Vice President JD Vance’s answer to a question about conservative pundit Tucker Carlson left some in the audience disappointed.
Page A3From§Eachthe wee small hours edition — 2 September 2026
Told to pick Israel or Tucker Carlson, Vance says he's fine if the answer is the End Times.
As it ran on the front
There's a very specific move in politics where somebody hands you an impossible choice specifically because either answer makes the story. Nikki Haley did it clean: pick a side, Israel or Tucker Carlson. That's not a policy question, that's a trap built out of a Rolodex, and the vice president is currently standing in the middle of it, trying to court Jewish Republican donors with one hand while a cable-news populist with a direct line to the base breathes down his neck with the other.
Normally a politician caught in that kind of pincer picks a lane and drives. Vance did something stranger. Asked, in effect, about where his current job might lead, he said that if his work with the president leads to the End Times, that's okay. Sit with the sentence construction for a second, because the grammar is doing real work: not 'that won't happen,' not 'that's a risk I take seriously' — 'that's okay.' That is a man being handed a binary about foreign policy alliances and answering a completely different, much bigger question, on the record, without being asked it directly.…
…(cont) I don't think this is a slip. I think it's the tell. When you spend a career building a coalition out of people who take biblical prophecy as a literal item on the policy agenda, eventually somebody's going to ask you the logical follow-up, and the honest answer, the one that doesn't cost you anything with that particular coalition, is the one he gave. It only sounds insane if you assume the goal is stability. If the goal is something else, 'that's okay' is not a gaffe, it's a status update.
Here's the actual stake, the boring one, the one that doesn't need Revelation to be scary: this is the man who is one heartbeat away from the office that decides whether the missiles currently flying at Iran keep flying, expand, or stop. He was just asked, essentially, whether the outcome of that decision-making mattering is fine with him, and he said yes. You don't need to believe in the End Times to notice that the guy holding some of the levers just told you, calmly, he wouldn't mind pulling them all the way.
“Nikki Haley tells the vice president to pick a side, Israel or Tucker Carlson, like it's a two-item menu, and he answers by saying he's fine with the End Times as a possible outcome of his own job. That's not a gaffe, that's the stated position of a guy a heartbeat from the presidency. When the vice president says the apocalypse is an acceptable side effect, that's not a talking point, that's a warning label.”
“The Vice President was speaking in the context of his faith, and taking a sound bite about eschatology out of that context is exactly the kind of gotcha journalism that — look, he did say 'End Times' and 'that's okay,' those are his words, in that order, I watched the clip. I'm not saying it's a great answer. I'm saying it's an honest one, which is either reassuring or the opposite of reassuring, and I need a minute to figure out which.”
The receipts
Shortly before US President Donald Trump on Tuesday spurred fresh fears that he'll use nuclear weapons in his illegal war on Iran, Vice President JD Vance told a Christian podcaster that he's fine with the administration's work leading to the end times. "Do I think that we're in the end times? I don't know," Vance told 22-year-old…
Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley accused Vice President Vance Tuesday of not taking a clear stance on Israel — slamming him for trying to “be both.” “Right is right.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.