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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.
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.
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?
The people criticizing Vance wanted Nikki Haley.
I wanted Haley, and I like JD Vance just fine (much better than I like Trump) FWIW.
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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.
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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.
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