HOWARD TULLMAN JOINS LISA DENT ON WGN RADIO TO DISCUSS SELFIES AND HIS INC.MAGAZINE COLUMN

 LISTEN TO THE SHOW HERE

LISTEN TO THE SHOW HERE

 

SIFTING THROUGH THE WRECKAGE We are NOT better off than we were two years ago, and that cannot be said enough D. Earl Stephens ✍️ Jun 2 After wiping the lack of sleep from my eyes, and pouring some midnight-black coffee into my overused mug, I fell into my office chair, flipped on my computer, and cautiously waded into my morning newsfeed. It took me but three seconds to sadly realize that I hadn’t gotten the news I’d hoped for, so I sighed, and hit The New York Times front page to assess the overnight damage. Here are the gruesome headlines that greeted me: -Hospitals See Diseases Resurge as Vaccinations Decline -Extreme Water Shortages in the West -Hegseth Strikes Female and Black Navy Officers From Promotion List -Trump backs off Plan for $1.8 Billion Fund That Drew Political Backlash -Israel Strikes Southern Lebanon -Trump Announces Stricter Rule For Medicaid Work Requirement There was no above-the-fold mention of the idiotic, dangerous war in Iran, our rocketing gas prices, or the millions of Americans who are being forced to use credit cards to feed their families or account for through-the-roof healthcare prices because there is only so much bad news that can be squeezed onto a screenshot. There was nothing about out-of-control inflation, rising interest rates, or the crumbling value of the dollar. There wasn't a thing about corporate America’s environmental terrorism, and steady assault on our clean air and water. The endless assaults on our vote, and resurrection of the Jim Crow South were now an active crime scene to be treated with the occasional gory update. If you are an American out looking for any good news at the moment, you better pack a lunch, and let your loved ones know you might not be returning for dinner. Our White House and the once pristine grounds that surround it are a metaphor for the wreckage King Trump and his corrupt Republican court have inflicted on what was once the world’s premier democracy. In just over 16 months, we have been reduced to a budding third-world country that is being crushed by out-of-control billionaires who are in our elections and our homes. They are being provided cover by a bought-off radical Right Supreme Court majority that has no notion of what law and order really means as it protects the insane whims of the convicted felon that appointed half its soulless members. And here — RIGHT HERE — is where it’s worth reminding everybody that things did not have to be this way and were not this way under the previous administration, which offered a hand up to people in need, and provided millions and millions of good jobs while rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure in every state of the union — not just the red, purple, or blue ones. Here’s where we must note for the record that while Joe Biden was not a perfect man, he was a patriotic one who spoke of all Americans — Democrats, Republicans and Independents — as being a part of the whole, and did not rip apart large segments of our colorful democratic fabric to ram through a dark agenda. He was a man of deep faith and conviction, who actually went to church every Sunday. He spearheaded the Inflation Reduction Act, the largest investment in U.S. history. All it did among scores of other good things was fight climate change, cap out-of-pocket prescription drug costs for Medicare recipients, and provided $2,000 per year of aid, while enabling Medicare to actually negotiate drug prices. He pushed through the CHIPS and Science Act which chiefly provided billions in incentives to boost domestic semiconductor manufacturing, reduced reliance on foreign supply chains, and celebrated science as a beacon of discovery instead of an enemy of the state. He expanded minimum wage for federal workers, provided scores of other workers protections, including making good and sure they got the mandatory overtime they deserved for their efforts. He ended the longest war in history in Afghanistan, after the previous slobbery president had surrendered to the odious Taliban. He stood firmly with Ukraine, and expanded and strengthened NATO to stand against Putin and Russia, not with them. Our allies across the globe also stood with us back then, instead of turning their backs in disgust and dismay as they do now. All of this was done during a four-year term that started with a lockdown following a terrible Republican attack on our Capitol, and under the sorrowful cloud of a once-in-a-century pandemic that killed more than one million Americans. I did not start this piece intending to prosecute such an ardent defense of the Biden Administration, but I am glad that I arrived at this place. An enormous amount of good was done during his four years, and I look back at them reverently, and with a sinking heart. We were safe back then. Were there warts and blemishes? Of course. The record will show a good-hearted, aging man in declining health, who was too stubborn to acknowledge the residue of Father Time, and the toll it had taken on him. He should have served one term as he promised, and bowed out heroically, to let a younger crusader lead from the front to build on all his good work. He also had a blind spot the size of Kansas for an attorney general, who simply refused to do the most important thing in his job description: protect America. Instead he dithered while the most dangerous man in the world — the man who had already violently attacked us once — rebuilt his army of Republican Orcs, and readied for another assault to finish us off for good. In the end, the disgraceful Merrick Garland even refused to protect Biden himself ... These things are simply unforgivable, because they left all of us exposed, and without protection. Armies are in our streets and masked government agents are shooting us dead. We have a mad king who demands loyalty instead of earning it, and has no talent for governing and pushing tough legislation through our House and Senate that helps Americans like Biden did. Trump is a petulant punk and a no-talent negotiator who has used that bought-off Supreme Court he built in his grotesque image, and Mike Johnson’s pathetic GOP House of used playing cards to steamroll his way toward the demolition of our White House, and the use of taxpayer dollars to compensate the lowlifes who attacked us on Jan. 6, 2021. He’s breaking the backs of working folks in America in myriad ways to include all these damn MAGA farmers, who are currently getting screwed almost as badly as the people of color who tirelessly work their fields just for the privilege of pocketing some chump change, and a leaky roof over their heads. Trump has proven beyond a shadow of any doubt that he could not only shoot one of his racist supporters in the middle of some street and not lose their vote, but could also swipe their family’s benefits and leave them destitute in that street just to really rub it in. America is a leaking sewer, and crumbling under the bloated weight of all these hideous billionaires, who are squeezing the life out of us and our budgets. As we stumble toward one of the most somber Independence Days in history, America is going it alone on the road to nowhere. We aren’t leading from the front, we are falling behind. Even if you don’t completely share my assessment of America 2026, this much must be acknowledged if you have even a shred of decency and an honest heart: We are not better off now than we were two years ago. Not even close.

Why Getting an AI ‘Selfie’ Is the Smartest Move You Can Make Right Now (Before Everyone Else Does)

 

Why Getting an AI ‘Selfie’ Is the Smartest Move You Can Make Right Now (Before Everyone Else Does)

Mark Zuckerberg said ‘Nothing is the future forever.’ This new tech trend is proving him right.

EXPERT OPINION BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS @TULLMAN

Jun 1, 2026

 

Those of us who remember the 70s may recall the famous quote from Jon Landau that appeared in Boston’s The Real Paper about Bruce Springsteen. In May of 1974, after watching a show where Bruce opened for Bonnie Raitt at the Harvard Square Theater, Landau wrote “I saw rock and roll future and its name is Bruce Springsteen.” Apart from his grammar, which left a bit to be desired, he was—as we used to say back then—“Right on.” Jon jumped right on the Bruce train and a couple of years thereafter became his lifelong manager. Right place, right time.

I realize that our culture today is overly obsessed with the constant search for the next new thing and that, as Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Meta (formerly Facebook), is fond of saying, nothing is the future forever. But there are in fact moments when you do see and feel something that makes you wonder if, in fact, the Earth hadn’t just moved for a moment and in that instant changed the future forever. It seems to me that we might just be on the cusp of seeing the next new thing and that nobody who’s anybody is going to want to miss the chance to get in on the ground floor while the gettin’ s still good. FOMO is a very powerful force, and no one wants to miss the moment or be left behind. Plus, if you don’t get yours while it’s available, it may soon be gone.

Of course, timing is everything, and the conditions and the context have to be just right to trigger a substantial shift in the way that the world does things. Sad to say, for all of Zuck’s grand schemes and dreams, Meta is very old news for the kids and, as Yogi Berra once said: “the place is so busy that no one goes there anymore.” Snap might be a resurrected distant second and X is always going to be a cross between a toilet and a sewer where it’s all about enragement rather than engagement. All the other players aren’t even also-rans, they’re “whatever became of” has beens.

For the next couple of generations, the only social channels that matter are Instagram, Tik-Tok and maybe YouTube. These are the most powerful communication tools that we have today for our youth, but—given the enormous volume of activity and the number of participants—they’re largely overwhelming, even for the most active posters and, as a result, they’re rapidly becoming a second day job that no one wants.

The truth is that even the most dedicated and well-intentioned creators on any of these platforms couldn’t possibly read, much less personally respond to, the zillions of posts that they receive constantly. The bad news is that, increasingly, even the most ardent fans are starting to notice. Fans are fickle and flighty and loyalty today only means that they haven’t seen anything better yet. Every entrepreneur’s job is exactly the same—find the next wave, race to the front, ride it for all it’s worth, and then move on before the inevitable crash.

Perhaps more important is the fact that these days, the true qualitative metrics of value and longevity aren’t about gross numbers, fans, followers or traffic volume. They’re about the artist’s ability to create and manage authentic and intentional sharing that drives caring and connection. As I wrote recently, the smart players want to own their own platforms and their content, connect and transact directly with their fans, ditch the gatekeepers, and cut out all the other layers and intermediaries that get in the way of direct and “personal” communication. For sure, this desire is based in no small part on economics, but it’s also about emotion.

Our early social technologies helped to manufacture thinly-related “friends” and the artificial impression of intimacy, but any real communicator, performer or other talent would tell you that mass means nothing and that meaning means everything. They’d all rather have a smaller collection of real and sincere fans than millions of nobodies that they’ll never meet. Those are the kinds of relationships that are still manageable and which pay off in multiple ways. And they provide demonstrable psychic benefits to the performers and help avoid burning out.

It turns out that an essential part of any artist’s preserving their own talent and humanity is their feeling and ability to believe and demonstrate that they’re not simply talented robots on the stage replicating the same performances night after night, albeit all over the world, but instead that they’re caring and committed professionals with the time, talent and artistry to do and share what they love doing. The last thing they want is to be chained to a desk or a phone feeding the social media beast all day long instead of doing what they wanted to do all along. It could be singing, dancing, teaching, or painting, but, for sure, they didn’t sign up to be posting all day.

So, the challenge for all these artists and performers is how do you create and deliver these kinds of experiences and connections at scale. The fact is that we’re all stretched and pulled in many directions all day long and, in addition to being weary and close to shutting down, if an artist is honest with himself or herself, they’re likely to acknowledge that sometimes they feel that they’re doing a halfway job and not delivering what was promised to their fans and followers. It’s far too easy to get spread a mile wide and an inch deep and disappoint everyone including yourself.

That’s why I think that, for anyone with an active and expanding social audience, getting yourself a Selfie—a digital twin that you can build in minutes—is the smartest thing you can do right now. I think of this as an investment in the future rather than in the present, and if you don’t start taking steps to invest in the future, it’s highly likely that you won’t have one.

And honestly, since we haven’t figured out how to physically clone ourselves, it’s pretty clear to me that soon everyone will have a personal digital twin like Selfie to write, post, comment and respond for them automatically and on a 24/7 basis in a manner that accurately reflects their intelligence, use of language and slang, writing style and conversational phrasing. I’m not talking about some business bot or shopping widget—that’s boring, already overdone, and mostly disappointing.  

I’m talking about a highly personal and social online twin (what better name for it than Selfie) that—solely on demand—automatically ingests all your social feeds, all your photos and videos, and anything and everything else that you supply it and builds a “brain” that thinks like you, writes like you, reflects your typical style and tone, and can answer questions from your fans, followers, family, friends or anyone else based on everything that it knows about you and on nothing else. No hallucinations, no out-to-lunch responses, and polite enough to say from time to time that it simply doesn’t know.  

You are always totally in control of your Selfie and can edit anything it writes, improve or add to its suggestions and responses, and/or decide to simply trash any post or comment or answer that it makes for you. Your Selfie gets smarter all the time based on your actions and also by virtue of additional information and material that you add to its content base over time. Plus, it regularly polls all your authorized social feeds and adds all your activity in those channels into its knowledge base as well.

Bottom line: nothing in our lives is a scarcer resource than our time. Agents are already all over the business world, for better or worse, but the Selfie is the first substantial attempt to create a personal agent/digital twin that fully and fairly represents you in social interactions at scale without taking more than five minutes to launch a Selfie and without spending more than an hour or two adding content to really make it your own. It’s easy to predict what the future will eventually look like; it’s just hard to determine when it will be here. But the Selfie is here—up and running today—and just waiting for you to get yours before someone else does.

 

Is JD Vance the 2028 Front Runner? Trump Has Questions.

President Trump appears to see the matter of his heir as unsettled, adding a layer of tension to his relationship with Vice President JD Vance.

By Katie Rogers and Tyler Pager

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• May 30, 2026

In recent conversations with aides and allies, President Trump often interjects with a question about his vice president: Does JD Vance have what it takes to go all the way?

He usually answers his own question: He’s not so sure.

It is not that Mr. Trump is abandoning Mr. Vance. He involves him in major decisions, has given him high-profile opportunities to position himself for 2028 and trusts the 41-year-old vice president to wage partisan warfare on his behalf. In a cabinet meeting this week, Mr. Trump compared Mr. Vance to Eliot Ness, the mob-busting federal agent, for working to ferret out fraud in mostly Democratic controlled states.

Mr. Trump has long conducted running focus groups on his closest aides, and appears to enjoy needling them and keeping them off balance as a way of asserting his dominance. Several people in the president’s inner circle have been subject to his quasi-public questioning of their performance and their future.

But when it comes to Mr. Vance, the stakes are higher. As the default front-runner for the Republican nomination and would-be inheritor of the president’s political movement, Mr. Vance’s fortunes ride to a substantial degree on the enthusiasm of the support he gets from Mr. Trump. And Mr. Trump’s regular polling of people on whether they prefer Mr. Vance or Secretary of State Marco Rubio has become one of the most closely watched early indicators of how power in the Republican Party might pass to the next generation.

When he conducts those polls in private, Mr. Trump often compares Mr. Vance’s performance to his own achievements. He has told several allies that Mr. Vance has never won a tough race without his help. (Mr. Trump’s endorsement got Mr. Vance over the finish line in a tight race for an Ohio Senate seat.) He has brought up the number of vacations Mr. Vance has taken as vice president. (Mr. Trump does not generally take them.)

He has repeatedly mentioned the vice president’s initial opposition to starting a war with Iran and has done so in front of Mr. Vance. (“I’m more of a peace person than you are — but I had to do it,” he has said to him.) The president has also questioned his decision to send a Vance-led delegation to a negotiation session in Pakistan that failed to end the war.

Mr. Trump, always keenly attuned to the optics of the presidency, has zeroed in on moments when Mr. Vance might not look the part. He has repeatedly brought up a moment from last spring, when Mr. Vance fumbled Ohio State’s national football championship trophy on the White House South Lawn. (Mr. Trump has said he is happy it wasn’t him.)

This account of Mr. Trump’s relationship with his vice president is based on interviews with more than a dozen people who are directly familiar with the dynamic between the two men. Some of them were granted anonymity to speak about Mr. Trump’s thinking.

“Vice President Vance has done a remarkable job of helping implement the president’s America First agenda,” Steven Cheung, the White House communications director, said in a statement. “There has been no vice president in history who has been more empowered, and that is a reflection of the strong trust and relationship between the two. Any false media narratives from unknown and unnamed sources fabricating stories clearly do not have any knowledge of the truth.”

Mr. Trump, who turns 80 next month, is generationally and stylistically different from Mr. Vance, a Midwestern millennial who rose out of a hardscrabble upbringing and made that struggle the animating force of his political brand. The president, a Queens-born real estate developer raised in wealth, prefers to be ensconced in gilded surroundings. When Mr. Vance is not in Washington, he enjoys taking his family home to Cincinnati or to Camp David, the woodsy presidential retreat that Mr. Trump has only visited once in his second term.

In meetings, Mr. Vance frequently scrolls his phone, and he uses social media to fight with his critics. The president frequently posts to Truth Social, but he does not spend time replying to people online, as Mr. Vance does.

Susie Wiles, Mr. Trump’s chief of staff, recently advised Mr. Vance to take a break from social media, as have other officials in the West Wing, according to people familiar with those interactions, because the fighting was beneath his office. (Mr. Vance said he took a break for Lent.)

Through it all, Mr. Vance has exhibited the one quality that Mr. Trump most prizes: loyalty. He has put aside his reservations about the war to back the president’s handling of the conflict and carried out the traditional No. 2 attack-dog role against Mr. Trump’s critics, even Pope Leo XIV.

He remains a popular figure among Mr. Trump’s MAGA base. Tony Fabrizio, a longtime pollster for Mr. Trump, said the president chose Mr. Vance as a running mate in 2024 because he appeals to those voters. In an interview, Mr. Fabrizio said that the president saw Mr. Vance as “a MAGA warrior who would go out every day and fight for the things the president wanted.”

Mr. Fabrizio added: “He knew that, and that was exactly what he got.”

‘Who Likes JD Vance?’

Even so, Mr. Trump has continued to needle Mr. Vance on matters of substance and style, from criticizing his shoes to ribbing him for his tendency to interject in conversations.

In November, the president wondered aloud why Mr. Vance was not more subservient, like the officials who work for President Xi Jinping of China.

“Why don’t you behave like that?” Mr. Trump asked Mr. Vance during a breakfast for Republican senators. “JD doesn’t behave like that! JD butts into conversations! I want to have that for at least a couple of days. OK, JD?”

People close to the president say that Mr. Vance is in Mr. Trump’s good graces.

“My father always brings up how JD is a savage and annihilates the fake news, like the made-up narrative of this story,” Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son, said in a statement relayed through his spokesman. “Interviews, rallies, podcasts — he shows up and performs and that’s what my father cares about.”

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Mr. Vance fumbled the College Football Playoff National Championship Trophy last spring. Credit...Eric Lee/The New York Times

To win the 2028 nomination, Mr. Vance must stay in good standing with Mr. Trump and reassure a Republican Party that has been molded in the president’s image but fractured by his choices. So far, like most vice presidents, Mr. Vance has prioritized his relationship with the president.

Despite his misgivings about the war with Iran, he has loyally defended Mr. Trump’s decision to start the conflict. And he has backed another politically fraught action, the creation of a $1.8 billion fund to compensate victims of what the administration contends is political persecution. Compounded by Mr. Trump’s recent retribution efforts against Republican lawmakers, that fund has sent Republicans into open revolt.

For Mr. Vance, whose political rise rested in part on his criticism of excessive American intervention abroad, the Iran war has left him balancing his loyalty to Mr. Trump against the antiwar sentiments of much of his political base

As Tucker Carlson, a close ally, recently put it, the violation of a campaign promise to not involve the United States in conflicts overseas has put Mr. Vance in a “tough spot.”

Marjorie Taylor Greene, like Mr. Carlson, recommended Mr. Vance to Mr. Trump for the running mate job. Both have since fallen out of favor with Mr. Trump. In an interview, Ms. Greene warned that, should he run for the presidency, Mr. Vance will have trouble regaining trust from Republicans who oppose the war.

“He is no longer in a place where he can hang on to his former reputation,” Ms. Greene said of Mr. Vance, whom she said she still considers an ally. “There’s nothing that can protect him anymore.”

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Mr. Vance on his mobile phone during a Rose Garden Dinner Club at the White House earlier this month. Credit...Eric Lee for The New York Times

As Mr. Vance works to shore up Mr. Trump’s policies, the president has pondered his vice president’s future.

Last summer, Mr. Trump said Mr. Vance was “most likely” to be his political heir apparent: “In all fairness, he’s the vice president,” Mr. Trump told reporters in August, adding that he thought Mr. Rubio could eventually be added to a presidential ticket but that it was “too early, obviously, to talk about it.” Since that interview, Mr. Trump has praised Mr. Rubio and has told people close to him how impressed he is with the job Mr. Rubio is doing.

Mr. Rubio spends more time with Mr. Trump than Mr. Vance does, as is typical of a national security adviser. Mr. Rubio frequently travels with Mr. Trump on Air Force One, and they have bonded over weekends in Florida. Mr. Vance, by nature of being vice president, does not travel on the same plane as Mr. Trump.

At a dinner in the Rose Garden earlier this month, Mr. Trump quizzed his guests about who would be the better choice: “Who likes JD Vance?” “Who likes Marco Rubio?” He made it clear that he was not endorsing either man.

In an interview with Fortune in the Oval Office this month, the president was asked, again, about who best was positioned to carry on his legacy.

“Whoever gets this is going to be very important,” the president said. “And if you get the wrong person: disaster.”

During that interview, Mr. Vance was watching from the back of the room as Mr. Trump answered.

‘He came up empty’

Mr. Vance is one of the most recognizable figures in American politics other than Mr. Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Health and Human Services secretary. One of his advantages as vice president is that he serves as the finance chair of the Republican National Committee, with direct access to donors.

Allies of Mr. Trump and Mr. Vance say that the vice president is still best positioned to be Mr. Trump’s successor. Despite widespread concern over affordability and the cost of the Iran war, Mr. Trump remains popular with Republican voters.

According to a Quinnipiac poll published last week, some 73 percent of Republican voters still widely approve of the job Mr. Trump is doing. According to a poll released by Pew in February, 75 percent of Republican voters view Mr. Vance favorably.

They are both broadly unpopular, however. The president’s overall approval rating has sunk to a second-term low. According to Quinnipiac, Mr. Vance is similarly unpopular, with 39 percent of voters approving of the job he is doing.

Recently, Mr. Vance has faced criticism among conservatives for his support for the Iran war, and for engaging with Mr. Trump’s attacks on Pope Leo for speaking out against the war. Mr. Vance, who converted to Catholicism in 2019 at age 35, advised the leader of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics to stick to religion.

Critics have characterized him as a political shape shifter.

Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky, who is widely seen as a likely 2028 Democratic presidential candidate, has repeatedly accused Mr. Vance, who was born in Middletown, Ohio, of overstating his blue-collar roots and misrepresenting himself as a product of Appalachia. (Though Mr. Vance’s relatives were from Appalachia, Middletown is not part of the region.)

In an interview, Mr. Beshear accused Mr. Vance of “governing in a way that only hurts the places he claims he was from.”

Mr. Beshear added: “JD Vance doesn’t have a real bone in his body. Last week he’s appointed the fraud czar, and this week he’s defending a new $1.7 billion slush fund for the Trump administration to give to their allies.”

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Mr. Vance in Pakistan for Iran peace talks last month. Credit...Pool photo by Jacquelyn Martin

Mr. Vance’s allies say that he is doing the work that would be most helpful to Mr. Trump by traveling the world on diplomatic missions and crisscrossing the country to bolster Mr. Trump’s domestic agenda. They say he is not worrying about netting political wins.

On the international stage, Mr. Vance campaigned for a hard-right overseas ally, Viktor Orban. Mr. Orban went on to lose his race to be re-elected prime minister of Hungary. Mr. Trump’s advisers say he expected that outcome, but the president wanted to help an ally who had stood by him in the years he spent as a political pariah.

A major test of Mr. Vance’s domestic political sway came last summer, when he was asked by the White House political operation to visit the Indiana Statehouse to encourage Republicans to vote to redraw the state’s electoral maps. In the end, the lawmakers declined to redraw the maps, and Mr. Trump waged a mostly successful retribution campaign to unseat those who defied his wishes.

Local officials believe Mr. Trump’s attacks have done long-term damage to the Republican Party and that Mr. Vance has a perilous path ahead of him if he decides to run for the presidency.

“He came up empty in Indiana the same way that he came up empty in Hungary,” State Representative Ed Clere, a nine-term Republican from southern Indiana who voted against redistricting, said of Mr. Vance.

Mr. Clere, who said he will run for mayor of New Albany, Ind., as an independent when his term ends, added that the vice president’s involvement in the redistricting fight “should be a wake-up call for anyone who thinks Trump will be able to pass the MAGA torch to Vance, or anyone else.”

James Blair, one of Mr. Trump’s top political advisers, said that Mr. Vance was willing to try to persuade Indiana Republicans even if it meant coming away with nothing.

“The vice president was willing to take on the fight in Indiana because he’s not afraid to do what needs doing, even if it’s an uphill battle,” he said in a statement. “The vice president takes on some of the toughest tasks and keeps at it until the job is done.”

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Mr. Vance at an event about fraud in Bangor, Maine, earlier this month. Credit...Tierney L. Cross/The New York Times

As part of his anti-fraud work, Mr. Vance traveled to Bangor, Maine, earlier this month, telling a crowd of supporters there that fraud had festered in the state under the state’s Democratic governor, Janet Mills. In Maine, supporters were receptive to the idea that Mr. Vance could lead the party in 2028.

John Lugo and his wife, Denise Dineen, were in the crowd, wearing matching hats that said “Make America Healthy Again.” Mr. Lugo, a small-business owner, said that he saw Mr. Vance as an “extremely articulate” partner to Mr. Trump.

When asked if he thought the vice president should be the next Republican presidential nominee, Mr. Lugo kept his options open.

“Him or Rubio,” Mr. Lugo said. “Rubio would be good, too.”

When Mr. Lugo and his wife turned to face Mr. Vance as he took the stage, another name was inscribed on the back of their ball caps: “KENNEDY.”

Trump Just Benched JD Vance — And Confiscated His Phone.

 

BREAKING: Trump Just Benched JD Vance — And Confiscated His Phone.

White House insiders: Trump thinks JD Vance is a “disaster,” can’t stop bringing up the time he dropped a trophy, and has reportedly had the chief of staff confiscate his phone. LOL.

Dean Blundell May 31

The most powerful "heir" in America was told to log off, seated in the audience, and called a "disaster" to his face. JD Vance is being humiliated in slow motion, and the leaks are GLORIOUS.

May 31, 2026

This weekend, the New York Times delivered the purest, uncut, pharmaceutical-grade version of how broken Trump’s White House/The Trump Regime is: a story about how Donald J. Trump — 79 years old, allegedly the most powerful man on Earth — spends a meaningful chunk of his day privately telling everyone who’ll listen that his own Vice President is a clumsy, vacation-addicted, terminally-online embarrassment who would be a “disaster” the second the keys got handed over.

And the best part? The single most humiliating detail in the entire piece isn’t even the trophy. It’s that the grown man who is one heartbeat from the presidency reportedly had to be told — by the chief of staff, like a substitute teacher confiscating a Nintendo Switch — to stop tweeting after having his phone taken away.

Take a break, JD. The fighting is “beneath your office.” Go sit in the audience.

Let’s get into it.

The Phone Gets Taken Away

Here’s the line that broke the internet, courtesy of the Times and more than a dozen insiders who apparently cannot wait to dump on this man: Susie Wiles, Trump’s chief of staff, recently advised Vance to take a break from social media. Other officials in the West Wing reportedly told him the same thing. Why? Because the Vice President of the United States spends his days scrolling his phone in meetings and personally throwing hands with random critics online, and the consensus inside the building is that this is — and I’m quoting the vibe here — beneath the office.

Trump posts 47 times before lunch, threatening to wipe entire countries off the map and cosplaying as the literal Son of God, and nobody takes his phone. But JD? JD gets the talk. JD gets benched. JD, per the reporting, then claimed he’d actually just stepped back “for Lent,” which is the political equivalent of “I wasn’t crying, I was yawning.”

America's Drunk Uncle/President Went Ape S*** On Social Media Yesterday: Breaking Down Trump’s INSANE Truth Social Medical Episode

Dean Blundell · 2:09 PM

May 31, 2026

Read full story

The man’s own staff looked at his posting habits and collectively decided the most effective thing the Vice President could do for the administration was shut up. That’s not a leak. That’s a performance review.

The Trophy. The Eternal, Sacred Trophy.

According to the Times, when Trump privately gnaws on whether Vance has what it takes for 2028, he keeps circling back — like a man returning to the scene of a crime he personally enjoys — to the time Vance dropped the gold College Football Playoff National Championship trophy. From his own alma mater. Ohio State. Let it tumble. Clang.

And then — because the universe has a sense of humour and Donald Trump has a long memory for other people’s failures and none for his own — a year later, Vance got relegated to the audience at the White House reception for the next champs. The Indiana Hoosiers got honoured. The Vice President got seated. In the crowd. At his own boss’s house.

If you ever wonder what it looks like to be slowly, deliberately, lovingly humiliated by the most powerful man alive, it looks like watching the football you fumbled get handed to somebody else while you clap from row six.

“JD Doesn’t Behave Like That!”

The receipts go back further. At a breakfast with Republican senators last November, Trump reportedly held up compliant foreign officials — the kind who nod and never argue — as the gold standard, and then snapped that “JD doesn’t behave like that!” as a knock on his own VP. The President of the United States used pliable foreign leaders as the model and graded his own running mate down for having a spine. In a room full of senators. Out loud.

Then there’s the Fortune interview this month, the one where Trump got asked who’d best carry on his “dealmaking legacy” — with Vance reportedly standing in the back of the Oval Office, listening — and Trump went: “Whoever gets this is going to be very important, and if you get the wrong person: disaster.”

Disaster. With the wrong person standing right there. You could not script crueler reality TV if you tried, and believe me, the title card “PREVIOUSLY ON SUCCESSION” basically writes itself.

The Marco Rubio Bachelor Rose Ceremony

This is the part that tells you everything about how Trump actually operates. He’s not just doubting Vance — he’s running an open, ongoing, deeply petty competition between Vance and Marco Rubio for who gets to be the heir, and he makes everyone around him play.

At a Rose Garden Club dinner in May, Trump literally polled the room — applause-meter style — on whether they’d want Vance or Rubio as commander-in-chief. Vance got the louder clap. Rubio got the polite golf clap. Trump’s verdict? “Alright, sounds like a good ticket.” Not “JD’s my guy.” A ticket. A consolation duo. Two contestants and a participation trophy.

Meanwhile, Rubio’s out here riding Air Force One, doing the trips, logging the face time, quietly becoming the kid who does his homework while JD’s in the back getting his phone taken away. The knives aren’t even subtle anymore.

The Denial That Confirmed It

Now, the White House did respond, and oh, did they respond. Comms director Steven Cheung called the whole thing fabricated “fake news” from “unknown and unnamed sources,” and specifically went nuclear on the social-media-timeout detail, insisting on X that the Wiles conversation “never happened” and that the Times refused to run his denial.

The Times, for its part, did not blink and stood by every word.

Here’s the thing about a denial this loud, this fast, this furious over one specific anecdote — the phone one. When an administration shrugs off “the President thinks his VP is a disaster” but loses its entire mind over “the chief of staff told him to log off,” you’ve just told everyone which detail actually drew blood. You don’t deploy the comms director at DEFCON 1 over the stuff that isn’t true. You do it over the stuff that’s true and makes the guy look like a teenager.

They didn’t deny the trophy. They didn’t deny the audience seat. They didn’t deny “disaster.” They went to war over the phone. Noted.

What This Actually Is

Strip away the comedy — and God, there’s a lot of it — and here’s the real machine underneath.

Trump does not do heirs. He does vehicles. He never built a successor because a successor is someone who eventually won’t need you, and need is the only currency he understands. So instead of anointing Vance and building him up, he keeps him hungry, keeps him guessing, dangles Rubio, runs the applause meter, drops “disaster” with the kid in the room, and lets a dozen aides whisper to the Times about the broken trophy and the vacations and the phone.

This isn’t a falling-out. It’s the business model. It’s the exact same leopard that ate Sessions and Barr and Pence and Milley and Tucker and Candace and MTG, now sizing up the one guy who was supposed to inherit the whole zoo. The loyalty was always transactional. The transaction with Vance just hasn’t paid out yet, and Trump is making damn sure JD knows the receipt is non-refundable.

So no, let’s not feel too bad for the man who built his entire identity on being Trump’s most fervent convert — the “Never Trumper” who became the truest believer the second the math worked, the guy Susie Wiles herself once called a conspiracy theorist for a decade. He signed up for the leopard. He praised the leopard. He campaigned for the leopard.

He just didn’t think the leopard would make him sit in the audience and put his phone in a drawer.

LOL.