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Following the bromance between President Donald Trump and “first buddy” Elon Musk on Trump confidant Sean Hannity’s show, a “concerned” Vice President JD Vance could be driven to the point of “day drinking” over the chummy relationship, a CNN panel observed on Wednesday.
Despite reports that Trump has grown annoyed as the world’s richest man takes on an increasingly dominant position in the administration, which culminated in Time depicting the Tesla CEO as the president, the two men were described in fraternal terms during their softball sitdown with Hannity on Tuesday night.
“This is going to be hard. I feel like I’m interviewing the two brothers,” the Fox News host gushed.
“I love the president; I think President Trump is a good man,” Musk said at one point while Hannity blamed the media for trying to force a “divorce” between the tech mogul and Trump. “And they try all, ‘President Elon Musk,’ for example. You do know that they’re doing that to you?” Hannity added.
“Actually, Elon called me. He said, ‘You know they’re trying to drive us apart,’” Trump reacted. “I said, ‘Absolutely.’ It’s just so obvious. They’re so bad at it… I used to think they were good at it. They’re actually bad at it because if they were good at it, I’d never be president.”
During a panel discussion on CNN This Morning, conservative pundit Jonah Goldberg felt that the love affair between Trump and Musk would eventually end in a messy breakup, mainly due to the nativist MAGA base becoming increasingly skeptical of the mega-billionaire.
“I think there‘s another front in the politics that‘s not getting a lot of attention. Elon Musk is just making this stuff up as he goes along, right?” Goldberg noted. “And it‘s sort of — someone was comparing it to the search for WMDs in Iraq, right? He‘s constantly looking for stuff and then declaring he‘s found something. And it turns out he didn‘t find what he‘s declared.”
Expanding on Goldberg’s point, anchor Jim Sciutto pointed out that Musk and his meme-based government efficiency department misread data to claim that millions of people over 150 were receiving Social Security benefits. Soon, the president amplified that falsehood as proof of fraudulent spending, just as he did with the bogus claim that $50 million worth of condoms were sent to Gaza, which was first peddled by Musk and DOGE.
While “normal people” will eventually realize that Musk is “just wrong” as the “veneer of expertise” is stripped away from him, Goldberg also pointed out that a “serious rift” was developing on the MAGA right over the SpaceX founder. Specifically, Goldberg said, former Trump chief strategist Steve Bannon has described Musk as not only a “fraud” but as a “parasitic illegal immigrant” who wants to “impose his freak experiments and play-act as God,” adding that “those tensions are eventually going to play out within Trump’s coalition.”
New York Times journalist Lulu Garcia-Navarro, meanwhile, disagreed with Goldberg over Bannon’s level of influence on the White House, noting that the Hannity interview showed that Trump and Musk “have a sort of father-son relationship” that should leave Vance worried about his own standing.
“I mean, if I were Vance, I would be slightly concerned. This is a very close relationship. I don’t think that we are seeing the Bannon wing of the party ascendant,” she said, prompting Goldberg to agree over their shared belief that the vice president should be worried.
“I agree that, first of all, if I were Vance, I’d be day drinking at this point,” he snarked. “But there’s going to come a moment where the Musk-Trump show hits the point of diminishing returns. They’re going to have some embarrassment… and at that moment, you’re going to see, I think, a section of the MAGA right saying that we backed the wrong horse with this guy.”
Perhaps adding to Vance’s potential heartburn about his political future is Trump’s own public hesitancy to back his vice president. During his Super Bowl interview with Fox News anchor Bret Baier, the president wouldn’t commit to Vance as his 2028 successor.
“No, but he’s very capable,” Trump declared. “I mean, I don’t think that it, you know, I think you have a lot of very capable people. So far, I think he’s doing a fantastic job. It’s too early, we’re just starting.”
