why do they believe Iranian propaganda only about one thing, the peace deal? They don't seem to believe Iranian propaganda — rightfully so — about anything else. So if you're in the position of endorsing Iranian propaganda only when it's related to this peace deal, then maybe you should check yourself a little bit and question your sources.
The second thing that I'd say is what is their alternative? If you look today, Brent crude is around $78 a barrel, West Texas crude is even lower $75, $73 a barrel. I mean, the numbers float around a little bit, but what that means is lower gas prices for Americans, lower energy costs for Americans. That means that this little blip that we've had of an increase in energy costs, has caused a lot of people some problems, we're now getting back to normal.
And I think that fundamentally, if you look at what they're proposing, they're proposing an endless conflict. They want this to go on until every bomb has been dropped or until every Iranian is dead. That is not what the president of the United States wants. What he said is, I set about this to end their nuclear program, to eliminate their ability to threaten their neighbors and project power, and to fundamentally make sure that no future child would have to deal with a terrorist regime with an atomic bomb.
That's why the president set out to do this. He feels, and he's right, that he's accomplished that goal, and now we can get to the negotiation to see what are the other benefits that we can get from this, and frankly, what are the benefits the Iranians could get from this if they behave? I just don't think that the people who are criticizing this, one, they're not actually dealing with the reality of what's in it. And number two, they don't have an alternative.
If your alternative is just to drop bombs without any clear goal or any clear American interest implicated, then you're not making the wise decisions on behalf of the American people. The president is and that's why we're in this position.