Powerless Couple
The MAGA Megalith of Trump and Vance is cracking, revealing the GOP ticket to be much weaker than the sum of its parts.
When Donald Trump announced that JD Vance would be his running mate two weeks ago, the news was met with a roar of triumph on the right and trepidation on the left. Vance brought the star power of a bestselling author whose life story of rising from poverty to Yale Law School had made it onto the big screen. Vance was heralded as the heir apparent of Trump’s MAGA empire, bringing a new brand of Republican populism sure to lockdown the critical swing states of Pennsylvania and Michigan adjacent to Vance’s home state of Ohio. As a rags-to-riches working-class hero, Vance seemed to be the perfect foil to Joe Biden’s flighty Vice President Kamala Harris, a child of two professors raised in the hotbed of loony leftism that is Berkeley, California. During the first presidential debate on June 27th, Trump had already proven himself capable of dominating a declining Biden, whose support within the Democratic Party was crumbling. With Vance by his side and providence sparing him from the worst of an assassin’s bullet, Trump would enter the Republican National Convention with the winds of destiny blowing at his back, propelling him toward a seemingly inevitable victory.
The RNC was not the majestic triumph that was promised. The hunched-over Trump and the doting Vance did not command the awe of an American Caesar (spared by the hand of destiny from a modern Ides of March) and his burly, bearded Augustus. When paired together, the individual charisma and power of both Trump and Vance vanished, their contrasting appearances revealing the flimsy foundations of public personas they have been building for years. Standing next to Vance, Trump looks old and feeble, a shocking contrast undermining the relative advantage in vitality Trump had enjoyed compared to a decrepit Biden. The decline of 78-year-old Trump became an even more glaring liability once Biden passed the baton to Kamala Harris, placing a feisty 59-year-old at the top of the Democratic Ticket. Even worse for Trump, his spike in momentum from surviving the attempt on his life has fizzled. Trump’s emo first-person narrative of the shooting during his RNC acceptance speech seems to have vaporized the actual assassination attempt from the minds of an overstimulated American public. As the elderly Trump rambled on through that 92-minute acceptance speech, Vance’s adoring gaze could not hide the ambitions of a power-hungry 39-year-old pondering the real possibility that he might inherit the ultimate prize well before Trump’s second four years in office were complete.
In the presence of Trump, Vance loses all the luster of the boot-strapping, self-made man from Hillbilly Elegy. No doubt Vance has come a long way from undeniably humble beginnings. But his fawning attention to Trump reveals how Vance’s rapid rise to power owes much more to his unmatched ability to kiss ass than to good old-fashioned grit. Seeing the servile side of Vance on full display makes us suspect that the Hillbilly Elegy path to success may have been more about brown-nosing than keeping your nose to the grindstone. By using the suffering and social pathologies of Appalachia to burnish his own success story, J.D. looks like the most despicable kind of social climber whose ladder was built with the bones of Americans suffering in one of the most impoverished regions of our country where Vance only briefly visited in his youth and never lived. Vance has propelled his career by ingratiating himself to a long line of powerful patrons from Amy Chua to Peter Thiel to Donald Trump Jr. When Vance found that his path to the Senate required the endorsement of the senior Trump, he had no qualms groveling at the feet of a man he once smeared as “America’s Hitler.” The intensity of Vance’s pleas for endorsement did not go unnoticed by Trump At a rally to support Vance’s 2022 Senate run Trump told the crowd “J.D. is kissing my ass he wants my support so bad.”
All that ass-kissing paid off handsomely for Vance, as he was given the VP spot despite not being the Donald’s first choice. According to NBC News, Trump was set on picking North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum when his sons Don Jr. and Eric threw epic temper tantrums until the VP spot was given to their buddy Vance. What has transpired in the two weeks since sheds light on the dangers of placing ass-kissers in positions of power over less-servile and more thoroughly vetted candidates for the job. Vance’s VP candidacy has unleashed an Old Faithful geyser of unflattering weirdness into the news cycle: resurfaced rants about “childless cat ladies” like Kamala Harris threatening democracy, debunked stories of conjugal relations with couches, peculiar search histories involving human females and marine mammals, etc. In less than two weeks, J.D. Vance went from the brightest young star in American politics to drowning in his own chronically online alt-right abnormality and faux hillbilly hypocrisy.
Vance’s favorability ratings have reached historically low depths and there is now open speculation that Trump may need to start thinking about a VP Plan B. With Vance in free fall, some Republicans have buyer's regret after passing on Burgum, while others dream of the zipper-fleece softness of a moderate like Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin. Yet with so much of Vance’s toxicity directed against not only cat ladies but women in general, Trump would be best served by looking for a female candidate to plug into the VP spot. Trump doubtfully has the stomach to pick his fiercest Republican Primary foe Nikki Hayley to be his running mate. His first choice for a female VP would have been South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem. Unfortunately for Trump, Noem vaporized her own VP viability by sharing the story of how she shot her family’s 14-month-old terrier, Cricket, before burying the dog in a gravel pit. If no viable VP replacement emerges and Vance drags Trump down in defeat, Kristi Noem may have buried more than just her dog in that South Dakota gravel pit. She might have also buried the dream of a multigenerational MAGA imperium, her canine sacrifice making way for the rise of the Childless Cat Lady In Chief, Kamala Harris.