A CNN panel shared a laugh at Vice President JD Vance’s expense over the chummy relationship between President Donald Trump and Elon Musk, with one panelist joking that Vance should be “day drinking.”
The panel was discussing the Musk and Trump’s joint interview with Sean Hannity on Tuesday—where the two seemed so close that the Fox News host compared them to “brothers.” At another point, Musk professed his “love” for Trump.
During the CNN This Morning panel discussion on Wednesday, conservative pundit Jonah Goldberg predicted that Trump’s MAGA base would eventually turn on Musk.
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“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 said. “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.”
Goldberg also pointed out that former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, who’s now a controversial MAGA media star, slammed Musk this week as a “parasitic illegal immigrant,” who wants to “impose his freak experiments and play-act as God without any respect for the country’s history, values or traditions.”
According to Goldberg, “those tensions are eventually going to play out within Trump’s coalition.”
Another panel member, New York Times reporter Lulu Garcia-Navarro, pushed back that Bannon and his supporters don’t actually have much influence over the White House.
She suggested, though, that the “sort of father-son relationship” displayed in the Hannity interview should have Vance worried about his standing.
“I mean, if I were Vance, I would be slightly concerned,” Garcia-Navarro said. “This is a very close relationship. I don’t think that we are seeing the Bannon wing of the party ascendant.”
Goldberg found at least one point of agreement: “First of all, if I were Vance, I’d be day drinking at this point,” he said, prompting laughs and smirks from the other panelists.
“There’s going to come a moment where the Musk-Trump show hits the point of diminishing returns,” Goldberg continued. “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.”
Vance may have other reasons to worry about his relationship with his boss. Earlier this month, Trump declined to embrace Vance as his presidential successor for in 2028.
“I mean, I don’t think that it, you know, I think you have a lot of very capable people,” Trump said. “So far, I think he’s doing a fantastic job. It’s too early, we’re just starting.”
