Last week, President Donald Trump gave Vice President JD Vance two high-profile foreign policy assignments: travel to Budapest on Tuesday and Wednesday to help save the Hungarian election for Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and his right-wing Christian nationalist party, then head over to Islamabad for the weekend to negotiate a final peace agreement with Iran. Vance was harshly graded on Sunday. Early in the morning, he announced an impasse with Iran in terse remarks that offered little suggestion of a diplomatic path forward.

By the end of the day, Hungarians rejected Vance’s argument that a vote for Orbán is a vote for “sovereignty and democracy, for truth and for the God of our forefathers,” handing the opposition coalition a parliamentary supermajority that throws Orbán out of office and sets up the possibility of a constitutional overhaul. To be fair to Vance, these were impossible assignments. Orbán’s party, in power for 16 years, was trailing badly in the polls thanks to a public fed up with corruption and economic stagnation.

An American vice president can’t swoop in at the last minute and change the minds of locals while claiming he isn’t meddling in a foreign election. The Iranian regime has long earned a reputation for stubborn and patient negotiation. Even Trump grudgingly praised them as “lousy fighters but great negotiators.” And the regime just proved it has the tenacity to not only remain in power after the assassinations of more than four dozen of its highest officials, including its Supreme Leader, but also gain negotiating leverage with newly seized control of the Strait of Hormuz, which is critical to the global economy.

The 41-year-old Vance has only been an elected public official for just under 40 months and has no diplomatic experience. Meanwhile, Trump hung out in Miami at an Ultimate Fighting Championship event with the person who is supposed to hold the foreign policy portfolio, Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Iran reportedly requested that Vance—who privately opposed Operation Epic Fury—lead the American negotiating team.

But where in The Art of the Deal does it say you should let your adversary pick its negotiating partner? In theory, anyone could have been sent to be the face of a likely failure. Why choose Vance?

Why set up the vice president to fail? Exploring that question is not just mining for schadenfreude. Trump’s difficulty, or disinterest, in grooming an heir apparent threatens his movement’s ability to sustain itself beyond this presidential term.

Vance is not the first vice president of Trump’s to be put in impossible situations. You probably remember that Mike Pence had the Constitutional task to preside over the ratification of the 2020 election’s Electoral College count. Trump publicly and privately pressured Pence to invoke the authority to reject the electors from several states won by Joe Biden and deny Biden’s victory.

When the January 6 mob chanted “hang Mike Pence,” according to testimony given to the House, Trump resisted taking any action to quell the riots and privately shared that Pence “deserves it.” Four years later, the two would run against each other for the 2024 Republican Party presidential nomination. But Trump always recognized that Pence, an old-school Ronald Reagan conservative skeptical of protectionism and Russia, wasn’t a full-fledged believer in MAGA. According to American Carnage by Tim Alberta, when Trump learned that his nominee to lead the Central Intelligence Agency criticized him during the 2016 campaign, he vented, “This is what I get for letting Pence pick everyone.” Come 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic overwhelmed America, Trump sidelined his own Health and Human Services Secretary and named Pence the leader of a pandemic task force.

Peter Baker and Susan Glasser reported in their book, The Divider, that Pence’s team suspected “the vice president was put in charge just to have someone to blame when everything went bad.” Moreover, Trump wouldn’t let Pence control the task force’s press briefings, hogging the spotlight for himself day after day. A reasonable conclusion to draw is that Trump never tried to set Pence up as his successor, even before January 6 drove a permanent wedge between them. Vance, at first, seemed poised to pursue a more rewarding vice-presidential path.

He became famous in 2016 during his Hillbilly Elegy book tour as a product of the white working-class who could explain Trump’s appeal to confused liberals while criticizing the candidate. But once Trump was elected and he eyed a political future for himself, Vance rebranded as a Trump loyalist, a social conservative extremist, and cheerleader for far-right anti-European Union political parties across the Atlantic. Vance was promoted to the vice presidency by Trump’s son, Donald Jr., who said he wanted to make sure “those snakes and the liars don’t get those positions of power” where they could constrain the MAGA agenda. As a true believer—or as true a