The nomination of J.D. Vance as Donald Trump’s running mate was backed by a whispering campaign from Elon Musk, Tucker Carlson and David Sacks.
Axios reports all three were swift to drop the former president a line after Saturday’s botched assassination, pushing Vance’s VP virtues despite the Ohio senator’s historic criticism of Trump’s first stint at the White House.
Carlson’s understood to have said Vance “doesn’t secretly hate Trump, as all the rest of them do,” citing a hardline stance against further aid to Ukraine as a sign of shared fundamental values.
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Not that Trump may have needed all that much courting. Insiders reportedly claim the White House hopeful is fairly smitten with Vance’s perceived “youth and vigor.”
The Ohio Senator, who holds a Yale Law degree, is also thought to put something of a finer intellectual spin on Trump’s otherwise earthier appeal to the campaign’s support base.
Plans are apparently to “park [him in] Pennsylvania for the next four months, with side trips to Michigan and Wisconsin,” shoring up support in the shooting’s aftermath with a view to blocking a Biden win in otherwise crucial Blue Wall states.
Musk and Sacks are themselves part of a wider cabal of tech billionaires who’ve pledged to pour money into a political committee in support of Donald Trump’s third bid for the presidency.
Other donors to the America PAC, as it’s known, include Palantir founder Joe Lonsdale and crypto-bro twins Cameran and Tyler Winklevoss, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday.
How decisive those last-minute calls from Musk and the others actually were remains up for debate. According to Axios, the inside track from the campaign is that Trump had in fact settled on Vance days ago, and that the wind had been blowing that way anyway for several weeks.
It’s only Trump’s notorious unpredictability that’s thought to have stopped sources from coming forward with a guarantee it’d be Vance who eventually wound up alongside him on the ticket.
That and the former president’s reported love of the “veepstakes drama,” which is apparently what kept him from finally making the announcement until just the afternoon that the Republican National Convention kicked off on Monday.
