The long, nuanced answer to the vice president’s post-election autopsy ran three printed pages and five words.

Comedian and NBC host Seth Meyers delivered that rebuttal during the “A Closer Look” segment of “Late Night with Seth Meyers” on Thursday night, Nov. 5, 2026, answering Vice President JD Vance, 42, who had blamed the war in Iran for his party’s collapse in the midterms.

Meyers first rolled a clip of a CNN anchor revealing the post on air, then opened his response with applause. He told viewers that Vance deserved credit for sitting down to write a thoughtful look at the political landscape and at where his party went wrong.

Then came the setup. Meyers said he had drafted a long, nuanced reply of his own and asked the audience for patience before he reached for a short stack of paper. The three sheets read, in order: “No one’s,” “****ing,” “buying it.” Meyers was laughing as he turned over the last one.

A Knicks Jersey Over the Spurs

Meyers compared the vice president’s turn to a fan celebrating on the streets of New York in a brand-new Knicks jersey pulled over his old Spurs one. Vance forfeited his right to oppose the war eight months in, Meyers said, after months of supporting it and only now that the rest of the country had soured on it.

The war began in February 2026 and has not ended. It is wildly unpopular with Americans and has been condemned worldwide, and Vance spent eight months justifying it to the public, at times assuring audiences that the war was over and that President Donald Trump would not let it drag on forever.

Meyers played several clips of Vance backing the war, including one in which the vice president pushed back on the idea that it was a war at all. Vance went out of his way to say Trump was uniquely qualified to execute it and that every goal had been achieved, Meyers said, noting that the man now blaming the war had insisted only two months earlier that it was not even a war. Meyers called the vice president a liar, then slipped into an impression of him, confessing that lying was his only talent, that he was not even good at it, and that everyone, himself included, could tell.

What the Vice President Blamed

Vance posted his lengthy explanation on X on Wednesday, Nov. 4, the morning after the election, and it dismantled his own administration’s record. Voters had gone to the polls Tuesday, Nov. 3, and handed Democrats control of both the House and the Senate.

“The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night,” Vance wrote. His accounting listed four factors: the war, the rising cost of living, the U.S. relationship with Israel and an America-first posture. His own voters turned out, Vance wrote; those four things were the reason many people cast ballots for Democrats.

The post leaned heavily on polling. Vance said a pollster he had consulted surveyed people who backed the Trump-Vance ticket in 2024 but planned to vote Democratic in the midterms, and he laid out four fixes to win them back: end the Iran war, focus on inflation, put America first and change the U.S. relationship with Israel.

Anyone arguing the war was worth losing the Senate for the next six years should say so plainly, Vance wrote, because at least that would be honest. He added that he had gone into Election Day feeling negative, and that he was shocked by a pollster’s estimate that Republicans would lose the generic congressional ballot by 13 points.

Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son, shared the post and praised it. Others faulted Vance for writing like a pundit rather than the sitting vice president. Vance has said he will decide after the election whether to run for president in 2028.

Trump Wouldn’t Take Any of It Back

Trump, asked about his vice president’s diagnosis, did not dispute it. He called the assessment largely true and pointed to the surge in gas prices the war touched off, but he refused to take any of it back. Given the chance, the president said, he would do it again, because in the long run it was the only answer.

Pressed on when the fighting would stop, Trump said: “Whenever I want it to, but it’s got to be done right.” Asked about the vice president’s post on Sunday, Nov. 8, he told reporters: “But a lot of people didn’t like his comments. But not me.”

“Late Night” returned to the fallout in a segment posted around Nov. 10 and titled “Trump Baselessly Claims Rigged Election After Historic Loss.” Its description of the aftermath of the midterm defeat: “The president cries fraud, throws blame, and suggests he would rather go to hell than forgive his enemies.”

No Speech, No Resignation

Rosemary Boeglin, the Democratic National Committee communications director, questioned whether Vance meant any of it. If he had felt this way all along, she asked, why had he not spoken out forcefully, and why had he not resigned. Vance does whatever is politically convenient in the moment, Boeglin said, and the administration’s failures are his.

On Fox News, contributor Marc Thiessen went the other direction, calling the vice president’s statement “disloyal to the president of the United States.”