Divorce is always hardest on the kids, but JD Vance still seems to think there’s scope for Elon Musk and Donald Trump to pick up the pieces after their spectacularly messy split.
“I don’t know that he would take my call right now,” the vice president said of the president’s former government efficiency czar in a sitdown with The Gateway Pundit.
“I kid,” Vance hastily added. “I’m sure he would take my call, but honestly, the drama around him and the White House over the last couple of months… my hope is that it just kinda cools down a bit.”
ADVERTISEMENT
The Tesla CEO’s departure from his White House advisory position as head of Trump’s cost-cutting Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) initiative toward the end of May detonated a bomb at the heart of the MAGA administration.
Within days, Musk had launched a series of vitriolic attacks against the president, describing Trump’s then-pending budget proposals as a “massive, outrageous, pork-filled... disgusting abomination” that threatened to undo all of his work spearheading the GOP’s crusade against federal spending.
Trump swiftly shot back in kind, threatening to revoke the SpaceX founder’s lucrative government contracts. Musk responded by calling for the president to be impeached, as well as alleging Trump had delayed the release of new findings in the Jeffrey Epstein case because his name features prominently in the investigative documents.
Trump has faced intense public backlash, even from the MAGA base, over the Epstein scandal and his relationship with the late sex trafficker, especially after the Justice Department and FBI released a statement on the case that contradicted far-right conspiracy theories, long fueled by the president himself, about the disgraced financier’s crimes.
Whatever bad blood remains between Trump and Musk, Vance apparently refuses to believe the president’s relationship with his former government efficiency czar, who also pumped more than $277 million into Trump’s presidential campaign last year, is really over.
“I really think it’s a mistake for him to try to break from the president,” Vance told the Gateway Pundit. “My hope is that by the time of the midterms, he’s kind of come back into the fold.”
Musk has also tried to smooth things over with Trump. It wasn’t long before he deleted his posts about the president’s relationship with Epstein, publicly stating he’d taken things “too far,” after he’d reportedly hopped on a call with Vance and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles to discuss how he might go about making amends.
A couple of weeks later, he also donated roughly $15 million to pro-MAGA super PACs, but the ceasefire didn’t hold for long. Three days after those payments, the Tesla CEO resumed his trolling of the White House by further posting about their handling of the Epstein case, and by threatening to launch his own “America Party” as a means of siphoning support from the GOP.
Trump, for his part, does appear to have softened a little on Musk even as his administration scrambles to contain the intense and mounting fallout from the ongoing Epstein Files furor. Asked last week what he thought of an opinion poll showing more than 61 percent of Americans hold an unfavorable view of the multi-billionaire, he was quick to his former bromance’s defence.
“I don’t know if the poll’s accurate,” he told reporters during a Wednesday Oval Office press conference. “I think he’s a good person, and I think he had a bad moment, a really bad moment, but he’s a good person. I believe that.”
Perhaps also conscious of those numbers, Vance further reinforced his invitation for Musk’s return to the MAGA fold by warning the Tesla CEO his prospects of future political influence outside the GOP are likely exceptionally limited, given the tech tycoon’s wholesale defection from the Democratic Party camp last year.
“He’s obviously got a complicated relationship with the White House right now,” the vice president said in his interview. “My argument to Elon is, like, you’re not gonna be on the left, even if you wanted to be, and he doesn’t, they’re not gonna have you back. That ship has sailed.”
The Daily Beast has contacted Vance’s representatives for comment on this story.
