Summary
JD Vance is actively working to raise his profile in the Trump administration after being overshadowed by Elon Musk.
During a recent Oval Office meeting, Vance took the lead to criticize Zelensky as “disrespectful,” setting up Trump to criticize Zelensky.
According to New York Times reporter Michael Shear, this confrontational approach is part of Vance’s strategy to avoid being “relegated to the B-team” in what has become “one of the most fast-paced and aggressive administrations in modern history.”
I am hopeful that this means a bit more. Vance was catapulted into politics with money from Peter Thiel. If he is at risk of being relegated to the B-team maybe that means that Thiel and Trump are on the outs. Maybe Trump thinks he doesn’t need Thiel’s money anymore now that he has Musk’s money.
The best hope for Democracy in America right now is if our new Oligarchs get too distracted fighting each other that they do a bit less damage, and accidentally let an actual election through in 2026.
This was my hope once the results came in. That they’d be too busy fighting each other for power to actually cause too much lasting damage
I’m eagerly waiting. For now, it’s at best a circular firing squad with the world in the middle. They have terrible aim but statistically we’re still all gonna die.
Don’t kid yourself, Thiel and Musk founded PayPal together and despite prior friction they’ve always been on the same team. In fact Musk becoming a full blown fascist has been Musk’s “return to Jesus” moment as far as Thiel is concerned.
Note that Musk was not a PayPal founder, he helped found “X”, a PayPal competitor that wasn’t really doing that well, but managed to merge with PayPal after PayPal was winning the market.
Musk was also the one who about ran PayPal into the ground with incompetence and he was forced out of decision making to save the company.
Don’t know if this changes anything relative to Thiel, but just wanted to highlight that Musk gets credited with PayPal but his history is first losing to them as a competitor and nearly ruining them as a leader, and finally getting a big sum off money for eBay for his failures…
Also, according to recent reports, people hate working with Musk. Each company has people who, if he ever shows up, part of their job is to keep him from interfering with people who are actually working. He’s basically a toddler.
So, the point is that, if it was just their past of working together, you’d actually expect Musk and Thiel to be enemies.
I’m guessing that they do actually get along, though, for the exact same reason that modern day Nazis have to stick together.
Fun fact:
Thiel also called musk a socioopath.
The article:
https://www.businessinsider.com/peter-thiel-elon-musk-relationship-contrarian-book-max-chafkin-2021-9?op=1
And don’t forget the rest of the paypal mafia who basically created modern society and its tech disopia :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PayPal_Mafia
No, the best hope for democracy in America right now is for the populace to protest. Hard. You can’t sit there and hope the problem away. You have to get up and make it happen. Fascism doesn’t just go away. You have to cut it out of the system.
I know it’s hard to come to terms with, but the sooner you realize the better it’ll be. Everyone seems to be sitting there waiting for someone else to swoop down and save things, and that’s exactly the kind of thinking that led you where you are. The founding fathers put the power with the people because they realized that’s where the actual power was. You’ve all forgotten that and have become complacent.
Don’t allow this to go on.
Thiel likes to work from the shadows, moreso than the first term, where he was personally interacting with trump, I’m guessing the anti-lgbqt+ sentiment is the reason why he’s not so public anymore( indirectly which led to his boy toy models death)