President Donald Trump is spiraling into paranoia after Elon Musk turned Vice President JD Vance into an existential threat to his power, author Michael Wolff said on the Daily Beast Podcast.
During their explosive spat last week, Musk called for Trump’s impeachment and urged that Vance take his place.
Wolff, the best-selling Trump biographer, suggested that Musk’s demand struck fear into the president and made him even more suspicious of Vance.
The Fire and Fury author noted that Trump has always been ambivalent about Vance, an “unlikely Republican” whose “hardcore support is in the tech bro community.” Trump chose Vance as his running mate, Wolff said, in part because Musk made his backing, worth of hundreds of millions of dollars, conditional conditional on that pick.
The president’s high-profile fallout with Musk—a “central pillar” of the tech world’s incursion into right-wing politics—leaves him vulnerable and will push him to scrutinize his vice president ever more closely, Wolff said.
“He will set up what we will see as a set of tests that Vance is going to have to endure and pass,” Wolff told host Joanna Coles. “(Vance has) got to profess his absolute loyalty to Trump, or he will just be marginalized within the administration.”
Vance has tried to get ahead of such tests by doing exactly that.
“I’m the vice president to President Trump. My loyalties are always going to be with the president,” he said as Trump-Musk feud was still unfolding, adding, “I think it’s a huge mistake for (Musk) to go after the president like that.”
It remains to be seen if that will satisfy Trump, who, Wolff noted, “demands flattery on a constant basis.”
Even if Vance is not plotting a tech-bro takeover of the White House, Musk dropped another existential threat on Trump by claiming he “is in the Epstein files” in an X post he has since deleted.
“The Epstein stuff floats around Trump as a consistent threat, as a consistent silver bullet really,” Wolff said. Trump had a longstanding relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, the late New York financier and convicted sex offender, from the late 1980s to the early 2000s.
The president has distanced himself from Epstein in the decades since, saying he ended the relationship in the early 2000s and had no knowledge of Epstein’s crimes.
Although Musk withdrew his X post, Wolff argued that the billionaire “could always bring back the threat.”
In a statement to the Daily Beast, White House Communications Director Steven Chung slammed Wolff as “a blithering idiot who has been widely discredited due to his blatant lies and fabrications.”
“He is an imbecile of the highest order and his Trump Derangement Syndrome-addled brain has caused him to lead a miserable existence devoid of reality,” he continued. “Nothing he says is the truth and he resorts to outlandish falsehoods in order to stay relevant since Father Time has passed him by 20 years ago.”
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