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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   35495 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 29, 2024

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Q: Why doesn't Trump swap out Vance for one of his sons?

It seems like endowing anyone outside the family with VP levels of power is going to screw Trump in the long term. Pence continues to say Trump's unfit for democratic office as do many of his previous associates. Vance has previous form of the same hate reaction that many Dems find themselves having in response to Trump, and may revert to that once it's no longer advantageous to support Trump. So he adds distrust to the ticket.

Plus, Vance currently is an obvious drag on Trump because he doesn't have the ability to constantly shift and twirl that Trump does. People said upon Vance's pick that he would provide a kind of ideological scaffolding for Trumpism but that concept is absurd, because it implies creating a system that makes explicit and clear Trump's commitments – what he'll stick to and what he'll abandon when necessary. That making-explicit will by its nature damage Trump because it restricts his freedom of movement and ability to retroactively choose which things that come out of his mouth are literal, which are serious but not literal, and which are simply jokes. Without that freedom to dodge, the gymnastic elephant that is Trump would eventually be brought down for good.

Choosing one of the sons would communicate clearly to people that there is a VP on the ticket who owes his very existence not just his power to Trump and cannot, will not differ from him. It would help bolster the idea that voters are choosing Trump, a man they feel they have an emotional, animal connection with, rather than a party or set of policies, and that the number two on the ticket is as in thrall to Donald Trump Senior as they are themselves.

True, it would create doubt over the succession plan if something happens to Trump while in office, but tbh with Trump on the ticket that is always the case because he is just not readily replaceable.

  • -14

Nepotism is an interesting thing. They key to getting away with it seems to be that you need to wait until you yourself are done with politics before they can "take up the mantle"... or else people look on it more unfavorably.

Since the first rule of VP picks is "do no harm", choosing a son would be potentially disastrous. It doesn't play well with regular people or swing voters.

Trump is the exception to the rule when it comes to nepotism though. He was openly nepotistic in the appointments he made as president, and his supporters like that he does the things he wants to do in his own interests, even if they break with norms such as the anti-nepotism norm. He's an avatar of how they figure they might be tempted to act if liberated and in power themselves.

Trump is the exception to the rule when it comes to nepotism though. He was openly nepotistic in the appointments he made as president

Citations needed.

Ivanka and Kushner were his advisors, Kushner his middle east envoy, and outside the presidency his sons took over his businesses. I think this tendency helps make him seem royal and free to act in his best interests which, due to his special connection to the American people, are also the country's best interests

Ivanka and Kushner were his advisors, Kushner his middle east envoy

Are those real positions or are they more charges like Kamala' border Czar?

and outside the presidency his sons took over his businesses.

Isn't that what they are supposed to do?

Either way it's nepotism. I think it's strategically smart though – if he wasn't nepotistic, it would look like he was scared of looking corrupt, and was too afraid to choose blood ties over DEI, academics, reputation etc.

I don’t think Vance is a drag on the ticket. I think he’s generic white male social conservative from the rust belt.

Now democrats are trying to paint him as a weird social conservative but everyone who would vote republican is prepared to vote for a weird social conservative, so even if it succeeds then, well, it probably doesn’t mean very much.

Vance is weird because he’s grey tribe, his weirdness is just of a conservative Thielish RETVRN flavor than a liberal polyamorist flavor.

If Scott entered politics and became Kamala’s running mate then the Republicans would attack him for being a weirdo as well.

The more interesting question IMO is where is all this talk about "swapping out Vance" coming from?

Is it some sort of Journo-List thing?

I think Vance scares the leftist journalists a lot. They're used to having Republican leaders be kinda stupid, or at least look stupid in their manorisms. Trump, Pence, W Bush, etc all fit into the sort of mold of "dumb prole low-education guy that the elites can look down on." (Even if it's not literally true, IE W Bush went to Yale, but he's still relatively stupid and low-education compared to the PhDs writing policy papers). Vance is different, he's like Douthat where even if you hate his politics, its hard not to notice that he's kind of brilliant. He has ideas which, right or wrong, have the potential to expand the Republicans outside of "aging broke white people" and win over young people.

have the potential to expand the Republicans outside of "aging broke white people" and win over young people

And perhaps more vitally, those ideas might be sufficiently powerful to return "disagreeing with the journalists' faction" to a respectable position (doubly so because new tech companies, all full of young men that faction is desperate to oppress, are less likely to be stupid enough to build weapons for their enemies to wield than they were in 2008).

It's bizarre. There's no one Trump could have chosen that the media would have applauded. Being disappointed by the lack of applause shows a failure to understand the current meta.

Choosing a blood relation as his VP candidate would be a disaster and would validate a lot of the worst things people say about Trump. Vance, on the other hand, shows that Trump is at least trying to bring serious people into his administration. He's a great pick.

I have no idea if Vance is a serious person because he appears to have no deeply held views besides bending in whichever way the political winds are blowing. The fact that all the weirdest and most online rightoids love him makes me think he’s probably not serious.

There's no one Trump could have chosen that the media would have applauded.

There are a lot of potential candidates who don’t give half the electorate the ick. Burgum, Rubio, Romney, etc.

Rubio would be an ok choice but is probably more useful to the party as a Senator. I don't know enough about Burgam to have an opinion, but can say with confidence that Romney would've been an absolutely terrible choice likely to alienate both Republicans and Democrats. Cheney or Manchin would come with less baggage than Romney.

Romney never would have agreed, though, so it's super strange he was even being mentioned. I mean, he was the only person to vote to convict Trump on impeachment!

That's just one of several reasons that I think picking Romney would alienate even more potential Trump voters than picking Cheney.

Meanwhile the Democrats would presumably dust off all thier old "Mormon Christo-Fascists puting women in binders, dogs on roofs, and blacks in chains" talking points from 2012 for round 2.

Even if Romney agreed, (which as you point out is doubtful) he'd be a terrible pick.

Agreed, as i said in last week's thread.

The people turned off by Vance's "weird views on sex and gender" weren't going to vote Republican in the first place.

The people who applauded when the Democrats tried to put a cross-dressing luggage thief in charge of US nuclear policy are now telling us that Vance is weird and disgusting for saying that Men and Women should want to start families. In my opinion there is only one sane response.

Vance shores up Trump's position with the donors and establishment Republicans which is what he needs.

Sorry, it's not quite accurate to paraphrase him as saying "[m]en and [w]omen should want to start families". That's his defense of his comments (painting the Democrats as anti-family, perhaps correctly), but he also took pains to say that being a parent does influence your perspective and that the government is overrun by corporate oligarchs with misaligned incentives. Obviously there's some good substance in what he's saying!

However, he did explicitly say that miserable Democratic women "effectively run" the country. His defense doesn't change the quote. Which not only seems to be outright false on its face (women aren't even the majority of decision-makers in the bureaucracy, much less childless ones) but also his comments pretty much explicitly stating that parental status can make change how you run the country for the worse I disagree with (even if I sympathize with the feeling, which I do). I mean, George freaking Washington never had kids. Same for Madison and Buchanan and Jackson and Polk (though not all were "good" presidents of course). I mean out of 46 that's not so many, but still. It's kind of like the old tired claim that atheists can't have a moral code.

I think both belief in God and being a parent are generally positive influences on your moral code, but it's far from deterministic and their lack is certainly not insurmountable. Beyond that I don't think it moves the needle much, really. As a simple and factual example to back up my point, parents and nonparents worry about climate change at very similar rates. If parental status were in fact the dealbreaker, you'd see much more of a difference. But we don't, even though nonparents quite literally don't have skin in the game the same way, and the same applies to government. Sure, the perspective of a parent still matters and if we had a dramatically abnormal lack of parents in leadership I might worry. But that doesn't seem to be the case at all.

So in short, Vance is wrong, and people are perfectly entitled to take issue with both what he actually said and what he continues to say he actually believes.

I mean, George freaking Washington never had kids. Same for Madison and Buchanan and Jackson and Polk

I notice these are all men. Do you have any childless female politicians whose achievements render Vance's judgement inaccurate?

But we don't, even though nonparents quite literally don't have skin in the game the same way, and the same applies to government.

Non-parents who believe in climate change could believe not what the science actually says, but what they are told by joirnalists: that within their lifetimes a mass extinction of humans is possible. If they believe such a thing, then they think they have "skin in the game".

As a source they were asked about the "perceived threat" and found no difference, so while that's still a plausible claim of yours, note that the average is only just under 6 (1-10 "not a threat" to "extreme threat"), so I don't find that argument about doomsday media very convincing. Clearly most people only consider it a medium threat of some sort.

So ChatGPT cites Bush-era Secretary of State/NSA Condoleezza Rice, three-decade Maryland senator Barbara Mikulski, one term Illinois Black senator Carol Moseley Braun, and two-decade Maine senator Olympia Snowe. Interestingly, ChatGPT decided to add a little thing to the end saying leadership isn't impacted by having kids without prompting. Though I probably disagree with the politics of at least some, on both sides of the aisle, I think at least two of those were relatively prominent?

Still, this doesn't quite answer our original question, which was more about the administrative machinery, often alleged to be non-elected. I have no idea if good statistics exist for the federal workforce more broadly, though probably not. Maybe a good proxy would be to go more local? And anyways childless women in politics aren't like crazy common, at least none come to mind right away, but part of that is we haven't had decent representation of women in Congress for very long either. Still if anything childless women (in electoral politics) seem to be very under-represented? Back of envelope math puts the proportion of childless women as about a quarter of adult women, though that likely goes down if you cut off the age a little higher (like most politicians). However, if you look at most female politicians, the vast majority seem to have kids. So yeah, back to local politics I guess.

I used this wiki page of notable women legislators in my home state of Oregon (which I thought might represent a liberal and childless state) and asked GPT to look up how many did or did not have kids. In my random sample of 15 people from that list, 3 did not, 2 were unclear, and 7 did. That doesn't seem too out of line with the general population. And the ones I read about (there were a few obituaries) seemed to have been impactful even when they didn't have kids.

So I really don't see the pattern Vance is talking about. I think he's talking out of his ass.

The talk about swapping out a candidate by the Republicans so soon after the Democrats did it reminds me a little of the popularity, in the former USSR, of the theory that the USA is on the verge of disintegration. "If it happened to us, it'll happen to them."

The reaction to JD Vance has been hilarious to me. There was a clip from some speech that Tucker Carlson was giving during the convention and he said (paraphrasing): "Here's you know how JD Vance is one of the good guys: all the bad guys in Washington DC, who want to keep you in permanent wars, that want to ship your jobs overseas, and that hate you, your children, and your way of life, those people all hate JD Vance. They're furious that he's anywhere near power."

Tucker Carlson...I don't know, but the reaction to JD Vance from all of the worst people that I see on twitter/reddit/etc. does seem to match up with this. This joke (very mean spirited, be warned) from twitter sums it up pretty well: https://x.com/grandoldmemes/status/1817666334823518436

Mainstream republican votes don't think JD Vance is "weird", they would look at you like a weirdo if you ever made a joke about JD Vance and couches, they certainly don't think that JD Vance should be inspecting the wares of every single vendor at every single gun show he has ever attended and doing background checks on all of them before being in the same building, etc.

They like JD Vance. The reaction validates him to me.

Here's you know how JD Vance is one of the good guys: all the bad guys ... hate JD Vance.

I guess Tucker Carlson must not be familiar with Maxim No. 29.

This matches my impression. Where is all this JD Vance criticism coming from? The neocon types and the Democrats. Why exactly is this a drag on Trump when these are the people who would be criticizing virtually anyone he had picked?

This matches my impression. Where is all this JD Vance criticism coming from? The neocon types and the Democrats.

You forget the white nationalists and 4channers calling him a miscegenating race-traitor; the paranoid "mark of the beast" folks who see him as a Thiel/Palantir/CIA puppet here to enact total digital surveillance; and the "sigma male" crowd around Vox Day calling him a possibly-gay "gamma":

Finally, JDA reports that JD Vance is proving to be a negative for the Trump ticket because women don’t like him. Gamma confirmed. And Karl Denninger noticed something very odd about the man’s marital relationship.

So his wife was employed by a California firm that focused on litigation and appeals in San Francisco and DC yet Vance lives in Ohio. That’s a rather interesting arrangement you two have, don’t you think, particularly with three young children in the game.

Oh, I don’t know, Karl. I’m sure he got out there as often as he could. There’s a lot of things for a man to do in San Francisco. A lot of interesting places to visit. A lot of friendly fellows interested in getting to know you…

The "the paranoid 'mark of the beast' folks" either bailed out of politics years ago to avoid becoming "of the world", or are holding thier noses and voting for Trump out of civic duty and hopes of maintaining a conservative majority in the USSC.

The rest are electorally irrelevant and if the Republicans think they can pick up even half of a percent of the minority vote by pushing them in front of the proverbial bus they will and they should.

While it's impossible to ignore the online dimension of Vance criticism (and what kind of criticism isn't at least a little online nowadays?) that's not what gives the criticism its legs. No, the concern lies in what the more accurate political pundits are saying about his potential influence on the election, and this is grounded in polling, so it's not just white noise.

Two particular and factual points. Recent polling indicates that in his "home region" which includes significant battleground states (that's Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Wisconsin), CNN pegged him at -16 net favorability, which is dramatic. Especially considering that usually VP picks are chosen specifically for their help in swing states! That he's hurting them there instead is notable.

Second, if we look nationally and compare again to historic VP picks, his polling is currently worse than Sarah Palin at the same point in time (i.e. right after the convention). And potentially the worst ever. One poll had net approval as -5 and another at -13. In fact literally no VP pick ever has had a negative net favorability rating (edit: at this stage)!

So yeah. It's not just insiders. This is data from voters themselves. Sure, that's a function of media attention in some respect, but this early in the campaign? I think a claim that it's just people out to get him is unsupported.

edit: Palin trajectory for comparison. She did end up around -20 net. Since typically net favorability tends to decrease for most VP candidates as the campaign goes on, starting already in the red is worrying. Note that although the chart goes longer, her net rating was only around zero-ish when the 2008 election actually happened, so -5 is still worse than she ever was during the actual campaign!!

wo particular and factual points. Recent polling indicates that in his "home region" which includes significant battleground states (that's Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Wisconsin), CNN pegged him at -16 net favorability, which is dramatic. Especially considering that usually VP picks are chosen specifically for their help in swing states! That he's hurting them there instead is notable.

I'm not really sure I'd call Illinois and Indiana battleground states. ohio and michigan, sure. But Illinois and Indiana aren't particularly competitive.

Well yeah but thus the word "include". Michigan and Wisconsin are literally 2 of maybe 5 states that will decide the election, so have absurdly outsized importance. In typical cycles, even improving your vote share by a half percent in those states could swing the election, and so to realize that Vance is potentially a drag? That's big news.

Could you link to those polls? How much of that factual point is democrats responding to the polls? It would not surprise me at all if the polling was far more partisan than when Palin ran and democrats answering presidential polls are probably skewed far more negative nowadays toward republican candidates regardless of who that candidate actually is. I don't think people during the McCain campaign era would be grousing that an assassination attempt against him failed. I think even discounting McCain being an outlier where democrats could like him that kind of opposition party respect just does not exist anymore. Trump is literally Hitler. Vance what's-his-name is VP, well then he's Hitler, too. Not even saying it doesn't work both ways but I'd bet that favorability does not matter unless someone is undecided anymore because anyone who's of the opposite party is going to be as negative as it can get.

I genuinely think it would make little difference who Trump picked. There would be wild and constant hysterics about anyone. Some of it would be mitigated if the person had more experience or was a more palatable gender or race but they'd still be ground into dust by the media machine just like Palin was and Vance is getting done. If Vance's childless cat-lady quote can be so easily taken out of context and create an entire personality for people to hate then anyone who has any public statements in the past is going to get the same treatment.

Ask and you shall receive!

This article summarizes some of the anecdotal concerns fairly well. As for polls, here is a source on comparisons to VP picks back to 1980, this article summarizes the four polls that asked specifically, and if you look at this YouGov poll linked in the previous roundup as an example, they have him at -8% (page 20), or -4% with registered voters more specifically, and -25% among self-identified moderates if you're trying to divine how the "swing vote" might go. Reuters/Ispos had him at -7% net, NPR/PBS/Marist at -3%, CNN -6%. The -13% was probably a less reputable poll, I was probably not cautious enough of hearsay there, but the original source I tracked down and is here.

Furthermore in at least the YouGov poll which I mentioned, and also the most recent Ipsos one, you can see independents and moderates reflect this trend, so it's not just closet Democrats. Ispos for example among n=341 independents shows a -15% net favorability rating!

So yeah, it's not just one poll, it's all of them. Obviously there's still plenty of space to go, it sounds like about a quarter to a third of voters either don't know him (Ipsos: 32% of independents, 20% of registered voters) or don't have a strong opinion right now, but given that normally VP picks provide an instant bump and only peter out later, it's big news. Polling seems to generally indicate that the upside of VPs more generally doesn't matter that much (though occasionally in their home state it does), but the downsides can move the needle. Palin for example didn't cost McCain the election (he lost by a lot) but as an example this paper thinks she cost him a whopping 2%. In national politics, that's very notable!

Thank you. I wonder if not having a direct competitor at this point is having an effect in any way. Much the same as "generic democrat" or "generic republican" can probably beat any specific democrat or republican. I think until he gets into a debate or does like a 60 minutes interview most of this is prognosticating without enough information. Palin not being able to name books or supreme court decisions is a kind of gaff/failure that moves the needle in my mind and as long as Vance can come across as even slightly intelligent he won't be impactful to the election. The fact that they're going so hard and so constantly against him with so little means, in my mind, they don't have much to tar him with. I am surprised they seem to have him out there appealing to the base though, maybe they needed to appeal to republicans more than independents.

Maybe his freshness or even appeal to republicans is a reason to pick him, but maybe it's just that Trump can stand him and considering the volatility of trying to get a VP that might publicly disagree with Trump and get Trump to start huffing and puffing at his own party it might be better to pick an "unlikable toady" than someone who might cause Trump to gaffe himself out of the election. It heads off Trump tripping over himself down the line. Who knows what strategy was put into the choice or if there wasn't any at all, really. Trump feels like a black box that you can't mess with if you want it to perform, if he decides it's JD Vance, then just let it be and try to make best of what you have.

The people criticizing Vance wanted Nikki Haley.

I wanted Haley, and I like JD Vance just fine (much better than I like Trump) FWIW.

I've seen a good few who weren't Haley fans -- Pete Spiliakos or EsotericCD, both of whom would have preferred Youngkin -- but they also generally weren't Trump fans, and many had (and some still have) committed to not voting for Trump regardless.

And if they'd gotten her, she'd get the Romney treatment from them. Probably not literally "binders full of women", but something equally unreasonable.

It’s not coming from neocons, Vance is a full neocon as regards policy toward Israel. It’s coming from very online types on both the left and right.

The simple answer is "because it would kill his appeal to marginal voters even more effectively than Vance does."

Trump has essentially 100% of the anti-establishment right behind him, but that is only 25-30% of politically engaged Americans, and probably only 20-25% of the Americans who will vote in November. The two main groups he needs to win over are the pro-establishment right (who object to Trump because of his personal obnoxiousness, his anti-Deep State foreign policy, and January 6th, but who will probably hold their noses and vote for him for the tax cuts and judicial nominations) and the "double-haters" who despise both candidates and may be persuadable to vote for the lesser evil.

For the pro-establishment right, "America doesn't have a King" is a foundational belief, and putting an obvious nepo baby on the ticket in what looks like an attempt to secure a dynastic succession would make it a lot harder to hold your nose. (John Quincy Adams and George W Bush had both been through the normal cursus honorum before running for President, which the Trump kids have not. In addition, they both sort-of ran against their fathers' legacies, not as continuations of them). There is also the issue that Jared and Ivanka's foreign business interests make Hunter Biden look like a patriot.

For the double-haters, putting an obvious nepo baby on the ticket makes a lot of the reasons why they hate Trump more salient, which makes Harris look more like the lesser evil.

Before Biden dropped out, I would have said the most likely scenario where he beats Trump is that the Epstein investigations turn up with hard evidence that Trump was banging teenage girls. I hadn't considered the possibility of him being stupid enough to make a family member his running mate.

The thing is he appears to see Vance as a kind of 'son he never had', calling him 'a handsome son of a bitch', saying 'he's got the look', 'beautiful blue eyes' etc. But a true nepo choice would paint Trump as more kingly and unashamed (you say that's a bad thing but I don't think his base would see it as a problem; I suppose the question is, to what extent does he need to enthuse the base and ensure turnout, and to what extent convince undecideds).

Trump's base is the most enthusiastic base in my adult life (Obama's is a distant second, I'm too young to remember Reagan) for a candidate who captured a major-party nomination. He doesn't need to motivate the base. I agree that the 10% most rabidly pro-Trump Americans would be positively excited by a dynastic pick.

FWIW, I think that the MAGA base is sufficiently Trump-pilled that if Trump wins in 2024 and endorses a dynastic successor in 2028, he can deliver the Republican primary with >50% probability. OTOH this would be a good outcome for the Democrats if it happened.

In addition, they both sort-of ran against their fathers' legacies, not as continuations of them

Could you expand on this?

I assume you mean that W’s “compassionate conservatism” went against Bush Senior’s Reaganite “read my lips” pitch, but on foreign policy I don’t think their platforms differed much; to the extent they did, my read it that it’s because Senior ran during the mop-up operations of the end of the Cold War while W ran in a brave new(ish) unipolar world.

And I know nothing about the Adams family (heh)

On the Addams family, John Sr was a Federalist, and John Q was a Democratic-Republican.

On W, I am being a bit vague, but the points I was thinking about were

  • that W was running as a Texan and an outsider against the Beltway establishment of which HW was a lifelong member
  • that W's platform was an implicit rebuke of HW's backsliding on tax cuts
  • pre-9/11 W was running on a relatively isolationist foreign policy (no more nation-building) which was arguably an attack on the bipartisan Deep State do-everything foreign policy that HW was an architect of, although you can also read it as a more specific attack on Clinton's foreign policy.

"Adams family." "Addams family" is something else.

(I wonder what Pugsley's positions would look like relative to Gomez's.)

I was in the blogosphere back in the Instpundit days, so I understand the full range of meaning that can be squeezed into a "Heh" like @stuckinbathroom's. I forget that the internet is full of whippersnappers nowadays.

Presuming that Trump's children are also residents of Florida, choosing them would forfeit Florida's electoral college votes under the 12th amendment.

The Electors shall meet in their respective states and vote by ballot for President and Vice-President, one of whom, at least, shall not be an inhabitant of the same state with themselves;

This is a weird rule formulation. Why not just plainly state that the President and Vice President shall not be residents of the same state?

Because that would be a different rule? Under the current rules, it is absolutely possible for the President and VP to be from the same state, so long as they get a majority of electors (across all states) to vote for them—it’s just that the electors of their home state are barred from voting for both of them.

Concerns about one state lording it over the others, such as Holland did during the era of the Dutch Republic, were very prominent in designing the Electoral College (and other parts of the Constitution) and concerns about party tickets were very not prominent.

Pretty much everything to do with choosing the President is one of those things the Framers got extremely wrong and their mechanism broken pretty much right away.

I think an election that worked the way the founders intended would be extremely fascinating. They appear to have essentially wanted the voters to elect a single-issue legislature to be elected on their own merits then thoroughly vet the actual candidates for president, and then vote for the actual president. It's hopelessly naive once the votes that mattered expanded beyond one room in Independence Hall, but I wonder if swapping electors to citizens drawn by lot might actually work.

Sounds like they were visualizing some papal ass shit where they all meet in a closed room and then when smoke comes out the top we know we have a new President.

Would be kinda cool tbh

why would you pick his sons over Ivanka? It's not like she's popular or anything but at least to me she appears much more mentally with it than either of his adult sons.

Several overlapping reasons. Any or all of which may be true, or which may not be true but Trump may believe them to be true.

  1. The Capability Problem: Edward Luttwak, the schizo academic gadfly, tweeted out the other week something along the lines of how it's telling that despite Trump having two grown adult sons, they are such obvious incompetents that the world of Trump fanfiction is built around Baron, who is just a tall and handsome but silent and autistic child. Don Jr. and Eric might just not have what it takes, or Don Sr. might not believe they have it. The Biden stuff recently has taught us a lesson" sometimes when a political campaign doesn't do something, it indicates that they can't do it, a lack of capability rather than a lack of strategy or motivation.

  2. The Succession Problem: The Trump organization is, whatever the #resistance truthers tell you, a big and complicated and important company. While Trump has pushed the boundaries of presidential involvement in the family business, he just doesn't have the time to run it day to day. Taking a son into the VP slot, where as frequently noted he would have little actual responsibility anyway, means taking a son out of the business. This reduces family control over the business, which I suspect is of at least equal importance to Trump as winning the presidency and exercising political power. When you move guys to new positions to fill holes, it messes up the depth chart elsewhere, you're robbing Peter to pay Paul. And particularly, we don't know if Don Jr. or Eric will be good VP candidates, so if you put a son in as VP and replace him in the Trump organization, you now have to worry about your VP candidate and the person you put in power at the Trump org. Where if you sign a free agent for the VP slot, you at least have certainty at the business.

  3. The Succession Problem: I noted repeatedly during the debates over the lawfare against Trump that such efforts would be ineffective against most political candidates, because most political candidates have obvious replacements. We've seen this play out in real life with the Biden-Harris swap. Most Democrats who liked Biden are more than willing to rally around Harris, because there isn't much ideological space between them to begin with, because Biden was just sort of a generic political candidate to begin with, and because both of their views can be described as adhering to Democratic party orthodoxy. Trump, on the other hand, is 1/1 and has not made any efforts to produce a political heir. In eight years dominating the national stage, he has never groomed an obvious second. While this makes him and his political movement uniquely vulnerable to lawfare or to an assassins bullet, it also protects him from the internal party apparatus changing him out because of the lawfare or the scandals. A huge number of Trump's voters would not support another Republican candidate, any other Republican candidate. Would the same hold true for Trump II? Trump might fear getting sidelined or forced out, as Biden recently was, if he puts one of his sons into the VP slot and publicly grooms him as a successor. He's shown no evidence of desiring a successor up to this point; "apres moi, le deluge." Trump wants to be in personal control, as soon as he creates a successor he creates an alternative.

  4. The Power Problem: Trump might not actually have the power to force one of his sons into the VP slot. IIRC, don't the party conventions vote on VP nominees? While typically they ratify the choice of the presidential nominee, the presidential nominee also makes the choice with the convention floor vote in mind. If Trump tried to force a full family takeover, he would risk inciting an insurgency in the party, or weakening his electoral case.

  5. JD Vance Isn't That Bad: This all operates under the assumption that he should swap out JD Vance. I don't think JD Vance was a bad pick, and he will be an asset to the Trump campaign and the Trump admin over time. The best attacks against him right now are generic R stuff that any VP would get, the couch fucking meme which is funny but ultimately intellectually contradictory even if it were true and totally meaningless if it isn't, and the "hates the childless" stuff which is just a negative reframing of a lot of Democratic policies (chlidcare tax credit for example). Give him a few months before we let liberal media outlets report "rumors" that require a change in strategy.

A lot to respond to but I think the incompetence of one of the Trump sons would be part of their electoral appeal – it's a guarantee to voters that they are voting for one man and one man only (Trump) and not Trump as diluted by some institutional safe pair of hands (this was Pence) or with the added risk of some other rival iconoclast who may be divisive or detract from the focus on Trump the man (this is Vance).

The succession problem I think is a non-problem – part of Trump's pitch is that he is the most vigorous and basically indomitable candidate America has ever seen, so no one has to worry about anything happening to him in the next five years. It won't, and I think the mindset Trump supporters should be in, if the campaign is run as I think it should be, is that a post-Trump world is unimaginable and not something they need to trouble themselves about.

... I'm a little lost here. You think Trump will be stronger running as a dictator who will abolish democracy? Or am I misreading you.

Not to actually abolish democracy necessarily, but to use the trappings of a king to dominate in a democracy. For example, he can make it socially forbidden within his movement to think about who or what comes after him, and damn as disloyal anyone who brings up the question of the post-Trump world as a topic. I actually think he pursues this strategy instinctively already, for example with his comments about Christians not needing to vote again after this election. Whether he actually goes on to abolish democracy is a different question, but keeping the possibility he might in play seems to work well with a section of the electorate.

Ah see I think Trump's hold on Republicans is pretty tenuous, sort of like owning a narrow majority of a holding company that owns a narrow majority of a conglomerate that owns the GOP. He's very vulnerable to the fact that he has no real 1:1 allies in his party. The prosecutions would be a suicide mission if he had a political heir.

This is totally offtopic, but is Barron Trump really autistic?

Sure, he always looks like he is in another dimension, but I found this very short video where he is greeting someone and he sounds totally normal and his smile doesn't look like an autist:

https://x.com/Pickuptruckdude/status/1788378062679114097

I think he is just reserved. Do we have other videos of him talking?

He's 18.

It seems like endowing anyone outside the family with VP levels of power is going to screw Trump in the long term. Pence continues to say Trump's unfit for democratic office as do many of his previous associates. Vance has previous form of the same hate reaction that many Dems find themselves having in response to Trump, and may revert to that once it's no longer advantageous to support Trump. So he adds distrust to the ticket.

Pence chose a losing team when choosing sides in the post-2020 Republican coalition leadership struggle. Vance recanted for reasons that align with the coalition Trump needs for him to have a longer term. Trump's children do not make up a meaningful part of the electorate, or have narrative sway within them.

Pence's denunciations of Trump ultimately resolve that in the post-Jan 6 fallout, where he (like many people) thought Trump was doomed, and he had personal and professional incentives to distance himself and low-key cooperate with the Democrat/Never-Trump Republican alliance that was lead in part by Liz Cheney, who at the time was one of the most senior Republican Party officials and attempting to lead a Republican establishment re-takeover of the Republican party apparatus that Trump disrupted. She lost- so badly that she was functionally ejected from the party- but for Pence, in cutting himself from Trump to attach to the never-Trump wing, when they sank so did he.

Vance's alignment fits with the coalition-narrative Trump needs, which is for people who may have been moved by, but since rejected, the Demcoratic-media's accusations. Trump can't win with only ever-true-believers, nor has he ever been the sort of person who never forgave opposition, and so the disloyalty argument doesn't really hold: Vance never claimed to follow Trump and then betray him. Vance's narrative is closer to conversion, of change of belief the likes of which Trump needs from others, and in any such metaphor you can't grow if you don't accept converts. That Vance isn't as free-wheeling is irrelevant- neither was Pence, and yet Pence served his role in the first coalition. No one judges Trump on the basis of whether he was consistent with his Vice President or not.

Trump's children provide no coalition-building narrative. Your argument that they are more loyal in the long-term is irrelevant if there is no long-term for lack of a broad enough coalition to win, and people who want to join the coalition for Trumpiness already have Trump as a reason to vote for the ticket. If they wouldn't vote for Trump unless it was Trump and a dynastic VP, they were never a meaningful Trump vote in the first place.

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