A late-night comedian answered the vice president’s long explanation of why his party lost the midterms with three sheets of paper and five words.
Seth Meyers, the comedian and NBC host, read that rebuttal during the “A Closer Look” segment of “Late Night with Seth Meyers” on Thursday night, Nov. 5, 2026, after rolling a clip of a CNN anchor revealing Vice President JD Vance’s post on air.
Meyers opened with applause. Vance, 42, deserved credit, he said, for sitting down to write a thoughtful look at the political landscape and where his party went wrong. Then he announced that he had drafted a long, nuanced reply of his own, and asked the audience for patience.
He held up a short stack of paper — three sheets, a single word on each. The first read “No one’s.” The second read “****ing.” The third read “buying it,” and Meyers was laughing as he turned it over.
The Knicks Jersey Over Spurs
The vice president, in Meyers’ comparison, looked like a fan celebrating on the streets of New York in a brand-new Knicks jersey pulled over an old Spurs one. Vance forfeited the right to oppose the war eight months in, Meyers said, after months of supporting it and only once the rest of the country had soured on it.
The segment played several clips of Vance backing the war, including one in which he pushed back on the idea that it was a war at all. Vance had gone out of his way to say that the execution of it suited President Donald Trump uniquely and that every goal had been achieved, Meyers said. The man blaming the war now, he noted, had insisted only two months earlier that it was not even a war.
Meyers called the vice president a liar. Then came an impression of Vance confessing that lying was his only talent, that he was not even good at it, and that everyone, himself included, could tell.
Blaming the War the Morning After
Vance posted his lengthy explanation on X on Wednesday, Nov. 4, the morning after the election, blaming the war in Iran for his party’s collapse. Democrats had won control of both the House and the Senate in the midterms on Tuesday, Nov. 3, dismantling his own administration’s record.
“The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night,” Vance wrote.
Three other factors filled out his accounting: the rising cost of living, the U.S. relationship with Israel and an America-first posture. His voters turned out, Vance wrote, and those four things were why many of them cast ballots for Democrats. A pollster he had consulted surveyed people who backed the Trump-Vance ticket in 2024 but planned to vote Democratic in the midterms, and Vance drew four fixes from that survey for winning them back: end the Iran war, focus on inflation, put America first and change the U.S. relationship with Israel.
Anyone who wanted to argue that the war was worth losing the Senate for the next six years should say so plainly, Vance wrote, because at least that would be honest. He added that he had felt negative going into Election Day. A pollster’s estimate that Republicans would lose the generic congressional ballot by 13 points had shocked even him, he said.
Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son, shared the post and praised it. The post also drew criticism that Vance had written it like a pundit rather than the sitting vice president. Vance has said he will decide after the election whether to run for president in 2028.
Trump Would Do It Again
Trump, asked about his vice president’s diagnosis, did not dispute it. He called the assessment largely true and pointed to the surge in gas prices the war touched off. He refused to take any of it back, saying he would do it all over again and that in the long run it was the only answer.
Pressed on when the fighting would stop, Trump said: “Whenever I want it to, but it’s got to be done right.”
Asked about the post on Sunday, Nov. 8, the president told reporters: “But a lot of people didn’t like his comments. But not me.”
On Thursday, Nov. 12, Trump directed Vance on Truth Social to “focus his complete and total attention” on the administration’s anti-fraud campaign rather than on the war. “We don’t need a deal with Iran,” Trump wrote in the same post.
The DNC Asks Why He Stayed
Democratic National Committee communications director Rosemary Boeglin doubted the sincerity of the post, wondering aloud why a man who had felt this way the whole time never said so forcefully or stepped down. Political convenience guides Vance in any given moment, she said, and he owns the administration’s failures.
A conservative television guest went the opposite direction, calling Vance disloyal and accusing him of backstabbing Trump.
The fighting started in February 2026, and no end has come. It is wildly unpopular with Americans and has been condemned worldwide. Vance spent eight months justifying it to the public, telling audiences it was over and that Trump would not let it drag on forever.
