Seth Meyers printed out his response to the vice president’s explanation of why Republicans lost the midterms, and it ran three pages for a total of five words.
The 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 the post on air. His target was Vice President JD Vance, who had published a lengthy explanation on X on Wednesday, Nov. 4, blaming the war in Iran for his party’s collapse in the Tuesday, Nov. 3, midterm elections. Democrats won control of both the House and the Senate.
Meyers began with applause. Vance deserved credit, Meyers said, for sitting down to write a thoughtful look at the political landscape and at where his party went wrong. Meyers then announced that he had drafted a long, nuanced reply of his own and asked the audience to be patient with him.
He held up a short stack of paper, three sheets with a single word on each. The first said “No one’s,” the second “****ing” and the third “buying it,” and Meyers laughed as he turned over the last one.
Blaming the War He Defended
Vance, 42, had spent the morning after the election dismantling his own administration’s record. “The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night,” he wrote on X. Three other factors followed in 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 are why many of them cast ballots for Democrats.
The post leaned on polling. Vance said a pollster he consulted surveyed people who backed the Trump-Vance ticket in 2024 but planned to vote Democratic in the midterms, and that winning them back came down to four fixes: end the Iran war, focus on inflation, put America first and change the U.S. relationship with Israel. Anyone who wanted to argue the war was worth losing the Senate for the next six years should say so plainly, he wrote, because at least that would be honest. Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son, shared the post and praised it. Vance, who has said he will decide after the election whether to run for president in 2028, has drawn criticism for writing it like a pundit rather than the sitting vice president.
A Knicks Jersey Over the Spurs One
Meyers was not buying the conversion. He compared Vance to a fan celebrating on the streets of New York in a brand-new Knicks jersey pulled over his old Spurs one. The vice president had forfeited the right to oppose the war eight months in, Meyers said, after spending those months supporting it and only now that the rest of the country had soured on it.
Then came the receipts. Meyers played several clips of Vance backing the war, including one of him pushing back on the idea that it was a war at all. Vance had gone out of his way to say Trump was uniquely qualified to execute it and that every goal had been achieved, Meyers said.
The man blaming the war now, Meyers noted, had insisted only two months earlier that it was not even a war.
Trump Says He Would Do It Again
Asked about his vice president’s diagnosis, President Donald Trump did not dispute it. He called the assessment largely true, pointing to the surge in gas prices the war touched off. He also refused to take any of it back. Given the chance, Trump said, he would do it all over again, because in the long run it was the only answer. Pressed on when the fighting would stop, he said, “Whenever I want it to, but it’s got to be done right.”
Democratic National Committee communications director Rosemary Boeglin questioned whether Vance meant any of it, asking why he had not spoken out forcefully or resigned if he had felt this way all along. Vance does whatever is politically convenient in the moment, she said, and the administration’s failures are his. On Fox News, a guest went the other direction, calling Vance disloyal and accusing him of backstabbing Trump.
The war began in February 2026 and has not ended. It has been wildly unpopular with Americans and condemned worldwide, and Vance spent eight months justifying it to the public — telling audiences it was over and that Trump would not let it drag on forever. Vance wrote that he felt negative going into Election Day, but that even he was shocked by a pollster’s estimate that Republicans would lose the generic congressional ballot by 13 points.
Meyers called the vice president a liar, then slipped into 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.