JD Vance wants to be taken seriously on the world stage.

The world has other ideas.

In the span of roughly one year, the Vice President of the United States has managed to antagonize a dying pope, fly to Europe to campaign for a strongman trailing by double digits, and spend twenty-one consecutive hours negotiating a peace deal in Pakistan that collapsed before he could finish his press conference. He returned home with nothing. No agreement. No ceasefire. No deal. Three minutes at a podium. A wave from the top of the stairs. Gone.

This is the man who wants to be president.

And he still might be.

But first, let us linger on the wreckage. It deserves a proper tour.

JD Vance converted to Catholicism in 2019. He has spoken at length about his faith. He has written a memoir about it. He has described his religious journey as transformative, sincere, and central to his identity.

The Pope disagreed.

Not quietly, either. When Vance invoked the Catholic doctrine of ordo amoris to justify mass deportation — claiming that Christian love properly understood puts your countrymen before outsiders — Pope Francis wrote a letter to American bishops specifically to dismantle that argument. The Pope did not imply Vance was wrong. He told the bishops, in plain theological terms, that Vance’s reading falls outside of traditional Catholic thought. He reminded them that Jesus himself fled to a foreign country to survive. He reminded them that Christian love, properly understood, does not stop at a border.

Vance acknowledged the criticism and continued deporting people.

He flew to Rome for Easter 2025. He was not scheduled to meet the Pope. Francis was gravely ill, weeks out of the hospital after double pneumonia, operating on a limited schedule. When the Vatican’s number two met with Vance the day before Easter, he delivered — according to Vatican statement — a lecture on compassion for migrants and prisoners. Not a greeting. A lecture.

The following morning, Francis agreed to see Vance briefly. Vance’s motorcade was on Vatican territory for seventeen minutes. The Pope gave him chocolate Easter eggs for his children, a Vatican tie, and rosaries.

Pope Francis died the next day.

The headline Vance wanted was Vice President Meets Pope. The headline he earned was something else entirely: the last audience of a dying moral giant, granted to the man who spent a year arguing against everything he stood for. Francis gave him Easter candy and sent him home.

And this man controls our future.

Undeterred by the theological humiliation, Vance took his act to Budapest.

Viktor Orbán, sixteen years in power, was trailing his opponent by somewhere between ten and twenty-five points depending on the poll, heading into the April 12 election. His government was drowning in scandal. Allegations of deploying secret services against political opponents. Allegations of ties to Moscow. A general fatigue, as one analyst put it, from a population that had simply had enough.

What Orbán needed was a lifeline. What he got was JD Vance.

Vance arrived in Budapest, stood at a press conference, and said — on the record, to journalists — that he was not there to tell Hungarians how to vote. Then he walked into an arena packed with Orbán supporters and told them exactly how to vote.

“Will you stand for sovereignty and democracy?” he asked the crowd. “Will you stand for Western civilization? Then, my friends, go to the polls this weekend. Stand with Viktor Orbán, because he stands for you.”

The arena cheered. The analysts shrugged.

One expert said a Trump visit might have moved the needle. Vance, he noted, doesn’t set the campaign trail on fire by any stretch of the imagination. Another assessed the electoral impact of the visit as close to zero. A third noted that Vance’s arrival was secured at a cost of $1.2 billion to Hungarian taxpayers, in the form of forced purchases of American crude oil and missile systems that Orbán had to agree to in exchange for the visit.

Hungary paid $1.2 billion for JD Vance to show up and make things worse.

Vance himself confirmed the fundamental problem without appearing to notice. When he took the stage, the first thing he did was pull out a phone and call Trump. He put Trump on speaker so the crowd could hear the president’s voice.

The first attempt went straight to voicemail. An automated message played through the arena speakers for five thousand people: “I’m sorry, the person you are trying to reach has a voicemail box that has not been set up yet.”
Vance smiled and tried again.
Trump picked up on the second call, slightly unprepared. “Hi. Hey JD, could you give me a second?” The crowd cheered anyway.
This is MAGA diplomacy. The rescue mission called its principal and got voicemail. The principal answered on the second try and asked for a moment to collect himself. Orbán stood next to all of it, smiling.

He introduced Trump by telling the Hungarian audience that they love him even more than they love Viktor Orbán.

The man had flown across the Atlantic to rescue a candidate. He opened his speech by reminding the room that his candidate was everyone’s second choice.

The election was held on April 12. Orbán, the MAGA movement’s favorite European autocrat, entered it as the most vulnerable he had been in sixteen years. His opponent led by double digits. Hungary paid $1.2 billion for JD Vance to show up, and the polls did not move.

Vance flew home.

And this man controls our future.

Then came Pakistan. Then came twenty-one hours.

The United States and Iran had been at war since February 28, when the Trump administration launched Operation Epic Fury, a joint strike with Israel targeting Iranian military and nuclear facilities. The war had killed thousands. It had largely closed the Strait of Hormuz to commercial shipping, rattling global energy markets and sending prices spiking. After weeks of hostility, a fragile two-week ceasefire was announced. Vance was dispatched to Islamabad to convert it into something durable.

He brought Steve Witkoff. He brought Jared Kushner. He brought technical teams and subject-matter experts. He negotiated for twenty-one hours straight.

He accomplished nothing.

Iran refused to commit to abandoning its nuclear program. Iran refused to reopen the Strait of Hormuz unconditionally. The Iranian delegation cited, with some justification, a pattern of American bad faith: twice in recent memory, they noted, negotiations had been proceeding when the bombs started falling anyway. Upon arrival in Islamabad, Iran’s parliament speaker said their experience of negotiating with Americans has always been accompanied by failure and breaches of commitments. He was not wrong.

Vance walked to a podium. He spoke for less than four minutes. He took three questions. He said the talks had been substantive. He said Iran had not accepted American terms. He said this was bad news for Iran much more than it was bad news for the United States.

Then he boarded Air Force Two and left.

While he was still in the air, Trump announced a naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz.

Before the talks concluded, Trump had been asked if he was hopeful about the outcome. He replied “whatever,” and added that whether a deal was made or not makes no difference to him.

The President of the United States sent his Vice President to negotiate a war-ending agreement, and while the negotiations were still ongoing, told reporters the outcome was irrelevant to him.

This is what serious diplomacy looks like in the MAGA era. The understudy, sent by a principal who already announced he doesn’t care, negotiating with a counterpart that has every reason not to trust the principal in the first place.

Twenty-one hours. Nothing.

And this man controls our future.

Now stop laughing.
Pay attention.

JD Vance is not a serious diplomat. That has been established. He antagonized the papacy while claiming Catholic piety. He campaigned for a losing authoritarian and made him look weaker for the effort. He failed to close a ceasefire deal after twenty-one hours in Pakistan while his boss told the world he didn’t care either way.

None of it matters. Not to the base. Not to the machine that will nominate him.

MAGA does not require competence. It never has. It requires loyalty, performance, and the correct enemies. Vance has all three in abundance. He is fluent in the dialect. He knows which grievances to stroke and which fears to amplify. He wrote the memoir. He attended the rallies. He stood on the stage and called Trump on speakerphone like a man auditioning for a role he has already been promised.

The failures abroad will be repackaged. They always are.

The Pope rejected him? The Vatican is globalist, out of touch, soft on borders.

Orbán loses? The EU cheated. Brussels rigged it. Magyar is a puppet of foreign elites.

Iran walked away? Iran was always the enemy. The fact that we tried proves we are righteous. The fact that they refused proves they are beyond reason. Vance was there. Vance fought hard. Vance came home because there was nothing left to negotiate.

Every failure becomes a badge. Every collapse becomes evidence of the world’s hostility toward real Americans. The base will believe it. They have believed far more improbable things.

And when Trump is done, Vance is next in line. The party will not turn on him for failing at diplomacy. The party has no use for diplomacy. Diplomacy is what globalists do. What Vance does is show up, make noise, confirm the enemy’s existence, and come home.

That is the job description. He is executing it.

The danger is not that JD Vance is incompetent. Plenty of incompetent people have held office and done limited damage. The danger is that his incompetence is invisible to the people who will elect him. The danger is that a man who cannot get a dying pope to take him seriously, cannot move the needle for a friend running in a foreign election, cannot close a deal in twenty-one hours of direct negotiation with a country that was, by multiple accounts, looking for a way out — that man is the current favorite to lead the most powerful nation on earth.

Not despite the record. Alongside it. Unbothered by it.

Dismiss him and you have learned nothing from the last decade.

He is not a punchline on his way out. He is a punchline on his way up.

That distinction is everything.