Where Is J.D. Vance in All of This?
Donald Trump and Elon Musk finally had their big falling-out, both inevitably and five months late. While they go back and forth on the social-media platforms they own, yammering in sentence fragments about the budget deficit and which one of them hates the other more, there’s one guy we haven’t heard much from: J.D. Vance. Where is the vice-president in all of this?
Publicly, Vance is a nonentity most of the time, save for when he met the pope and then the pope died. Politically, his respective Trump and Musk alliances make him central to whatever the hell is going on here. Vance and Trump’s relationship is clear enough. With Musk, you have to dig just below the surface for a better sense of their connection.
Prior to running for office, Vance worked at Mithril Capital, Peter Thiel’s venture-capital firm. Thiel went on to heavily finance Vance’s political rise. Thiel and Musk have a rocky relationship but have known each other for over 20 years, since their PayPal days in the early 2000s, when the Thiel-founded business acquired Musk’s financial-services company, X.com (no relation).
Musk and Vance also share techno-libertarian approaches to politics. They both think the government should stay out of their businesses and taxes (Tesla has avoided paying federal taxes for years) and are proponents of free trade (increasingly, code for “wealth-hoarding”). Some far-right commentators and X users who can’t stop posting even think that it’s by design that a Thiel protégé wound up in the White House right as the broligarchy rose to power. On Thursday, Musk shared a post that proposed Trump’s impeachment and Vance’s rise to power. The Tesla founder simply added, “Yes.”
Vance is in a tricky spot. As the many, many jokes about his being the child of a messy divorce suggest, the vice-president now has to pick between his two papas. What’s a guy to do? Obviously, go on a podcast. As the feud went down on Thursday, Vance posted a photo with Theo Von captioned, “Slow news day, what are we even going to talk about?”
Slow news day, what are we even going to talk about? @TheoVon pic.twitter.com/LVmtK219Dt
— JD Vance (@JDVance) June 6, 2025
Cute! Vance then fell in line. On Thursday night, he wrote on X, “President Trump has done more than any person in my lifetime to earn the trust of the movement he leads. I’m proud to stand beside him.” He doubled down on Friday morning, writing, “There are many lies the corporate media tells about President Trump. One of the most glaring is that he’s impulsive or short-tempered. Anyone who has seen him operate under pressure knows that’s ridiculous.” Would an impulsive man spend most of his days dictating posts that say, “AMERICA IS HOT! SIX MONTHS AGO IT WAS COLD AS ICE!”
It seems that Vance has chosen a side for now. (Trump will get full custody in D.C., and Musk can have supervised visits every other weekend?) In six months, we can reassess the custody agreement with the judge, the honorable Peter Thiel.
Related