On the upside, I’m sure he’ll get along great with future P.M. Pierre Poilievre.
O.K. first, sorry, but we have to steel ourselves to an ugly reality. With less than a month to go, the polls haven’t budged an inch. None of the things we might have expected to matter greatly have, in fact, mattered at all. Not Kamala’s strength as a campaigner and interviewee, not her scintillating convention oratory, not the huge crowds and extraordinary energy of her rallies, not her crushing debate performance, none of it, any more than it’s mattered that Donald has appeared throughout like a demented lunatic, or that he’s being egged on by a vile little jumped-up debating society frat boy who’s turned out to be the least popular running mate in living memory. Sure, Trump’s unpopular, and can’t even get a rise out of his dwindling crowds any more; these days, those that show up make for the exits in droves long before the bloviating winds down. Sure, Kamala’s raising way more money than he is, and saturating the airwaves with far more ads. You’ll have noticed, too, that an increasing number of Republican stalwarts are endorsing the Democratic ticket, and that prominent Republican Governors and Senators have recently taken Donald to task over the ridiculous lies that have undermined federal hurricane relief efforts, a sure signal to any rational voters that the GOP candidate is a mendacious opportunist manifestly unfit to lead.
All good, except as near as we can tell, it just doesn’t matter. As near as we can tell, for all practical purposes the candidates might just as well have been sitting at home since Kamala got the nod, doing nothing, waiting quietly for November’s vote; everything looks about the same as it has for months, and thus there’s every chance now, as there has been since the beginning, that Donald is going to lose the popular vote by two or three points, but win the Electoral College and retake the White House. Barring some sudden shift, this is what I’m expecting, on my bad days, anyway. After all that’s happened, and despite Kamala’s apparent momentum, it’s still just a frigging coin toss.
This forces us to consider a scenario that’s been getting far too little attention this election year, overwhelmed as we all are by the repulsive, terrifying, soul-destroying prospect of the dawn of a new American dictatorship under Donald Fucking Trump – and look, no two ways about it, the thought of that grotesque orange thing once again wedging his fat, diapered rump into the big chair is enough to drive anyone ‘round the bend, so don’t talk to me about “Trump Derangement Syndrome” like there’s something misguided about losing your shit over the possibility of seeing Donald back in the Oval, perhaps as President-for-Life – but here’s the thing: we may be obsessing over the wrong threat. In fact, I’m beginning to think we certainly are.
It’s J.D. Vance we need to be worried about.
If you’re sane and struggling to stay that way, you won’t have been paying attention to Donald’s most recent rally and interview performances. This is rational. No worries. I’ve been keeping tabs for you, and in a nutshell, he’s falling apart at an alarming, and apparently accelerating, rate. MSNBC’s Chris Hayes described the situation as it stood a few weeks ago:
This might prompt a “so what else is new?” reaction, since he’s always been a craven liar, and he’s always expressed himself in the mangled syntax of a stoned second-grader, but lately he’s been unusually repetitive, meandering, and obsessive about fictional narratives that he truly does seem to believe. He’s definitely sliding down hill at a frightening rate. It’s so bad that even the inexplicably negligent New York Times has felt obliged to make note of it:
Nicolle Wallace elaborates:
More:
Now Donald, of course, has always been unfit for office. He’s always been stupid, spectacularly ignorant, immoral, corrupt, and mentally ill. This time around, though, it’s worse, a great deal worse, because now he’s all the while losing neurons by the billion. It probably won’t be long before he’s not just struggling to maintain, but is completely incapable of, coherent thought, and you have to believe that everybody around him understands this perfectly well. All those Project 2025 fuckos, all those malignant billionaire oligarchs, all those boot-licking MAGA-kow-towing GOP politicians, all those Christo-fascist absolutists, simply have to realize that Trump, in the best scenario, will be eating pablum off a spoon within a couple of years, maybe less, and is already largely incapable of participating in anything approaching policy-making. He’s too erratic, too apt to change his mind, too likely to throw tantrums, pitch fits, and bark impetuous orders that may or may not undo what was just done, and may or may not even be possible.
Here’s what gives me pause: fighting tooth and nail to re-seat this human train wreck behind the Resolute Desk isn’t just dangerous and senseless, it’s counterproductive to the right wing project, which, as revealed by the voluminous Project 2025, envisions a campaign of conquest involving the greatest number of complex, sequential, interlocking steps since the Schlieffen Plan. Its execution will require cold, calculating, consistent pressure from the top, not the poo-throwing antics of a caged and stir-crazy primate grinding out the last years of his captivity at the Bronx Zoo. Anyone wishing to bring Project 2025 to fruition must realize that the Incredible Shrinking Trump is not the one to ensure it all goes off without a hitch. So what’s the plan here?
Well, I’m increasingly convinced that the plan is to regain the White House and then ditch Trump at the first expedient moment through what would be, after all, a perfectly legitimate and unimpeachable use of the 25th Amendment, which reads, in part:
Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.
This being the U.S. Constitution, nothing is as simple as all that. Trump would have a chance to declare himself once again fit and reclaim his office, which he would unless a 2/3 majority of both houses of Congress side with the Cabinet that he remains unfit, but I’m betting – and I’ll wager they’re betting – that Trump will be in such poor condition, as certifiable by credible medical professionals, that a two-thirds vote will be eminently attainable (after all, a proper medical exam would probably prove today that he’s already fit for removal). Why not? The Dems won’t want him around, and the Republicans won’t see any downside in replacing him with his nasty little Veep. Then, voila, say hello to President J.D. Vance.
Given the alternative, is this really so bad? Not at all, not to hear me talk about it all these years, since my constant refrain has been that anybody, but anybody, would be preferable to Donald as Commander-in-Chief, whether Ron DeSantis, Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz, a potted plant, or a goddam can of creamed corn, and I guess I stand by that, to a point. Vance is much, much smarter than Trump, likely to be stable and capable of a consistent approach to policy, and he’d probably be a far better option when it comes, say, to handling the inevitable national emergencies and natural disasters, pandemics, earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, and all that, despite his gross inexperience. At least he’s not crazy enough to believe in Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine, right? He’s not liable to order his subordinates to get the South Koreans to relocate Seoul, or drop H-bombs on a hurricane. There would, arguably, be somewhat fewer things to fear from a Vance Presidency.
Yet when confronted with the concrete possibility, one can’t help but waver a little. If he’s a better option than Donald, he’s certainly not much better. On several key questions he’s every bit as awful. He seems to be every inch the same Putin-loving, NATO-hating, anti-Ukraine authoritarian. Unlike Donald, who’ll say and do anything to grab power but lacks any real convictions, Vance isn’t just willing to go along with the evangelical crusade against female reproductive autonomy, he’s plainly motivated by a deep, genuine, cruelly misogynistic will to control, which makes him an enthusiastic oppressor of women, one who’ll abet every Congressional attempt to make everything the States are doing to curtail female rights a matter of federal law. His Supreme Court picks are apt to be just as noxious. His intense Trumpian antipathy to the immigrant community has been on open display, as has his enthusiasm for the mass deportation plans endorsed by the Stephen Miller faction of the GOP, as set out in Project 2025 and touted repeatedly by Donald.
Most crucially, Vance has repeatedly refused to accept that Trump lost the 2020 election, and repeatedly asserted, on the record, that he would not, as Vice President, have certified that election. Don’t, then, expect J.D. to stand up for democracy in a way Donald wouldn’t. Expect him instead to be a ruthless, cunning, and probably much more effective tool in the implementation of Project 2025, someone equivalent to a Christian nationalist mole, a plant whose directed efforts could all but put an end to the former Republic, in fact if not in law. By the time he’s through carrying out the plans of the coalition that now supports Trump, they’ll have managed to pull America as close to the one-party minority rule of Orban’s Hungary as possible in what still purports to be a democracy.
For the factions that crave a Republican back in the Oval – the evangelicals, the anti-tax crusading oligarchs, the white nationalists, the misogynists, the xenophobes, the rapacious capitalists determined to dismantle the administrative state – Vance is a dream come true, a Godsend, and far better equipped to serve as the instrument of their malicious schemes than poor, doddering Donald, who won’t be able to tell up from down, is apt to adhere to whatever ideas he heard from the last person that talked to him (either in person or through the TV), and never really held to any belief system anyway, beyond the imperative to secure his own salvation and enrichment. Vance, by contrast, comes on like a True Believer. This may yet be a dodge, true. It can seem that way. He used to call Donald Hitler, and decried what the modern GOP has come to stand for. Yet by all appearances he’s become a full-throated convert, and it looks to me as if he’s talked himself into internalizing the evil nonsense that Donald merely wore like a cloak to get where he wanted. He’s a zealot, yearning greedily for power, keen to adopt whichever beliefs propel him to the summit. He doesn’t just want to get rich, or stay out of prison. He wants to wield coercive authority in the worst way. He wants to be The Man. This, perhaps, makes him even more dangerous than a venal, corrupt, self-serving Trump, who, end of the day, was just a grifter hoping to reap the personal benefits available from the abuse of high office.
Amazing, isn’t it? Vance is a punk, wholly unqualified for the Presidency, yet his ascendance to the top slot is all too probable within the next couple of years. You can tell he can taste it. You can tell he feels it coming within his grasp. Incredibly, he feels equal to the coming moment. And that’s just fine with the white men who really run the GOP, and aspire to run the whole country in perpetuity. As notorious and outrageously influential anti-taxation crusader Grover Nordquist once put it, all they need is an arm that can hold a pen and sign what’s laid out before it on the President’s desk. With J.D. Vance, they’ll have found their man, and then, God help America. God help us all.
the needlefish 
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