Move Over, JD Vance. Trump Has a New, Even Weirder Running Mate.

I would like to apologize to JD Vance. He is not, it turns out, the weirdest member of Trump’s reelection campaign.

In late July, I described the Ohio senator as not only the worst running mate Trump could have picked, but perhaps the worst in history. Vance was, I argued, the one potential GOP nominee for vice president who exacerbated all of Trump’s weaknesses while bringing no one—besides deep-pocketed Peter Thiel—to the table. Vance was extreme, yes, but also just awkward and off-putting—“a fraud, a freak, a weirdo,” I wrote.

That is all still true. Vance has, to be fair, found a foothold: He speaks to the mainstream press and defends whatever lie the Trump campaign is pushing that week—and, in many cases, he does this by openly admitting that it’s a lie, as happened when he and Trump began pushing a racist rumor that legal Haitian immigrants were eating pets in Springfield, Ohio. Vance is like Trump’s Pete Buttigieg: a young try-hard surrogate whom the base likes because he goes into “hostile” media situations and doesn’t give an inch.

Vance is also still the most unpopular running mate in recorded history of U.S. presidential elections. But he is no longer the worst member of Trump’s presidential campaign. That honor instead goes to the man who is increasingly bankrolling the campaign and taking center stage within it: Elon Musk.

The 53-year-old tech oligarch began aggressively backing Trump earlier this year, when Trump seemed like a safe bet against President Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee at the time. Now that Biden has been replaced by Kamala Harris and the race is a toss-up, Musk has stepped up his efforts in basically every possible respect. He is spending untold millions in an effort to boost Trump, taking control of much of the campaign’s infrastructure, boasting of a promise to be “Efficiency Czar” should Republicans take the White House, and appearing at seemingly every high-profile campaign event, such as Trump’s return to Butler, Pennsylvania (where he escaped assassination), and last Sunday’s grotesque rally at Madison Square Garden.

The problem is that Musk is by a wide margin the cringiest person in any position of prominence in this election—no small accomplishment given the competition on both sides. He makes Vance seem downright normal. Whereas we all get a laugh out of Vance’s weirdness, Musk is unnervingly weird, not to mention awkwardly uncharismatic and transparently insecure. If the Uncanny Valley were a real place, he’d be the mayor.

Musk also has what may be the corniest and most juvenile sense of humor possessed by any adult of consequence. He loves to make outdated, on-the-nose jokes, like saying that he will head the “Department of Government Efficiency”—or “Doge,” a reference to a stale internet meme from a decade ago that lives on as an unstable digital currency. He has spent weeks hyping Trump’s odds on Kalshi—an unscientific betting market—reaching “69.420 percent.”

The richest man on the planet is also bizarrely thirsty. He has hawked deeply uncool merch at several Trump rallies, first touting a black “dark MAGA” hat at the rally in Butler and then unveiling a “dark gothic MAGA” hat featuring a Nazi-ish typeface at the sociopathic orgy at MSG. And have you seen him bound onstage like a child, desperate for applause?

More substantively, Musk has been dogged by a number of stories showing him to be an off-putting creep. An advocate for procreation, Musk has reportedly offered several women—including Robert F. Kennedy’s former running mate, tech billionaire Nicole Shanahan—his sperm to conceive children. More recently, it was reported that he has bought a large compound in Texas to house his many children (the press has confirmed at least 11) and their mothers. At the same time, every day brings a flood of Musk’s bad, racist, unfunny, and deeply stupid tweets—many, if not most, of which contain easily debunked misinformation.

Theoretically, Musk is bringing the entrepreneurial know-how that has helped him build several innovative companies to the campaign. In practice, the results are rather different. Musk’s companies seem to do better when he takes less of an active interest in them—X, the social network he obsesses over, is by far the least successful—and his work overseeing the Trump campaign’s get out the vote operation suggests that might be true when it comes to politics too. In Nevada, Musk’s efforts are going well, thanks in part to his hands-off approach and decision to hire Chris Carr, a well-respected veteran of Silver State politics. Elsewhere, things are going much less smoothly. On Wednesday, Wired reported that door knockers employed by Musk were often put in hostile situations, sometimes duped into working for Trump, and generally unprepared for the work that they were doing. “I think it’s what happens when you let a bunch of grifters take over,” one Trump source told the magazine. “Shit is always gonna produce shit.”

“We have to reduce spending to live within our means,” Musk said during a virtual town hall last week. “And, you know, that necessarily involves some temporary hardship, but it will ensure long-term prosperity.” This wasn’t a gaffe. Musk has hammered this point in recent days.

Musk is being honest here. Trump’s promises to destroy the federal bureaucracy, when coupled with Musk’s own stated aim to cut “trillions” in discretionary spending, would indeed tank the economy. For all of the talk about Trump representing a new economic program for Republicans, this is just textbook conservatism. But the twist is that Musk, no doubt to the consternation of many Republican leaders, is saying the quiet part loud: He’s admitting that there would be economically disastrous consequences for fully implementing the GOP’s orthodox policies.

The actual root of Musk’s support for Trump is still something of a mystery. He is undoubtedly “red-pilled,” particularly since he bought Twitter in 2022 and turned it into his own personal LiveJournal; he has become obsessed with the left’s support for immigrants and trans people. He may see the Democrats’ increasing embrace of antitrust—and growing skepticism—of the tech industry as a threat to his businesses. It is possible that he looks at Trump and sees an old man who is rapidly diminishing as a kind of Trojan horse. Musk, born in apartheid South Africa, is ineligible to be president, and his own beliefs and demeanor would make it difficult for him to become president even if he were a natural-born citizen. But he can still become the most powerful person in the world: He just has to get Trump elected first.