Vice President JD Vance is being set up as the White House’s sacrificial lamb in the escalating Jeffrey Epstein scandal, according to Donald Trump’s longtime biographer Michael Wolff — who declared flatly that the administration is throwing its own number two overboard to protect the president.

Speaking on the latest episode of the Daily Beast’s "Inside Trump’s Head" podcast alongside co-host Joanna Coles, Wolff described Vance as having been “thrown in front of the bus” following bombshell reporting by The New York Times that placed the vice president at the center of chaotic, behind-the-scenes efforts to manage the fallout from Trump’s long-scrutinized ties to the disgraced convicted sex trafficker.

The NYT Report That Lit the Fuse

The Times reporting — drawn from an excerpt of the forthcoming book Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, due out June 23 — describes a White House in full damage-control mode after the Justice Department and FBI released a memo last July declaring there was no Epstein client list and that the financier died by suicide in federal custody.

According to the excerpt, top administration officials, including Vance and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, gathered in the Situation Room on July 17, 2025 — without Trump — to debate how to contain the mounting outrage among MAGA voters who had been promised Epstein transparency and felt betrayed. The closed-door session was one of several emergency meetings convened as the administration scrambled to manage what Vance himself reportedly described to colleagues as a “huge problem.”

According to the Times, Vance took a notably aggressive posture inside those meetings, pushing colleagues to release the DOJ’s millions of Epstein files in full — even if some of the contents reflected poorly on Trump. He offered to personally go on television to defend the administration’s handling of the matter and reportedly floated the idea of enlisting Tucker Carlson to interview convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell inside prison as a public relations gambit. His colleagues largely dismissed his suggestions, choosing instead to close ranks around the president at all costs.

Wolff: The Message Is Clear

For Wolff, a veteran journalist and author who has had extraordinary access to Trump throughout his political career, the Times report is far less notable for what it says about Epstein than for what it does to Vance.

“More interesting, probably than what it says about Epstein, is JD Vance, who is really dumped … thrown in front of the bus here,” Wolff told co-host Coles on the podcast. He described the story as a carefully directed piece of messaging aimed squarely at one person.

The report sends a signal directly back to Trump, Wolff argued — that his vice president was not a loyal soldier during the crisis, but rather someone operating on a different set of priorities. In Wolff’s telling, Trump’s position on Epstein has always been simple and unwavering: there is nothing to discuss, anyone raising the subject is an enemy, and any aide who treats it as a genuine problem is — by definition — not on his side.

In that context, Vance’s push for transparency, his offers to go public, and his expressed belief that full disclosure was survivable all paint him as someone who fundamentally misread the president. “The White House is throwing JD Vance over the side,” Wolff said flatly. “That’s what’s going on here.”

Vance, 41, emerges from the Times account as a figure described in unflattering terms by the very colleagues who presumably leaked the story — depicted as panicked, out of step with Trump’s instincts, and convinced he understood the political moment better than the president whose loyalty he depended on.

A Pattern of Vance Vulnerability

The Epstein narrative is not the first time Wolff has flagged signs of tension between Trump and his vice president. On an earlier episode of “Inside Trump’s Head,” Wolff described Elon Musk’s high-profile demand during his public feud with Trump last spring — in which Musk called for Trump’s impeachment and urged that Vance take his place — as having planted a seed of lasting suspicion in the president’s mind. Trump, Wolff suggested, has never been fully comfortable with Vance, viewing him as a choice driven in part by Musk’s financial leverage during the 2024 campaign rather than pure instinct.

The Epstein episode adds another layer. Rather than loyalty during a crisis, the leaked account portrays Vance as someone who privately doubted the strategy, went his own way in internal debates, and misjudged what the president actually wanted — which, according to Wolff, was silence, not sunlight.

White House Hits Back at Wolff

The White House did not engage with the substance of Wolff’s analysis. White House Communications Director Steven Cheung, reached for comment by the Daily Beast, responded with a pointed personal attack, calling Wolff “a lying sack of s–t” who had “been proven to be a fraud.” The administration offered no denial of the Situation Room meetings or of Vance’s reported behavior inside them.

Wolff, who rose to national prominence with his 2018 account of the early Trump White House, Fire and Fury, has faced persistent pushback from Trump allies over his sourcing and characterizations. He has nonetheless continued to produce reporting that the White House disputes but struggles to definitively disprove.

What It Means for 2028

The broader stakes are hard to miss. Vance has spent much of Trump’s second term positioning himself as the heir apparent within MAGA — attending rallies, managing congressional relationships, and carefully mirroring the president’s style and rhetoric. A perception that he wavered during one of the administration’s most politically explosive moments, or worse, that he actively distanced himself from the president’s preferred approach, could prove deeply damaging as the 2028 succession fight quietly intensifies.

According to Newsweek’s analysis of the Times reporting, senior officials were primarily concerned about losing support among core MAGA voters rather than political opposition — underscoring how internal fears about the base, not the broader electorate, shaped every decision the White House made during the crisis. Vance’s instinct to get ahead of the story was, by that measure, a direct challenge to the president’s read of his own supporters.

Whether the leaks originated from rivals inside the administration seeking to ingratiate themselves with Trump by throwing Vance overboard, or from some other faction entirely, remains unclear. Wolff’s argument is that the motive matters less than the effect: the story has been told, the frame has been set, and the damage to Vance’s standing with the one person whose opinion matters is already done.

As Wolff put it on the podcast, in the Trump White House everything is an audience-of-one performance — and by the time the Times excerpt hit newsstands, JD Vance’s reviews were already in.