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Notes -
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.
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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