A bombshell new opinion piece from New York Times’ Michael Shear appeared to hit the nail on the head when it comes to Vice President J.D. Vance and, more specifically, the way he made a complete and utter fool out of himself during the wholly embarrassing and downright ridiculous Oval Office meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky yesterday — and it all comes down to a heady combination of Vance’s ego and the infamous billionaire Elon Musk.
There is certainly no denying, even among the MAGA crowd, that tech billionaire, Twitter and Tesla CEO, and head of the unelected but Trump-backed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Elon Musk, has successfully centered himself as Donald Trump’s right-hand man, just a month into Donald’s 4-year second term in office. Despite the fact that Donald already had a vice president.
Yesterday, we all watched in utter horror, shock, and disgust as VP Vance effectively showed his ass as he attempted to cosplay an attack dog on Trump’s behalf during the televised Oval Office meeting with Zelensky that has quickly gone viral across the country. Vance referred to Zelensky as “disrespectful” and helped to open the door for his boss, Donald Trump, to openly berate, attack, and threaten his fellow world leader as the pair chastised and belittled the Ukrainian president for not being grateful enough.
Frankly, it was the most we’ve heard out of Vance since Donald took office last month — and Michael Shear thinks there’s a very specific reason for why J.D. Vance is suddenly finding his voice again.
In Shear’s opinion, what we’re seeing out of Vance all of a sudden is nothing more than the “Hillbilly Elegy” author’s attempt to stop playing second fiddle to Elon Musk.
“It was Mr. Vance’s most high-profile moment since assuming the role of Mr. Trump’s understudy. And it suggested that the 40-year-old, former first-term senator from Ohio is trying not to be relegated to the B-team of what has already become one of the most fast-paced and aggressive administrations in modern history,” Shear writes for the New York Times. “It was a striking moment for Mr. Vance, who has not been the one generating most of the banner headlines alongside Mr. Trump.”
He goes on to point toward Elon Musk’s overwhelming presence in media reports on the Trump Administration before going on to note that Vance has seemingly been desperately trying to carve out a name for himself on Musk’s social media platform, X, formerly known as Twitter. Shear writes, “…there have been hints over the last six weeks that Mr. Vance was eager to showcase his own ability to shock.”
Shear was referring to Vance’s now-infamous recent X post, in which he stated, “If a judge tried to tell a general how to conduct a military operation, that would be illegal.”
“That statement, too, made headlines,” Shear writes.
You can read Shear’s full opinion piece with the New York Times here.
Featured image via Wikimedia Commons/Gage Skidmore, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license