Vance silence on Musk may be Game of Thrones tactic ever

Richard Hall, The Independent

The kingdom is in turmoil, the great Houses of Musk and Trump at war, and their subjects forced to choose sides. But as the scheming Littlefinger in Game of Thrones famously said as he plotted to take the King’s place: “chaos is a ladder.” And so it is for JD Vance, the ostensibly loyal vice president, and perhaps the person who stands to benefit the most from the chaos unleashed by the feud between Elon Musk and Donald Trump — which is perhaps why he's remaining uncharacteristically subdued. Vance has never been one to shy away from a fight, especially an online one, especially if it's in defense of his boss. He once launched a 400-word diatribe against historian Niall Ferguson for criticising Trump's Ukraine policy, slamming his "moralistic garbage" and "historical illiteracy."

He had no problem accusing senior members of his own party of "pettiness" for voting against what Trump wanted, and mocked world leaders who've had run ins with the president. The practicing Catholic even found himself on the wrong side of the Pope himself when he got into another online beef with British politician Rory Stewart over Trump's deportation policies. So one would expect the online warrior to rush to the defense of his president in response to the firestorm of abuse unleashed by Musk against the president on Thursday, which began with accusations of ungratefulness and ended with claims of him being close to Jeffrey Epstein.

But Vance has been remarkably quiet. His only public comment at the time of writing has been the kind of terse statement a wife gives in support of a cheating politician spouse. "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," Vance wrote on X.

The next day, he continued with his lawyerly posts.

"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," he wrote.

"It's (maybe) the single biggest disconnect between fake media perception and reality," he went on. Where was the combative Vance who demanded the Ukrainian president say thank you to his boss in the Oval Office? The one who told Kamala Harris to "go to hell" over the Biden administration's handling of the withdrawal from Afghanistan?

Instead, Vance did not utter Musk's name in the 24 hours since the feud burst into the open. Vance was asked by Trump to remain diplomatic in his dealings with Musk, The Independent learned from a source familiar with the situation. Regardless, the VP has other motivations for keeping quiet. For years, he has been dogged by rumors of dual loyalties between the tech billionaires who fueled his rise and the president he now serves. Vance first came to public attention as the best-selling author of Hillbilly Elegy, a memoir of a rough Appalachian upbringing that many liberals praised as an intellectual explanation of Trump's appeal to the white working class. But before that book set him on a path to Congress and the Senate, he was already being courted by a set of right-wing tech billionaires known as the "PayPal mafia" — the billionaires Musk, David Sacks and Peter Thiel, who worked together at the pioneering online payments company back in the late Nineties and early Noughties and were bound together by a belief in deregulation, libertarianism and later, by darker right-wing ideology that railed against multiculturalism.

Vance was working in venture capital at the time and went to work for Thiel at his San Francisco investment house, Mithril Capital. Thiel would be instrumental to Vance's rise, backing his campaign for Senate in 2021-22 to the tune of $15 million, and reportedly introduced Vance to Trump. The trio of Musk, Sacks and Thiel were instrumental in convincing Trump to choose Vance as his running mate, seeing in him an ideological ally, the libertarian tech investor who could one day take over as president. Some have gone so far as to call Vance a Manchurian Candidate for the tech elite. When the feud between Musk and Trump spilled out into the open, Musk was not shy about announcing his desire for Vance to take over as president.

He responded to a tweet calling for Trump to be impeached and replaced with Vance with one word: "Yes." That is not an empty threat. Vance's path to the White House would inevitably require the support of Musk, the man who spent $395 million on electing Republicans in 2024. So his decision to ignore Musk's call for mutiny is an interesting — and calculated — choice. Much like Littlefinger, Vance has made sharp ideological turns and formed strategic alliances to find his way to within arm's length of the throne. He was once vehemently opposed to Trump, only to radically change course to stand by his side in his quest for power. But, spoiler alert, his fictional counterpart's calculating and maneuvering didn't end well for him. Trump spent his entire first term weeding out traitors, and claims to have gotten very good at it over the years. Will he be able to sniff out Vance?