Fabulist J.D. Vance attempts to prime the Party for post-Trump.
It was plain as the smirk on the Ohio Senator’s face; Republican VP nominee J.D. Vance spent 93 of the 96-minute debate last week against Democratic opponent, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, building a bridge from what is looking by the day to be the end of Donald Trump’s MAGA cult into his own minted version. Then, in those last three minutes, his meticulously cobbled house of cards came tumbling down thanks to Walz’s finest and most memorable moment of the evening.
Vance: “It’s really rich for Democratic leaders to say that Donald Trump is a unique threat to democracy when he peacefully gave over power on January the 20th, as we have done for 250 years in this country.”
Walz: “This was a threat to our democracy in a way that we had not seen, and it manifested itself because of Donald Trump’s inability to say – he is still saying – he didn’t lose the election. I would just ask that. Did he lose the 2020 election?”
Vance: “Tim, I’m focused on the future.”
Walz: “That is a damning non-answer.”
Vance miscalculated one key element of his plan: Donald Trump is still at the top of the Republican ticket. He was watching. Vance was threading a difficult needle; he needed to survive the hour, but by skirting the issue of the 2020 election that caused the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol in 2021 and all the rest, he scarified the larger picture for him: take over the Republican Party in 2025 by backing his Project 2025 agenda that the rest of the Trump Campaign is trying to distance itself from, and position himself for a 2028 run.
Vance’s rehabilitating of his historically low approval and likability ratings and putting a fancy sheen on the horrors and idiocy of the top of the ticket was ostensibly what we heard and saw, which, for reasons discussed below, will be the last such word from the campaigns. However, what tuned-in politicos digested was a larger, more potent audition for the man who hopes to emerge from the 2024 ashes as a less odious, if not more dangerous, MAGA model.
The reporting from the leakers inside the Trump Campaign (whatever is left of it) has not been sterling for the ex-president. Only garbage right-wing polls have him within three points of VP Kamala Harris nationally, and even some internals rival the trusted A+ polls that is more like four-to-six points with all seven battleground states either fair-to-solid in her column or tied. No polls, cooked or respected, have Trump ahead. The talk of his dwindling crowds at rallies, many of whom run for the exits halfway through his nearly two-hour old man ramblings, is rampant. Whispers of his low-energy press conferences with him slumped over podiums and slurring worn axioms about mass deportations and everyone sucking except him are everywhere… as are complaints from trailing Republican senate and congressional candidates who endure the dismal drag on their hopes for a comeback, all while a lunatic screams about pet-eating migrants and the coming “rough days of violent retribution” haunt them. Many are pissed that money better spent on their behalf is being funneled to lawyers and videos hawking watches, bibles, and cryptocurrency, but those frightened and defeated voices only echo what is being shown to all the world: the Trump Campaign is giving up.
To wit: In the last week alone, the Trump and his minions across Congress tried in vain to strike an over-30-year law allowing Nebraska’s 2nd District to provide one electoral vote of the state’s five to whomever wins it. This is because if Harris secures the famed Blue Wall of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, with all her guaranteed states, and she wins what is now referred to as “the Blue Dot,” she gets to 270 electoral votes and the presidency. This shameful and overt flouting of conventions merely 40 days out from Election Day prompted Republican State Senator Mike McDonnell to stop the ad hoc madness citing capitalistic reasons – the district in which the city of Omaha rests gets a shitload of advertising cash and tons of media staying in hotels and packing restaurants, and, incidentally, is where he wishes to run for Mayor in 2025.
Next, Trump has refused to debate Harris again on the proposed date of October 23. After his shellacking at the hands of his capable and sharp-talking opponent, whom he is now reduced to calling “mentally disabled” in a clumsy attempt to reclaim his tattered “manhood, who could blame him? But it does speak loudly to where things are when the candidate who craves cameras and the spotlight like a smack junkie and props his fat, old carcass up as “strong” any chance he gets can’t bring it a week out from the big day. Those defending this crap, like all the other Trump crap, say it is too late for a debate, (despite Trump debating then candidate Joe Biden on October 22 in 2020), and so it was left to Vance to be the final word of 2024.
And man did he take it.
Bolstered by a report hours before the two VPs took the stage that Trump had backed out of the seemingly obligatory 60 Minutes interview all presidential candidates have done (including himself twice before) for over 50 years, Vance poised himself to not only clean up Trump’s abysmal debate performance, incoherent public appearances, and sinking poll numbers, but pitch himself as the next MAGA standard-bearer. With nary a MAGA snarl or the usual crazed rhetoric from what he kept referring to in the debate as his “running mate” (a dismissing of Trump, since “running mate” should refer to Vance– ouch!), the slick-addled VP candidate began rewriting the 2024 narrative one answer at a time.
He complimented his opponent, softened Trump’s “mass deportations” to somehow helping migrant families find their children, claimed more than three times that Trump, whose main goal for four years as president was to proudly strike down the Affordable Care Act, “saved it from ruin.” He evoked the name of Christ in response to the gun violence gripping the nation, and beyond a call to turn schools into fortresses and some spectacular craziness about the preponderance of American guns coming from Mexico (guns are illegal in Mexico – they get their guns from us), evoked a compassionate tone unheard from Trump, who routinely tells grieving parents of slain children to “get over it.”
Following that, Vance complained that Republicans must do a better job explaining why 52% of the citizenry can’t have bodily autonomy, mentioning his love for a female friend who got an abortion in a tender moment of enviable political showmanship from a man who used to have a National Abortion Ban page on his website. He quickly deflected the albatross of Trump proposing “the seizure of public land” for some kind of socialist housing project, and during the Iran/Irreal discussion, Vance never once mentioned one of Trump’s most personally valued moves as president: the asinine striking down of the Iran Nuclear Deal that was supported by the entire planet, including China and Russia – that has consequently strengthened America’s most virulent enemy. Republicans have always known this was an atrocious mistake and Vance did the best he could to distances himself from it.
Vance also did a masterful job putting Trumpism in the rearview mirror while staying the rhetorical course about the economic numbers, all of them – not some, but all – made up. Still, all of it was from a long-gone conservatism’s standpoint, not the populist anti-trade, tariff-boasting, bloating of the deficit Trump policies.
Those on the Right who knew Vance when he was a social liberal and a fiscally conservative voice in the party, calling Trump “America’s Hitler” in 2016 and again in 2020 criticizing Trump’s inability to stem the tide of a booming deficit, figured as soon as his gambit to tie himself with a winning MAGA formula went south he would abandon ship and make his own way. But now we hear that the “they’re eating the pets” thing he made up and fed to Trump, which has further sunk his chances, was pure sabotage. Vance never once mentioned this lunacy during the debate.
Vance’s approvals went up 18 points as a result to a now rousing negative- eight, while Walz’s skyrocketed to over 60%, which makes him currently the most popular politician in America. Walz was there to continue the joyful warrior, “let’s try and find common ground rather than accentuate our differences” rhetoric from the Harris Campaign that the voters are now embracing. Vance, who is an anti-woman, anti-Democratic, full-on fascist who wrote the foreword to the radical Project 2025 agenda and goes on white supremacy podcasts to demean “childless cat ladies” who have “no stake in the future of this country,” was there to reintroduce himself to the nation as the better lying-vacillating-racist alternative to Donald Trump, who is headed for oblivion (and maybe prison soon).
Alas, in the end, forced to hang for another month with the most unhinged human to ever attempt to be president much less hold office, Vance crapped the bed. His inability to come with any answer about who won the 2020 election and the criminal madness that followed it soiled the whole thing.
For now.
Vance deftly played both sides as best he could, which always suckers the great unwashed. Of course, none of it helped his “running mate.” It was all for J.D. Vance. For that, the megalomaniac that is Donald J. Trump should be proud, but then again, the last Trump VP who went his own way almost ended up hanged, so there’s that.
