Vice President JD Vance posted a response online Thursday that turned heads amid a growing feud between his boss, President Donald Trump, and former DOGE chief Elon Musk spilled into the public realm.
The response was more of a quip than anything else, however.
In an X post containing a photo of him seated next to top podcaster Theo Von, the vice president wrote: “Slow news day, what are we even going to talk about? @TheoVon.”
“President Trump has done more than any person in my lifetime to earn the trust of the movement he leads,” Vance said on X (formerly Twitter) late Thursday night.
Affirming his stance and support of Trump, he added: “I’m proud to stand beside him.”
Throughout the day on Thursday, Musk openly attacked the president and the “Big, Beautiful Bill” that narrowly passed the House last week as a pork-laden fiasco that did not contain enough of the DOGE-recommended cuts his team found and suggested.
Musk also claimed, without evidence, that Trump’s administration was holding back on releasing the files related to the late convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein because the president was in them.
By Friday morning, however, Musk was beginning to sound conciliatory, though ABC News’ Jonathan Karl posted on the X platform that Trump told him he wasn’t in a hurry to speak to the billionaire SpaceX and Tesla CEO.
“In a phone conversation this morning, @realDonaldTrump told me @elonmusk is ‘the man who has lost his mind.’ Trump did not, however, seem angry or even concerned about the feud. As for reports that there is going to be a Trump/Musk call scheduled for today, Trump told me he is ‘not particularly’ interested in talking to Musk although he says Musk wants to talk to him,” Karl wrote.
For his part, Vance also posted a note of support for the president 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.”
The vice president made headlines earlier this week when he jokingly slammed an interviewer for calling him an “intellectual” at a black-tie event in Washington, D.C.
The event was hosted on Tuesday by the conservative think tank American Compass, where founder Oren Cass interviewed Vance on stage. In his introduction, Cass referenced Vance’s pre-White House career as a writer for National Review and described him as an intellectual “in the good sense of the term.”
“I come here and you insult me,” Vance quipped. “And you call me ‘an intellectual,’ remind me that I wrote for the National Review. What an asshole this guy is!”
Cass responded as the audience clapped: “That’s fair. I will admit that I, too, wrote for National Review.”
The magazine leans conservative but is no friend of Donald Trump and his MAGA movement although several of the president’s policies align with those embraced by the publication for years.
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In May, Vance also turned heads when he criticized Chief Justice John Roberts’ statement that the judiciary’s role is to serve as a check on the executive branch, calling it a “profoundly wrong sentiment,” adding that courts should be “deferential” to the president, especially in matters related to immigration policy.
“I thought that was a profoundly wrong sentiment. That’s one half of his job, the other half of his job is to check the excesses of his own branch,” the VP said.
