Vance Is Pressed on Epstein, Race and His Boss on ‘The View’

One topic that did not arise was the president’s war on ABC. In December 2024, the network agreed to pay $15 million to settle a defamation lawsuit brought by Mr. Trump. In April of this year, Mr. Trump and his wife, Melania Trump, both demanded that ABC fire the late-night host Jimmy Kimmel for a joke he made about Mrs. Trump having “a glow like an expectant widow.” And then, last month, the network accused the Federal Communications Commission of threatening its station licenses as part of a campaign of “unconstitutional retaliation and coercion.”

After “The View,” Mr. Vance sat down with Megyn Kelly, the right-wing media personality whom the president recently attacked as an overrated, “Low IQ person.” She has been among the most searing critics of his war with Iran. “MAGA is not what it was,” she said last month. The month before that, she asked of Mr. Trump: “Can’t he just behave like a normal human?”

He said he gave the president a heads up. “I talked to him last night, and I said, ‘Mr. President, I’m going to go on Megyn Kelly’s show, and I’m going to defend the administration’s policies,’” Mr. Vance told Ms. Kelly. The boss apparently responded: “Absolutely, I love that.”

Mr. Vance’s book tour coincides with the administration’s drawdown of the conflict in Iran. The vice president, who is expected to sign the new cease-fire with Iran in France later this week, has been the face of the peace negotiations and is sure to get many questions about it on his book tour, especially while the president is himself in France at the Group of 7 summit. While some members of the MAGA base are happy that the fighting seems finally to be coming to a close, more hawkish types are growing fitful in the absence of any clear details about what a deal might entail.

Mr. Vance told Ms. Kelly that text of the deal would be released by Friday at the latest.

“The reason why we haven’t released it yet is there are some delicate diplomatic things going on, where the Iranians, and not just the Iranians, but some of our mediators, the Pakistanis and the Qataris, have asked us to sequence this in the right way,” he explained. “I don’t, frankly, fully understand it, but there are sensitivities that exist in the Arab and Muslim world that we’re trying to be responsive to. Fundamentally, does it really matter if the deal comes down on Wednesday versus Friday?”