Trump Tells Vance to Focus on Domestic Corruption and Says the US Does Not Need a Deal With Iran

President Donald Trump said on Thursday that the United States does not need a deal with Iran, and that he has asked Vice President JD Vance to turn his full attention to crime and corruption in Democrat run cities and states instead of leading talks with Tehran.

"I have asked Vice President Vance to focus his complete and total attention on the Massive Corruption and Crime taking place in Democrat run Cities and States throughout the U.S.," Trump wrote on social media. He named Minnesota, California and Illinois among what he called poorly run and corrupt states, and said billions of dollars are stolen every month.

"Our Budget could be quickly BALANCED with the correction of this large scale criminal activity. CORRUPTION is in the Democrat Leadership's blood!" he wrote. "We don't need a deal with Iran. Those days have long since passed. We've got their money, Hundreds of Billions of Dollars, and we've got their Strait!"

A shift for the top Iran negotiator

Vance had taken the lead in trying to resolve the conflict with Iran. The Wall Street Journal reported that he had opened a channel with Mohsen Rezaei, the secretary of Iran's top security body, and was considering face to face talks with him. Those discussions were preliminary, and no date had been set.

On Wednesday, Vance distanced himself from Trump's war. He questioned whether the war was worth the cost, blamed the Iran war for the Republicans' heavy losses in last week's midterm elections, and said an earlier recommendation to end the war was sound advice. Vance is seen as a leading contender for the Republican nomination in 2028.

Trump's post pulls his vice president back from that diplomacy in public and points him at a domestic target. Vance already leads an antifraud task force for the administration, a job Trump gave him earlier this year, and the president has repeatedly accused Democrat run cities of corruption and weak crime policy since he returned to the White House in January 2025.

What it means for the talks

The post does not formally end the Iran channel, and neither Trump nor Vance announced a change in policy on Thursday. It does put the president on record against a deal at the moment his own negotiator was testing whether direct talks could end the war. Democrats are set to take control of both the House and the Senate when the new Congress is sworn in, and party leaders have promised to press the administration on the war and on how it has been run.

For now, the public instruction to Vance is domestic. The Iran file, which he had carried for months, was described by the president as a closed subject in the same post.