Here's a political puzzle for you: When President Donald Trump gets into a public spat with the Pope, who else might be catching some of the shrapnel? According to Anthony Scaramucci, the answer is Vice President JD Vance.
Scaramucci, who served briefly as Trump's White House communications director, says Trump's clash this week with Pope Leo XIV was more than just a Vatican-vs-Washington drama. He argues it also amounted to a subtle sabotage of Vance, a Catholic who has become one of the administration's most visible defenders on the Iran war.
Scaramucci Sees Vance In The Crossfire
In a post on X, Scaramucci wrote that Trump "puts everybody in the woodchipper before it's over," that Vance is "feeling it now," and that "he won't be the last." He called the pattern "not personal" but simply "who he is."
Think about it this way: Vance converted to Catholicism, and the pope is a significant figure for roughly 80 million American Catholics. So when Trump attacks Leo, Scaramucci argues, that's also—deliberately or not—a slight against his vice president.
"People are missing the Vance dimension entirely," Scaramucci wrote, framing the Pope dispute as both a political and a religious slight.
Earlier this week, Scaramucci had separately mocked Vance as a "jellyfish" and questioned why he wouldn't defend the pontiff. It's the kind of commentary that makes you wonder about the temperature in certain Washington circles.
Iran Talks Add Pressure On Vance
Meanwhile, there's the whole Iran thing. Scaramucci also suggested Vance may have been "set up" during weekend Iran talks because Washington was never going to accept any outcome that left Tehran with continued uranium enrichment and a path to a bomb.
This comes after Vance, in media appearances, defended Trump's criticism of Leo while saying disagreements with the Vatican were "natural" and "not that big of a deal."
So you've got a vice president trying to navigate religious diplomacy while also managing actual diplomacy in a Middle East conflict. And according to a CNN report syndicated elsewhere on Thursday, Trump has been closely monitoring Vance's efforts to help broker an end to the war and has been asking friends and advisers how they would rate his performance.
That's a lot of scrutiny for one vice president.
Old Critiques Fit A Familiar Pattern
Scaramucci's latest comments fit into a familiar pattern of critique. In a Newsweek interview published April 6, he argued that "nobody is actually friends with Trump" and said Trump sees people as "an object in the guy's field of vision," not as full individuals.
In social clips tied to that interview, Scaramucci described alliances with Trump as ego-driven "Faustian" arrangements—a view he has linked to his own short and combustible White House tenure. It's the kind of perspective you get when you've been inside the machine and seen how it works.
The Vance angle matters because it's happening while the vice president is also under fresh scrutiny over Iran. It's one thing to have policy disagreements; it's another to have your boss feuding with the leader of your religious faith while you're trying to negotiate an end to a war.
Scaramucci's basic thesis seems to be this: Trump's relationships follow a predictable cycle, and Vance is just experiencing a phase of that cycle. Whether that's accurate or not, it's certainly a compelling narrative about power, loyalty, and the strange dynamics of this particular administration.
