Vice President JD Vance pulled his pregnant wife into a surreal analogy to defend the Trump administration’s negotiations over Iran’s nuclear enrichment.
The 41-year-old vice president likened telling Usha Vance she couldn’t go skydiving to forbidding Iran from pursuing nuclear enrichment after being pressed Wednesday over Iranian accusations that the U.S. had already violated the two-week ceasefire deal.
While Iran said the U.S. had accepted a 10-point peace plan that included its right to nuclear enrichment, President Donald Trump declared Wednesday, “There will be no enrichment of Uranium.”
Vance tried to explain that the administration is not concerned with what Iran’s leaders “claim they have the right to do” by strangely invoking Usha’s “right to skydive.”
“I thought to myself: You know what, my wife has the right to skydive, but she does not jump out of the airplane because we have an agreement that she won’t do that, because I don’t want my wife jumping out of an airplane,” the vice president said, before seamlessly transitioning from domestic drama back to his point about Iran’s nuclear enrichment.
“We don’t really concern ourselves with what they claim they have the right to do. We concern ourselves with what they actually do,” he continued. “And I think the president has been very clear on the enrichment question. Our position on that has not changed.”
Trump, 79, said on Truth Social that the U.S. would work with Iran to “dig up and remove” all of the highly-enriched uranium buried under rubble from last year’s U.S. strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities.
Iran’s parliamentary speaker, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, responded by saying that Iran’s 10-point peace plan, which Trump deemed “workable” on Tuesday, preserved the country’s right to nuclear enrichment.
“Now, the very ‘workable basis on which to negotiate’ has been openly and clearly violated, even before the negotiations began,” Ghalibaf said in a statement on X.
Vance, who spoke to reporters from Budapest, Hungary, was also cornered on Trump’s crazed threat to wipe out a “whole civilization.”
He repeatedly sidestepped addressing the president’s Truth Social post before explaining, “The president of the United States is saying that unless the Iranians do the right thing, he is going to have some serious consequences for the regime.”
“We obviously don’t want the people of Iran to suffer but we have a lot of leverage the president of the United States could use and that’s why it’s so important for the Iranians to be negotiators in good faith,” he said.
The vice president sparked outcry in October after publicly stating that he wished his wife, who is Hindu, would follow him in converting to Catholicism.
The Vances, who married in 2014 and are expecting their fourth child in July, stirred further rumors of trouble in paradise after Usha was spotted several times without her wedding ring.
Vance later declared his marriage “as strong as it’s ever been” in an NBC News interview in December, saying the two of them “kind of get a kick out of” rampant speculation about the state of their union.
The Daily Beast has reached out to Vance’s office for comment.
