Vice President JD Vance took aim at Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed over his criticism of the war in Iran. But when El-Sayed was given the chance to respond on CNN, he opened with a line that turned their political dispute into a college rivalry.
During a CBS News town hall, Vance questioned whether the Democrat had any practical answer to the conflict.
“I see what Abdul El-Sayed says about the war in Iran,” Vance said, criticizing the candidate for attacking decisions made by the president and military leadership.
Vance argued that the administration now had to deal with the situation as it stood, rather than revisit decisions made months earlier.
“It’s easy to criticize something that happened seven months ago,” he said.
But when CNN’s Laura Coates asked El-Sayed about those remarks Sunday evening, the Michigan Democrat wasted no time.
“First of all, Ohio State owes that boy a refund because he clearly didn’t get anything from his education there,” El-Sayed fired back.
The jab carried an extra sting. Vance graduated from Ohio State University, while El-Sayed attended the University of Michigan — two schools with one of the fiercest rivalries in American college sports.
But El-Sayed quickly moved from the joke to the substance of the disagreement.
He argued that the United States should never have entered the war and pointed to the nuclear agreement negotiated under President Barack Obama as an alternative diplomatic approach.
The agreement, known as the JCPOA, was designed to restrict Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief. Trump withdrew the United States from it during his first presidency.
Pressed by Coates on what he would actually do now, El-Sayed proposed using congressional war powers to stop further military action and returning the dispute to diplomats.
His argument was straightforward: The administration should not treat a war it chose to enter as though it were an unavoidable problem inherited from someone else.
The exchange comes as El-Sayed faces Republican Mike Rogers in Michigan’s closely watched Senate race, where the war, rising living costs and the Trump administration’s policies have become major campaign issues.
Vance wanted to know whether El-Sayed had an answer.
On CNN, the Democrat gave him two: a sharp joke about his college education and a proposal to end the fighting through congressional action and diplomacy.
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Way to go Mr. Abdul El-Sayed!!!