J.D. Vance’s Venmo Offers Shocking Look Into Trump V.P.’s Inner Circle

Senator J.D. Vance’s public Venmo account shines a light into the many corners of the Republican vice presidential nominee’s inner circle, illuminating his long-standing ties with right-wing fascists, shadowy elites, and federal employees, according to a new report from WIRED.

Vance’s public account on Venmo, a mobile payment app, was first discovered by a law enforcement and extremism researcher, who asked to remain anonymous. WIRED was able to verify that the account belonged to Vance.

It’s worth noting that when setting up a Venmo account, the app offers users the opportunity to sync their phone contacts into their friends list. So some people included on the list of Vance’s Venmo friends could have been automatically added when he made his account in 2016, and may have never made a transaction with the senator or contacted him recently.

Still, the list presents a trove of powerful right-wing voices and some surprising names, too, who could be splitting meals and trips with the Ohio Republican.

Among the more than 200 accounts listed on Vance’s Venmo friends list is that of Amelia Halikias, the government relations director at the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank behind Project 2025.

Donald Trump and Paul Dans, the project’s leader, have attempted to create the illusion that the former president is not affiliated with the fascist plan to oust civil servants and replace them with Trump sycophants. But they can’t outrun all of the evidence demonstrating that Trump had his hands all over the project.

Despite all that posturing, Vance has long-standing public links to the Heritage Foundation, and the group’s president even said he had been rooting for Vance to get the V.P. nomination. Halikias also gave a nod to Vance Monday, retweeting Elon Musk’s comment on Trump’s “excellent” pick of running mate.

Also present on Vance’s friends list is Gladden Pappin, a conservative political theorist who serves as the president of the Hungarian Institute of International Affairs. Pappin is part of the same “new right” vanguard as Vance, which has turned to Hungary’s authoritarian populist regime for inspiration on how to install Christian nationalist policies nationwide.

Pappin also co-founded an online publication called the Journal of American Greatness, which attempted to make scholarly arguments out of Trump’s talking points but shut down before the 2016 election. Alongside collaborator Julius Krein, Pappin later co-founded American Affairs, a Trumpist magazine that still exists.

A Yale alum, Vance has previously criticized elite universities as “expensive day care centers for coddled children,” but he had plenty of connections with many attorneys from expensive law schools, including (predictably) his alma mater.

Several of these lawyers are employed by the Department of Justice and would therefore be considered Trump’s so-called “deep state” enemies. One friend was an assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, which once launched an investigation into Michael Cohen’s claims about the Trump Organization’s business dealings.

Vance also had links to outright Trump critics, such as former Arizona Governor Jeff Flake and Lanny Davis, Michael Cohen’s former lawyer. Davis denied being Vance’s friend on Venmo.

Others on Vance’s list include intellectual dark web doyenne Bari Weiss, hapless conservative news pundit Tucker Carlson, as well as lobbyists from conservative think tanks such as the Hoover Institution and American Enterprise Institute. None of these people responded to WIRED’s requests for comment.

While Vance’s Venmo presents a window into his inner world, it also presents a security threat, by exposing his connections to those who would seek to influence a potentially powerful person.

“What you guys need to realize is that Vance is influenceable,” wrote Andrew Torba, a right-wing social media CEO who has promoted antisemitic content, in a post on X. “We have plenty of people in his orbit. Plenty of our guys can be put into positions of power because he’s there. Our focus should be on pulling him as far right as possible by 2028. Long game. Honey, not vinegar.”

It turns out that the right-wing boycott of Bud Light in 2023 was helped along by funding from a conservative with a history of dark-money spending: Leonard Leo.

The Guardian obtained 2022 tax filings showing that a group linked to Leo, the Concord Fund, donated $350,000 to Consumers Defense, part of Consumers’ Research, shortly before the latter group played a big role in the beer boycott.

The boycott started over Bud Light’s use of transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney in an advertising campaign, resulting in threats to Mulvaney and Anheuser-Busch, as well as a drop in profits. The company abandoned and eventually dropped Mulvaney.

Consumers’ Research, after having been dormant for decades, has surfaced in recent years as a right-wing organization dedicated to leading “the fight against ESG,” or environmental, social, and governance policies, by corporations in America. When companies put “progressive activists and their dangerous agendas ahead of customers” in its view, Consumers’ Research releases “woke alerts.”

This wasn’t the first time a donor group connected to Leo helped out Consumers’ Research. In 2021 and 2022, it received $15 million from right-wing philanthropic organization Donors Trust, also linked to the billionaire Republican megadonor. Consumers’ Research is also a client of Leo’s for-profit firm CRC Advisors, according to The Guardian.

Leo is infamous for helping to engineer the conservative takeover of the Supreme Court and the right-wing influx of judges into lower federal courts. Through those efforts, he has in effect become a power broker in conservative circles, throwing his money in unexpected places, such as blocking AIDS relief, in addition to funding brand boycotts. He’s dodged Democratic attempts to hold him accountable or even to have him just answer questions about his activities.

The Bud Light boycott Leo fueled might have caused an ethics violation by one of the justices he helped get on the Supreme Court, Samuel Alito. During the height of the boycott, Alito dumped between $1,000 and $15,000 of Anheuser-Busch stock, possibly showing his own support of the boycott his patron helped to fund.

Former President Barack Obama has reportedly joined the slate of high-ranking Democrats who think that President Joe Biden ought to reconsider his candidacy in the presidential race.

Obama has reportedly told his allies that he believes Biden’s path to victory in November has significantly narrowed and that his former running mate needs to start seriously considering the feasibility of his candidacy in 2024, multiple people familiar with the former president’s opinion told The Washington Post Thursday.

In his conversations with allies, Obama has said he wants to protect Biden and his legacy, according to the Post. Should the president mount an unsuccessful bid that costs Democrats the White House and control of both the House and Senate, that legacy could be in serious jeopardy.

News of Obama’s wavering confidence comes on the heels of three brutal leaks on Wednesday, which revealed that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had all privately urged the president to withdraw from the race for the sake of the Democratic Party.

Still, their calls for him to step aside in the race come only as leaks and not public calls to withdraw, signaling a reticence to go against Biden entirely. These high-ranking Democrats have resorted to soft power to protect the president, and likely their own skins, should things go another way. The result is a third week of total chaos within the party, while Republicans rally around Donald Trump in Milwaukee and Biden continues to drop in the polls.

Obama’s concerns about Biden’s candidacy have only deepened in the weeks since the president’s disastrous debate performance, people familiar with the matter told the Post.

In all that time, the two have only spoken once, in the immediate aftermath of the debate, and Obama has kept relatively silent. It was reported that George Clooney had consulted with the former president ahead of the actor’s decision to publish an op-ed urging Biden to withdraw from the race.

In recent days, ring-wing social media users have been sniffing out, doxxing, and hounding those who cracked offensive jokes or comments about last week’s attempted assassination of Donald Trump.

Namely, Chaya Raichik, who runs the prominent far-right X account Libs of TikTok, has spent the week doggedly pursuing everyday retail workers, teachers, and public safety personnel who made insensitive remarks in the wake of the incident.

For example, after one social media user posted a video confronting a Home Depot cashier for making a Facebook comment that read, “To bad they weren’t a better shooter!!!!!,” Raichik’s account shared the footage with the caption, “Hi @HomeDepot! Are you aware that you employ people who call for political violence and the ass*ss*nat*on of Presidents? Any comment?” On Tuesday, Home Depot’s official X account announced that the woman “no longer works at” the home improvement store.

Also on Tuesday, after Raichik’s account put the name and workplace of an Oklahoma schoolteacher who made a similar remark on blast, it caught the attention of Ryan Walters, Oklahoma’s Republican Superintendent of Public Instruction. Walters vowed to investigate and, later that evening, posted, “I will be taking her teaching certificate. She will no longer be teaching in Oklahoma.” (Walters, it should be noted, recently appointed Raichik to a position where she can advise school libraries in Oklahoma.)

On Sunday, a Pennsylvania firefighter found himself in the crosshairs of Libs of TikTok after posting, “Too bad it didn’t hit him square.” The following day, according to NorthcentralPA.com, a bomb threat was made on the fire house where he was captain, which “may have been connected to [the] viral social media post.” On Tuesday, the man announced his resignation in a statement online, writing, “I have been threatened. My family has been threatened. My friends have been threatened. I have never felt so unsafe in my life.”

To think it was once a purported consensus on the right that upending the livelihoods of ordinary people for making unsavory remarks is a vile feature of cancel culture.

Texas’s border battle with the Biden administration is apparently not going to end anytime soon, at least according to its governor.

Speaking at the Republican National Convention on Wednesday, Governor Greg Abbott bragged about the contentious back-and-forth he had with federal border agents earlier this year. That spat ended with the Supreme Court siding in favor of the Biden administration. In a 5–4 decision, the high court ruled that Texas had overstepped its authority by placing razor wire along the Rio Grande section of the U.S.-Mexico border. It also gave the green light to the federal government to snip and move sections of the wire that had prevented federal border agents from doing their job.

But all of that was in the rearview mirror for Abbott, who insisted Wednesday that not only had he brought the “border crisis” to President Joe Biden but that the job was far from over.

“We have continued busing migrants to sanctuary cities all across the country,” Abbott said, accusing the undocumented immigrants of being “rapists,” “murderers,” and “terrorists” while attendees waved signs calling for “mass deportations now.”

“Those buses will continue to roll until we finally secure our border,” he added.

Before the Supreme Court ruling, Abbott’s signature Operation Lone Star had bused more than 100,000 migrants from Texas detention centers to cities across the country. That included sending more than 37,000 undocumented people to New York, 30,000 people to Chicago, and 12,500 people to Washington, D.C., according to the governor’s office.

But continuing the highly controversial and extraordinarily cruel program could prove to be legally dubious, economically unsound, and possibly ineffective. In a May report, the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas found that the state had spent $11 billion on increased border security funding, including the busing program, with the intent to “detect and repel illegal crossings, arrest human smugglers and cartel gang members, and stop the flow of deadly drugs like fentanyl.”

But the massive expenditure doesn’t seem to have paid off. The majority (43 percent) of those caught and arrested were charged with misdemeanors, while less than 3 percent of the individuals arrested actually went before a judge for drug offenses. Even fewer (2 percent) went to court on weapons charges.

“Texas has no business trying to run its own immigration enforcement program,” Sarah Cruz, policy and advocacy strategist for border and immigrants’ rights at the ACLU of Texas, told Texas Public Radio at the time. “Governor Abbott and other state politicians conflating immigration with drugs and crime is as false as it is inflammatory and dangerous to our communities.”

To top it off, some political operatives have accused Abbott—and Governor Ron DeSantis, who operated a similar program in Florida—of engaging in human trafficking, while legal experts have roundly criticized the program as unconstitutional.