LARRY KUDLOW: What is JD Vance doing?

Kim Strassell writing today in the Wall Street Journal argues that Vice President Vance has gone AWOL. 

The leader of the Senate could bring Congress together, but he’s hawking a book. 

My pal Ben Domenech, writing in the Daily Wire, suggests that Mr. Vance is in desperate need of a “nineties summer”.

Right now, Mr. Domenech explains, Mr. Vance is too online. The vice president pays too much attention to social media that he appears to be blaming Israel for a peace deal with Iran that was poorly put together from the very beginning, and of course ripped to pieces by Iran. 

The nineties summer? Chill out with minimal screen time, maximum outdoor time, and major family time. 

The New York Post editorial board is even more direct: Mr. Vance is wrong to blame Israel for his Iran peace deal’s failure thus far. 

And the Post warns that Mr. Vance is flirting with rank antisemitism.  

Just as baffling was Mr. Vance’s podcast with The Daily Wire where he attacked the free-market, free-enterprise, school-choice icon, Milton Friedman, then attacked the equally capitalist free enterprise iconic British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher. And then later in the interview attacked the concept of meritocracy. Huh?

President Trump has done all he can to get rid of woke DEI affirmative action on steroids produced by President Obama and then President Biden, in order to restore the great American principle of merit-based achievement. And Mr. Vance is attacking that?

Or we have all these howling far-left socialists — Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Senator Bernie Sanders, virtually the whole Democratic Party — screaming for big-government socialism or communism in order to nationalize the economy and continue their antisemitic, hate-based policies railing against Israel and Jewish people in general. And Mr. Vance is somehow cross-ruffing to that?

I’m sure he means well and I don’t want this to sound personal because I’ve always gotten along with him. Frankly, though, I don’t understand what he’s doing and I truly believe he needs to step back a moment for a great reset of his policy priorities and his own actions.