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As the world waits with bated breath to see whether the United States and Iran can achieve a deal to end the intensifying conflict before President Trump’s Tuesday evening deadline, Vice President J.D. Vance is hoping that the regime will play ball.
“We feel confident that we can get a response, whether it’s positive or negative, we’re gonna get a response from the Iranians by 8:00 tonight,” VP Vance said while speaking on Tuesday in Hungary.
Vance is visiting and working with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban this week, a close ally of the president’s administration, who is up for re-election.
“I hope they make the right response,” Vance continued. “Because what we really want, is we want a world where oil and gas is flowing freely, where people can afford to heat their homes and cool their homes, where people can afford to transport themselves to work. That’s not going to happen if the Iranians are engaged in acts of economic terrorism.”
The vice president said that Iran needed to understand that “we’ve got tools in our toolkit that we so far haven’t decided to use, the President of the United States can decide to use them, and he will decide to use them if the Iranians don’t change their course of conduct.”
It’s unclear what the vice president is referring to here as far as “tools,” but there is plenty of speculation in the public square. Some have suggested that this is a thinly veiled threat by President Trump to use nuclear weapons against Iran.
Understandably, the public’s fear that this could be a possibility ramped up on Tuesday morning after President Trump proclaimed on Truth Social, “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.”
The Trump administration’s main goal, as alluded to by Vice President Vance, is to free up the flow of oil and gas through the key chokepoint of the Strait of Hormuz – a shipping corridor that Iran has continued to threaten since the onset of Operation Epic Fury.
However, Rapid Response 47 – the administration’s rapid-fire social media account on X – refuted claims that the “tools” the vice president was alluding to were nuclear weapons.
“Literally nothing @VP said here ‘implies’ this, you absolute buffoons,” the account stated.
The president promised to strike Iran’s power plants and bridges on Tuesday as he turned the heat up on negotiations. On Easter Sunday, President Trump wrote mockingly, “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.”
As reported by RSBN, Israeli and U.S. strikes appeared to continue in Iran on Tuesday, even as the Iranian regime is reportedly encouraging its citizens to form human shields around critical infrastructure in a bid to stave off U.S. military attacks.
