Et Tu, JD?
The president’s dutiful sidekick already seems to be planning for life without Trump.
Andrew’s back from northern Michigan today. Thanks to Ben and Jim for shouldering the Morning Shots load in his absence—and if any of you are trying to offload a lake house right now, Andrew might be in a very suggestible mood. Happy Monday.
Sir, Beware JD Vance
by William Kristol
As the deplorable Laura Loomer seeks to purge the administration of closet Never Trumpers (her latest target is Secretary of the Army Dan Driscoll), may I offer her a suggestion: Look higher up on the food chain. Keep your eyes on Driscoll’s good friend and law school classmate, JD Vance.
After all, it was Vance’s actions this past week that seemed designed to undercut the president on the issue that is perhaps most dangerous to him, the matter of Jeffrey Epstein.
First, Vance sought to convene a very unusual meeting at his residence, with Attorney General Pam Bondi, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, FBI Director Kash Patel, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, and others, to discuss Epstein. As far as we know, the Vice President hadn’t been particularly involved in the Epstein matter. Unlike Bondi, Blanche, and Patel, for example, Vance presumably doesn’t know what’s in the Epstein files. And unlike Wiles, he’s not responsible for coordinating the administration’s messaging. So it’s unclear why Vance suddenly chose to involve himself in the Epstein situation so conspicuously.
One might also note that Bondi, Blanche, Patel, and Wiles seem to have been pretty disciplined in recent weeks in coordinating their efforts to carry out the coverup. Suddenly, Vance gets involved, and news of a big Epstein-focused meeting leaks.
So the day before Trump’s big tariffs announcement, Vance managed—inadvertently of course!—to place attention back on to Epstein.
After news of the planned meeting got out, it was moved to the White House, where, of course, it could have been held quietly all along. The next day the vice president took himself off to Great Britain for a meeting with the British foreign minister and a nice family vacation.
But Vance chose to interrupt his vacation yesterday for an interview with Maria Bartiromo on the Fox Business channel. Bartiromo predictably asked Vance about Epstein. Vance chose not simply to deflect and say blandly that the administration was handling the situation responsibly. Nor did he choose to defend Donald Trump and assert confidently that Trump had done nothing wrong.
No. Instead Vance gave the simmering Epstein issue new oxygen. He emphasized that “President Trump has demanded full transparency” on this issue—an assertion that only raised the question of why the administration has actually released no information at all.
Vance then pivoted to attacking the Biden administration for doing nothing on Epstein for four years, and he speculated on how many Democrats were involved with Epstein, including Bill Clinton. But this simply served to increase curiosity about just what the files show—yes, about Clinton, but also about Trump. Beneath the mask of a partisan attack on Clinton, Vance seems to have—inadvertently to be sure!—aimed a dagger at his boss.
Vance went on to emphasize that “a lot of Americans want answers. I certainly want answers.” With this bland statement, Vance succeeded—inadvertently, needless to say!—in reminding us that we don’t yet have the answers we want and deserve.
So Vance’s comments contributed to the sense that the question of the Epstein files is still very much an open issue, one that the administration has to deal with.
Perhaps Vance was simply being clumsy. But if one had a suspicious mind, one might think Vance knows what he’s doing. Perhaps he doesn’t mind seeing Trump embroiled in the Epstein scandal. Vance presumably had no connection to Epstein, so he’s at no risk if the files are released. And to the degree Trump gets damaged by the Epstein matter, it would make it harder for Trump to run again in 2028—something Trump obviously wants to do, something Vance is intelligent enough to see that Trump wants to do, and something Vance presumably doesn’t want Trump to do.
The next time President Trump re-reads Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, he might want to focus on Act 1, Scene 2, lines 201-224. Caesar is famously suspicious of one man in particular:
Yon Cassius has a lean and hungry look.
He thinks too much. Such men are dangerous . . .
Such men as he be never at heart’s ease
Whiles they behold a greater than themselves,
And therefore are they very dangerous.
Now it’s true that Vance may not have a “lean and hungry” look. But isn’t Vance the type who thinks too much? Does Vance appear to be at heart’s ease? Is Vance happy beholding someone greater than himself?
Caesar allowed Mark Antony to reassure him about Cassius, and dismissed the warnings of a soothsayer to beware the Ides of March. He put aside his concerns. Will Trump make that mistake about Vance? As we approach the Ides of August, shouldn’t Trump’s loyal soothsayer Laura Loomer warn her beloved leader about the dangerous man who lurks nearby? His name is JD Vance.
Spitting on a Miracle
by Andrew Egger
Over the weekend, Jonathan Cohn had a great Breakdown of HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s decision to cancel half-a-billion dollars in federal contracts developing the next generation of mRNA vaccines—the incredibly promising technology whose maiden voyage was lifting the world out of the coronavirus pandemic. If you missed it, Cohn’s vivisection of Kennedy’s wild conspiratorial rhetoric about mRNA is well worth the read. I just wanted to add one brief point on how we got into this mess.
It was less than five years ago that mRNA tech arrived on the scene at the most serendipitous moment. The technology had been thought of as promising for years, but no vaccine had been developed using it when COVID suddenly throttled the world in early 2020. Under previous vaccine tech, scientists would have needed to develop a weakened or deactivated version of the virus—a lengthy, costly, and rigid process. The mRNA pathway—stimulating the body to itself produce the proteins to train itself to fight the virus—was dramatically faster and more flexible. The world, with the Trump administration leading the way, placed a major financial bet on mRNA. The COVID vaccines’ rollout smashed all records for speed and saved untold millions of lives.
A sane world would have seen mRNA tech’s debut for what it was: a quantum leap forward in medicine with a surface of potential we’d barely scratched. And, indeed, much of the world sees it as that—just not the part of the world with governing power. mRNA tech is now falling victim to its own success, strangled by a line of conspiratorial thinking that found its very lifesaving speed a cause for suspicion—a line that has now found enormous power in the person of Kennedy Jr.
That this happened is all the stranger since the alternative path was right there for the taking. Trump, the driver of so much change in what the American right believes, was a longtime booster of the mRNA COVID shots. And he understandably wanted to take credit for his own administration’s success in funding them. But when suspicion of mRNA technology seeped up from the sewers—overflowing from the most conspiracy-riddled corners of the internet to infect millions—even Trump found himself unable to stem the tide. Eventually, he lost interest—and then, ever the opportunist, he decided to embrace the conspiracy himself by appointing Kennedy.
When it comes to questions of misinformation, you can always find a line of heterodox thinking that wants to scold the elites first. People are supposed to believe crazy things about COVID and the shots because Anthony Fauci was too hectoring, or the official guidance for how to deal with the pandemic changed too many times, or because Joe Biden was too heavy-handed with vaccine mandates. But it’s impossible to tell that story with a straight face here. America didn’t turn on an unbelievably promising vaccine technology that literally just saved millions of our lives like two seconds ago because of an elite failure. They did so because right-wing distrust for anything that feels “official” is a suppurating wound on the body politic, and the infection has spread to the brain.
AROUND THE BULWARK
Alaska Summit: Trump and Putin Are Planning to Carve Up Ukraine… And it’s hard to see anything good coming from the meeting of the president and his hero, writes CATHY YOUNG.
Sarah Longwell Reads the Comments Section… In a special video exclusively for Bulwark+ members, SARAH LONGWELL takes on your toughest comments and questions—no dodging, no fluff. Plus: behind the scenes of The Focus Group Podcast!
Dems Crack Down on Fraudulent Fundraisers… An overdue reckoning with the fact that those annoying text messages do the party more harm than good, reports LAUREN EGAN in The Opposition.
The Most Damaging RFK Jr. Decision Yet… Our HHS Secretary is Making America Great Again—for lethal pathogens, observes JONATHAN COHN in The Breakdown.
America’s Losing the AI Race to China… In the latest episode of How to Fix It, MATT POTTINGER joins JOHN AVLON to talk about global security, U.S.–China relations, artificial intelligence, and the health of democracy.
Quick Hits
GREASE MY PALM: It used to be that conservatives had an intense allergy to new government intrusions in the free market, which they tended to see as harbingers of growing tyranny and socialism. But of course that was before Donald Trump announced that it was actually very legal and very cool for the White House to wield trade policy to help itself to more and more of a company’s revenue. Bloomberg News reports on the latest case: the White House’s agreement with GPU producers Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices, which have agreed to pay 15 percent of revenues on AI chips sold to China to the U.S. government:
The arrangement reflects US President Donald Trump’s consistent effort to engineer a financial payout for America in return for concessions on trade. His administration has shown a willingness to relax trade conditions like tariffs in return for giant investment in the US—as with Apple Inc.’s pledge to spend $600 billion on domestic manufacturing. But such a narrow, select export tax has little precedent in modern corporate history. . . .
“This seeming quid pro quo is unprecedented from an export control perspective. The arrangement risks invalidating the national security rationale for U.S. export controls,” said Jacob Feldgoise, a researcher at the DC-based Center for Security and Emerging Technology.
It “will likely undermine the US’ position when negotiating with allies to implement complementary controls,” he added. “Allies may not believe U.S. policymakers if they are willing to trade away those same national security concerns for economic concessions—either from U.S. companies or foreign governments.”
Everything has a price in Trump’s America, including AI dominance against China.
OUT OF SIGHT, NOT OUT OF MIND: It turns out that you can ascend to the highest office in the land, be the most powerful person on the planet, and still act like the pettiest man on earth. CNN reported yesterday that Donald Trump has ordered the official portraits of Barack Obama and George W. Bush moved from their prominent positions in the White House entryway to a spot at the top of the White House’s grand staircase, out of view of visitors to the presidential home. “White House protocol and precedent,” CNN notes, “calls for portraits of the most recent American presidents to be given the most prominent placement.” Maybe Trump figured it was odd to keep Obama’s picture hanging in his house while he yammers on about his predecessor’s supposed “treason” in 2016.
THE TEA ON TARIFFS: As his trade wars have played havoc with international supply chains and tariff costs have piled up for U.S. businesses, Donald Trump has commanded companies to simply “eat” the costs rather than raise prices on consumers. This is a ridiculous suggestion for many businesses that operate on tight margins—and few more so than AriZona Iced Tea, which has sold a signature 22-ounce can for 99 cents for nearly 30 years. Now that Trump has jacked up tariffs on foreign aluminum, longtime CEO Don Vultaggio is mournfully preparing to raise the price. “I hate even the thought of it,” he told the New York Times this weekend. “It would be a hell of a shame.”
Only about 20 percent of AriZona’s aluminum is imported, but Vultaggio is bracing for domestic price hikes as well. “Our price has been dramatically bumped up because of this tariff talk,” he said. “I hope the administration understands and deals with the fact that if you’re going to protect American manufacturers, you can’t allow them to gouge the marketplace because of that protection. If I had Donald Trump’s ear, that’s what I would tell him directly.”
Cheap Shots
My husband had stage 4 melanoma. He was dying before our eyes. His spine and liver were riddled with tumors. Then in 2018 his doctors at Mass General Boston got him into a phase 1 trial using a personalized mRNA cancer vaccine. He is cured. These monsters are throwing out this amazing technology that can save lives. It is horrifying. So much blood on their hands.
JD Vance is an overly ambitious, grubbing and creepy dude. Take your eyes of this guy at your own peril.