Trump Says Vance and Rubio Are Involved in Talks With Iran

Speaking from the Oval Office on Tuesday, President Donald Trump disclosed that Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio were personally involved in negotiations with Iran, a revelation that upended the widely held assumption that his special envoys were running the diplomatic show. "We're in negotiations right now," Trump told reporters, saying that Vance, Rubio, envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner were also involved.

The president had originally tapped Witkoff and Kushner to lead talks with Tehran, but Iranian officials refused to negotiate with them, according to the Guardian. The shift in who is at the table carries significant weight: Vance, in contrast to Witkoff, Kushner and even Rubio, is viewed as more sympathetic to wanting to end the war. Vance had been rumored to lead the U.S. delegation in potential face-to-face negotiations with Iranian officials, though White House officials declined to comment on those reports.

Trump said, referring to Rubio and Vance, "They're doing it along with Marco, JD, we have a number of people doing it," while answering questions in the Oval Office. He expressed confidence a deal was reachable: "And the other side, I can tell you, they'd like to make a deal," the president said.

Trump suggested Tehran was eager to reach an agreement to end the war, and said he had backed off from his recent threat to strike Iranian energy infrastructure "based on the fact we're negotiating." Iran publicly contradicted that framing. Iranian parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf denied on Monday that Iran was negotiating with the U.S. to end the war. An Iranian source told CNN that Tehran is willing to listen to "sustainable" proposals to end the war, suggesting back-channel contact even as the official denial stood.

A meeting between the U.S. and Iran later this week in Islamabad remains a possibility, but even those advocating for it are skeptical that it will actually happen. Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said in a social media post that his country was willing to facilitate talks between the two countries.

International shipping through the Strait of Hormuz remains gridlocked, leaving energy markets in turmoil and prompting the International Energy Agency to warn of a "major, major threat" to the wider global economy. Around 1,000 U.S. soldiers with the Army's 82nd Airborne Division are expecting to deploy in coming days to the Middle East.

On the domestic front, the Iran conflict was not the only crisis demanding Washington's attention. The Senate was closing in on a deal to reopen the Department of Homeland Security after a five-week shutdown that caused major delays at airports and prompted national security concerns amid the foreign conflict. Senate Majority Leader John Thune told reporters that the Republican offer would fund 94% of the DHS budget while withholding $5.5 billion for ICE's deportation arm, known as Enforcement and Removal Operations.

At a swearing-in ceremony for newly confirmed Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin on Tuesday, Trump said he would "take a good hard look" at the compromise funding proposal. But his support was far from guaranteed. Trump offered a pessimistic assessment of the plan Tuesday afternoon, saying "any deal they make, I'm pretty much not happy," just as top Democrats were insisting they would need more to support the plan as well.

Travelers were waiting in security lines for hours at some airports as unpaid TSA officers called off work. The Senate was scheduled to leave on a two-week recess, but those plans could be scuttled if DHS remains shut down. With both a widening war abroad and a gridlocked government at home, the week's diplomatic and legislative gambits were converging on the same question: how much leverage, and how much patience, Washington has left.