JD Vance Visited the Murdochs Right Before the WSJ Dropped Trump’s Letter to Epstein

J Divan Vance, vice president of the United States, is a man of great ambition. He is also a man of great unpopularity. These things generally cancel each other out in the life of a politician. But Vance’s impression of his own importance is so solid that this rule no longer applies. And it appears that he may have found his own conservative Sanhedrin, one willing to pay the 30 pieces of silver it would take to sell out the boss, in the wilds of Montana. From the Associated Press:

Vice President JD Vance on Tuesday made a brief trip to Montana, where he spoke to media mogul Rupert Murdoch; his son Lachlan Murdoch, the head of Fox News and News Corp.; and a group of other Fox News executives, according to two people familiar with the trip. Vance met with the group at the Murdoch family ranch in southwest Montana near Dillon, according to the people. They confirmed the visit to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about it. It’s not clear why the vice president addressed the group or what they spoke about.

This meeting took place shortly before Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal published its scoop about the birthday letter allegedly written by the president to Jeffrey Epstein, which takes this little item out of the frontiers of classic MAGA paranoia and into the heart of the hopelessly mutated mainstream of American politics.

The vice president’s office does not release a schedule for Vance and did not offer advance notice of the trip, so the surprise arrival of Air Force Two in Butte, Montana, set off local speculation as his motorcade was seen driving away.

Vance’s sudden enthusiasm for Big Sky country adds an extra measure of turmoil into the already roiling stew of MAGA politics. The president is being belabored by large portions of his base over documents detailing his relationship with Epstein, perhaps the most notorious American human trafficker since the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment. Many of those same MAGAnauts have no use for Vance, whom they view as a) the ambitious climber that he is and b) the tool of a new tech elite led by gazillionaire Peter Thiel, Vance’s one-man raison d’être as a politician.

This latest news places the most fervent members of the cult in a terrible bind, but, to my mind anyway, if it ever comes to a choice, and if the feeling that Vance is organizing a coup becomes general within the cult, Vance will go overboard first. Personally, I think it’s the eyeliner.