The right-wing media’s hawks recognize the reported memorandum of understanding that President Donald Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance signed with Iran on Sunday is a dog’s breakfast that fails to achieve the administration’s stated war goals and leaves the U.S. in a weaker geostrategic position than before it began. But they also understand that the cult-like structure of the MAGA movement means that criticizing Trump directly could trigger an audience revolt, and that Trump himself is unlikely to change course if he feels personally impugned.

The result is a truly pathetic effort to blame the MOU’s contents on Vance — who reportedly supported the agreement and is making the interview rounds defending it while Trump is in Europe — while absolving Trump of responsibility for the document that he signed and publicly describes as “a very strong deal.”

Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade exemplifies this approach. A longtime supporter of military strikes on Iran, Kilmeade supported Trump launching the war in February. Over the past months, he has repeatedly urged the president to undertake risky escalations to “finish the job.” 

He also laid down a marker by asserting that “we can't leave this conflict with the uranium in the ground and the strait in Iran's hands.” This reported agreement plainly does not meet that standard, and unlike his primetime colleagues Jesse Watters and Sean Hannity, who are lavishing Trump with praise for the MOU, Kilmeade is responding by being forthright about his concerns.

But while Kilmeade spent much of Wednesday’s program panning the MOU’s reported contents, he repeatedly placed the blame on Vance while suggesting that Trump may have been out of the loop and deceived — and now that he’s paying attention, could ultimately decide to blow up the deal at the last moment

“All I'm going to say, the vice president was here and did a wonderful job on every outlet, including The View,” Kilmeade said near the top of the show. “But this is his deal. It's not the president's deal. And it's his deal and Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner together. I just hope they didn't let the president down. Because the president is putting a lot of stock in them. He can't do everything himself. I just hope they didn't let him down.”

Later in the program, after enlisting Hudson Institute senior fellow Rebeccah Heinrichs to help criticize the MOU for relieving the U.S. blockade and helping to rebuild the Iranian economy while allowing Iran to implement tolls on the strait and leaving the regime in place, Kilmeade added: “Everything that you said, I think the president would say. I’m just wondering if the people that negotiated this have informed the president about what’s in the page and a half he is going to read publicly on Friday.”

He went on to say that he hoped Trump would “go in” and change the agreement to make it more favorable “in the next 24 hours.”

“It doesn't look like Iran has been brought to its knees,” Kilmeade complained in a third segment. “Iran got a lot out of it that many people weren't expecting. That's going to be the issue. And maybe the president wasn't even expecting, because he has got enough plates in the air that he can't be into every detail.”

“So, I just wonder if the vice president, who was against this by all reports, was against the conflict to begin with, maybe he wasn't the right person to bring this conflict to an end," he concluded.

In this telling, Trump — who has spent recent weeks planning a birthday bash featuring military flyovers and a UFC fight at the White House, ensuring that the bottom of the Reflecting Pool is painted “American flag blue,” and complaining about his name being removed from the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts — simply lost track of the negotiations to end the war he started, is either too lazy to read the page and a half agreement or too stupid to understand its contents, and was hoodwinked by his perfidious vice president.

And this is the story he’s telling to avoid blaming the president!

Others have similarly sought to make Vance the “Iran Deal Fall Guy,” as The Bulwark’s Joe Perticone put it after speaking to Senate Republicans like Lindsey Graham, who described the vice president as “the architect of the deal.” On Tuesday, Ben Shapiro similarly characterized it as “JD’s deal.” Vance, meanwhile, is accusing right-wing media hawks who criticize the agreement, like Fox’s Marc Thiessen and Mark Levin, of believing “Iranian propaganda,” a characterization sure to widen the split.

Ultimately, the MAGA hawks are victims of their own success and their own hubris. They got the war they demanded, only for Iran’s obvious counterstroke of closing the Strait of Hormuz to prove just as damaging as national security experts had warned. Now the incompetent president they supported is careening that war towards failure, and they can’t even manage to say that publicly without further discrediting themselves and risking their position within the movement.