He’s the former marine commando used to dealing with high-pressured situations that demand immediate reaction.

JD Vance is frequently being put to the test by Donald Trump with last-minute changes to plans and sudden revelations while he is in the public eye.

One of the most notable recent occasions saw the vice president just minutes away from going live on Fox News with Bret Baier.

He was sitting on the set on Monday when suddenly producers rushed over to tell him the president had released breaking news on social media.

Trump had just revealed he’d reached a ceasefire between Iran and Israel after launching a historic airstrike on Iran’s nuclear capabilities.

Vance grinned, realizing he was facing yet another last-minute curve ball from his volatile boss.

After recently meeting with the president at the White House, Vance, despite having seen a draft of the statement, took the time to carefully review it to ensure he understood it completely.

It was just one more test of his ability to react in real time on live television to quick-shifting narratives unleashed by an unpredictable boss.

Image Caption: A photo provided by the White House shows U.S. President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance seated in the Situation Room, monitoring a mission targeting three Iranian nuclear enrichment sites.

In a photo released by the White House via X, US President Donald Trump (R) and Vice President JD Vance

‘How often does it happen where you’re going to do an interview and you get a Truth Social seconds before, you have some sense of it, but it’s pretty detailed, where you are being asked about something the president has just put out?’ Baier asked.

‘In this administration, Bret, it happens quite a bit actually, but we knew this was coming,’ Vance chuckled.

The vice president celebrated the breaking news of a cease on Fox News, but he was also eager to report there were no American casualties as a result of the operation.

‘The president, without, knock on wood, having a single American casualty, obliterated the Iranian nuclear program,’ Vance said, literally knocking his knuckles on the studio desk.

Vance spent long hours with the president and his team to make sure that the first major military action of his second term was not a disaster.

‘He wanted to make sure every option was thoroughly vetted as the administration weighed its military plans, with a focus on preserving the president’s flexibility and minimizing risks to U.S. forces,’ a source close to Vance told the Daily Mail.  

As the national security team discussed the operation, Vance and key figures of his administration knew that a botched presidential operation on foreign policy could lead to a significant blow to the administration’s reputation early on in Trump’s second term.

For John F. Kennedy, it was the Bay of Pigs, for President Richard Nixon it was the ugly four year struggle to end the war in Vietnam, for President Joe Biden, it was the disastrous exit from Afghanistan, and nobody in the administration wanted anything to look like George W. Bush’s eight years of ‘regime change’ war in the Middle East.

President Bill Clinton faced the ugly political ramifications from his failed ‘Black Hawk Down’ mission in Somalia where 18 American soldiers were killed, 84 were wounded, and one American servicemember was captured.

US President Donald Trump addresses the nation, alongside US Vice President JD Vance (L), US Secretary of State Marco Rubio (2nd R) and US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth (R), from the White Hous

President Obama and his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton were haunted politically for years by the 2012 failure to protect American diplomats and troops in Benghazi, and the mishandled the messaging that followed. 

Key figures in the President’s MAGA coalition were warning the president away from launching strikes on Iran, arguing it could be the ‘end of his presidency’ if it went wrong or escalated into a full scale war.

The vice president broke his silence as the online debate raged and after citing ‘a lot of crazy stuff on social media’ Vance urged Trump supporters to trust the president. 

At the same time, however, he previewed that the president was preparing to act. 

‘He may decide he needs to take further action to end Iranian enrichment,’ he said. ‘That decision ultimately belongs to the president.’ 

By Monday evening, Vance and the entire administration breathed a sigh of relief: the worst had been avoided and they felt it was time to declare ‘mission success.’

‘I can’t emphasize this enough. We have destroyed the Iranian nuclear program. Zero Americans have died. That’s an amazing, amazing thing. Americans, whether Democrats or Republicans, we should be celebrating that,’ he said.

A day earlier, Vance was more cautious on the Sunday shows as he declared the mission a success and resisted trumpeting the lack of casualties, knowing that Iran could still strike back against military bases in the Middle East. He also emphasized the administration did not want ‘regime change,’ a statement that was undermined hours later when the president floated that exact possibility.

US President Donald Trump and US Vice President JD Vance salute at the National Memorial Day Observance at the Memorial Amphitheatre

Trump made it clear that if any Americans were killed, he was prepared to unleash more hell on Iran in response.

On Monday, the United States successfully intercepted the Iranian missile attacks against the U.S. base in Qatar and no Americans had been killed or wounded.

Prior to Trump’s direction, the public debate within the MAGA movement over Israel’s strikes in Iran and their efforts to convince the Americans to join them grew heated and Vance got caught in the crossfire.

A Reuters report detailed that Vance challenged Israeli officials in a ‘tense phone call’ telling them the United States ‘shouldn’t be directly involved and suggesting that the Israelis were going to drag the country into war.’

A White House official disputed the report noting, ‘the Vice President did not say this during the call’ but the report sparked outrage from Republican hawks who questioned his loyalty to the president.

‘Is this report about Vance accurate?’ asked conservative radio host Mark Levin on social media questioning the vice president’s role in the ongoing debate.

Levin followed up by citing a ‘solid source’ that the report was ‘inaccurate’ but he did not delete his post raising questions about the vice president, wondering openly whether Vance was trying to convince the president to back down.  

Others on social media accused the vice president’s staff, without evidence, of leaking to media outlets and demanded an investigation.

Vance broke his silence to describe one accuser on social media as a ‘loser’ for attacking his team and added, ‘he has no evidence for this BS smear because there isn’t any.’

The White House praised Vance’s performance in a statement to the Daily Mail.  

‘Vice President JD Vance is one of President Trump’s closest and most trusted advisors,’ White House Spokesperson Davis Ingle said. ‘Vice President Vance is a highly-respected Marine veteran and an America First warrior who shares President Trump’s America First foreign policy vision.’

Since Trump first selected the freshman Ohio senator as his running mate in the Summer of 2024, Vance has faced skepticism from traditional interventionists for his knee-jerk resistance to foreign entanglements.

‘Trump’s Best Foreign Policy? Not Starting Any Wars,’ he wrote in a 2023 opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal, praising the president for resisting ‘enormous pressure from his own party and even members of his own administration’ to avoid escalating tensions in the Middle East.

After joining the ticket, however, Vance indicated on multiple occasions that Iran could not get a nuclear weapon and that he supported the president’s ‘punch hard’ philosophy on military engagements.

Vice President JD Vance joins Meet the Press following U.S. strikes on Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities 

ABC News’ Jonathan Karl interviews Vice President JD Vance on ‘This Week.

In his starring role on the the Sunday shows, Vance demonstrated the president’s confidence in him, but also put his own political reputation on the line to defend the president’s decision to strike Iranian nuclear facilities.

He indicated he had been listening to the raging debate in the MAGA movement but urged them to trust the president.

‘I certainly empathize with Americans who are exhausted after 25 years of foreign entanglements in the Middle East,’ he said on NBC’s Meet the Press. ‘I understand the concern, but the difference is that back then, we had dumb presidents, and now we have a president who actually knows how to accomplish America’s national security objectives,’ he said.

Even though he was not the ultimate ‘decider,’ Vance would still shoulder the political fallout for a failed mission or one that ultimately makes the U.S. less safe.

By Tuesday morning, however, he showed no sign of trepidation as he praised the president’s successful military strikes.

‘For my entire life, American presidents have so misused American power that many in my generation have lost confidence in our country,’ he wrote. ‘President Trump is rebuilding that confidence brick by brick.’

He also signaled relief at the end of the 12 day ordeal.  

‘I wonder if other VPs had as much excitement as I do,’ he added with the crying laughing emoji.