Yon Cassius has a lean and hungry look.
He thinks too much. Such men are dangerous.
- William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
NOTE: I came up with the base outline of this piece before Saturday July 13, when a gunman shot Donald Trump at the campaign podium, grazing his ear but killing at least one innocent bystander before the Secret Service took him down. So let me preface this and subsequent remarks towards Donald Trump by saying I do not endorse violence as a means of achieving political goals. Except of course, the American Revolution, World War I, Dresden, and Hiroshima.
As many have pointed out, while President Biden tries (with mixed success) to rebuild his credibility with the media and his own party, Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee and challenger, is laying low and actually following the wise axiom, “Never interrupt your enemy while he is in the process of making a mistake.” But then he may have other priorities. This coming week is the next Republican National Convention, which is always comedy gold, but this year, Trump, who is not the incumbent (NEWS FLASH: TRUMP LOST THE LAST ELECTION) has not yet picked a running mate. And in his theatrical way, Trump is apparently setting up his running mate’s coming out party for the Convention floor, and even though he’s apparently nominated three, or four, finalists to be his (A)pprentice, it’s going to take all the concentration he can muster with his very little brain to make the final choice.
The finalists in question are Florida Senator Marco Rubio, Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, South Carolina Senator Tim Scott and Doug Burgum, Governor of North Dakota. Or some other state. To address Rubio first, there’s the slight issue that Trump and Rubio are both Florida Men, and according to the rules of the Constitution, the President and the Vice President can’t both be from the same state. But like Trump cares about the Constitution. If he has to, he can make Rubio solve the problem by moving somewhere else, and Rubio will just go “Yeh, boss. Whaddeva ya say, boss.” But that gets to another reason Trump probably won’t pick up Rubio. He’s already clashed with him in 2016, and essentially broken him. He’ll be no fun to play with anymore.
The other Senator, J.D. Vance, has also opposed Trump within his party, and more forcefully. He made his reputation with the book Hillbilly Elegy, describing his hard-knocks childhood in rural poverty, and the pathologies affecting many of our white poor. Given that he later served in the military, got degrees and became a successful venture capitalist, he was in position to describe how the traditional conserative virtues of hard work and education could get poor people out of the trap of dependency. And he did. And as such a person, he realized early on that Trump was bad news for what used to be conservative values of integrity and self-reliance. Apparently at one point Vance told an acquaintance that Trump might be “America’s Hitler.” All this changed, coincidentally when Vance ran for the US Senate as a Republican in Ohio in 2022. Since then he’s been one of the more loyal and radical Trumpniks in the US Senate, to the extent that despite his heresy, Trump hasn’t felt the need to go after him. But that just indicates that Vance’s posture is exactly that, a posture. It’s what he needs to do to get over in what his Party has become. On many levels Trump would be well-served by having Vance as his running mate, or at least in his Cabinet. He is well-spoken, well-read and capable of articulating the Republicans’ new “postliberal” philosophy better than most other people in the Party. Including Trump. Which is the problem for him. Vance is not a Lindsey Graham or Rubio hanging on to his career. He is not a broken toy. He is a rising star. Potentially, a rival.
Which is part of Trump’s well-deserved reputation for bullshit. He keeps saying he hires “the best people.” No. The best people would not work for Trump. And even if he somehow bribed them to do so, he would find some reason to antagonize them and get rid of them, because he knows what a true failure he is, and can’t stand to have anyone around him who is better than he is at anything – which is most people. Except cringing worms and people so lacking in ego and soul that they will deny reality itself to be next to power, which means that any advice they could offer will always be undermined by their need to stay in proximity to power. But such people have no ambitions in and of themselves, which is why Trump feels safe with them. He would not feel safe around Vance. Nor should he.
So I still think that Trump is most likely going to pick the candidate who is most submissive and inoffensive, which is either Scott or Burgum. As I just said, for practical reasons you’re supposed to pick the Vice President who would do the best job of succeeding you if it ever comes to that, but clearly that’s not how either party wants to do it. It’s not like we even need a Vice President anymore, it’s just one of those holdovers from the Constitution that we keep holding up even though we don’t have any use for it. Such as, the rest of the Constitution. Politically, the reason you pick a Vice President is to shore up your “base” by appealing to the demographics you don’t naturally appeal to. In Biden’s case he picked Kamala Harris to appeal to women, Black voters and Asians. And we can see how well that’s worked out for him. In his first term, Trump had picked Mike Pence as his Vice President, mainly to appeal to the Evangelical types. This turned out not to be necessary, as the last eight years have proven that as long as you help the Evangelicals kill abortion rights and turn America into a country that makes Gilead look like Rio, they’ll support you even if you got convicted of sexual assault, got convicted of 34 felony counts of fraud, and were frequently seen in public with Jeffrey Epstein. So that’s not the problem. Not only does Trump not want a “postliberal” ideologue like J.D. Vance, he doesn’t need one. What he needs is somebody who is normal and likeable, which both Burgum and Scott are, and Trump is not. Also, Trump is memorable and (to some people) charismatic, while Burgum and Scott are not. Again, there’s no room for competition on Trump’s stage.
So that would be the conventional way to do it, if you expect that you’re going to live forever and will never have to give up power, which Biden seems to and Trump certainly does. But as we can see from Biden, that’s not necessarily the best idea, otherwise people wouldn’t be panicking at his apparent unreadiness when he’s had an understudy waiting in the wings. Trump could die any minute, but as we can see lately, he might live forever, despite all logic. If he gives a damn about a movement that is greater than himself and is going to live beyond himself – y’know, I’m speaking hypothetically here – he would pick somebody who would be a credible face for Trumpism beyond Trump, and J.D. Vance is that guy. But that also means that Trump would have to keep somebody in his Cabinet who has clear ambitions to replace him, and to avoid that he has a paradoxical inclination to pick somebody who would be incapable of succeeding him, despite the Social Darwinist mentality of his own Party.
As much as Trump clearly wants to be so, he’s a pretty bad Sith Lord.