Vice President JD Vance took sharp questions on the Iran war, petrol prices, immigration and his own rhetoric at a CBS News town hall filmed in Flat Rock, Michigan, and aired on Saturday night, with Tony Dokoupil in the chair. Midterm elections are close. Vance said there is “of course” a chance he does not run for president in 2028.

Joey Amor, the widower of Master Sgt Nicole Amor, asked about “a failure of leadership” after his wife’s death: CNBC reports she was one of six US soldiers killed by an Iranian drone in Kuwait the day after the war began. Vance said this was “literally the first time I’ve heard of this”, that the job is an honour, but that you live “in a bit of a bubble” and information does not always filter up. He said he wanted to speak with Amor afterwards.

He then accepted mistakes: there were issues with where troops were located, “a huge mistake”, and the arrangement had been changed. In the excerpts published he did not offer a war balance-sheet, and we have not treated his remarks as a military verdict.

A Michigan voter who said he backed Trump and Vance in 2024 but is now looking to Democrat Abdul El-Sayed for the Senate pressed him on expensive petrol. Vance agreed prices were too high. He tied them to the Middle East and spoke of Iran as a state trying to choke the world’s energy supply. On Fox he also blamed Joe Biden for about 20 per cent of US refining capacity going offline — his figure, not our audit. Dokoupil reminded him the administration has been in office for nearly two years.

Vance declined to own the moment as a scorecard of his own: “we are where we are,” he said, and asked what El-Sayed’s solution was. “It’s easy to criticize something that happened seven months ago.”

A Catholic nun asked how their shared faith sat with immigration raids that leave children separated from parents. “We’re trying to strike the right balance,” Vance said; when Dokoupil pushed, he called it “constantly a work in progress”. He admitted some people “really screw up”; investigations, he said, lead to training or discipline, but they are not advertised while they are open. A voter who became a US citizen five years ago confronted him over calling H-1B visa holders “foreign indentured servants”. “To the extent that my rhetoric has been imperfect here, that’s on me,” he said, and that he meant the companies, not the workers.

Dokoupil asked whether the White House made him squeamish, including nearly $1.2 billion from the president’s crypto businesses last year, a figure CNBC ties to a federal filing. Vance said he had never seen anything like that from the president. Corruption in Washington, yes; from the president and the administration, no, in his telling. He was also asked about Kimberly Guilfoyle’s resignation as ambassador to Greece, over allegations she denies. “If somebody’s selling access to the White House, that’s disgusting and despicable, and they should suffer consequences.”

Image: Ken Lund, Flat Rock, Michigan, 24 September 2015, CC BY-SA 2.0, Wikimedia Commons. Not the CBS town-hall hall.

Sources consulted: Vance faces tough questions on Iran war, immigration and more in CBS town hall — CNBC; JD Vance claims US has destroyed Iran's nuclear program at town hall — Fox News.