Shank You for Your Service

Handicapping the looming succession fight

Donald Trump is not doing well. That statement applies in several areas, but in this case, we’re talking about his obvious physical and mental decline. Recently, the President of the United States has:

• Gone for a totally normal, completely routine annual checkup at the six-month mark.
• Had advanced imaging done during that visit that his staffers won’t talk about.
• Conducted an “interview” with Jake Tapper entirely by text. Not in person, not on video. Just completely unvetted text messages. I hope Stephen enjoyed the exchange and got to play an extra round of Royal Kingdom before he had to give the phone back. Allegedly.
• Made up a war between Cambodia and Armenia.
• Had another spell during which he was not seen in public for several days.

That disappearance from the public eye was the second time in two months that Trump, a man who starts shaking and dry heaving if he stops being on television for more than five minutes, has gone Garbo for several days in a row.

The excellent Gary Legum over at Wonkette makes a solid case that the President may be getting a regular IV infusion of a medication that leaves him too sick for general viewing for a few days afterward. And Trump himself makes a case for his own rapid deterioration every time he does or says anything in public.

Trump’s lackeys—you know, the ones who seem to have ordered a rush on commemorative coins for Trump like you only make for dead people—are very aware that there is going to be a power vacuum soon. And that makes for a three-piece-suit slap fight that is most likely already in the warmup rounds.

Vance is in bigger trouble than he thinks he is.

According to the Constitution, JD Vance is the only possible successor to the Presidency, and Peter Thiel paid good money for him to be in that position. But there is absolutely no reason for Trumplings or Congressional Republicans to start paying attention to the Constitution at this late date. And six members of the Supreme Court are so dependent on Trump for all their decisions that when he finally passes on, they are going to lie face-down in the dirt and start clawing their way to Hell so they can be there to nod at his next edict.

Trump has asserted the right of the Executive Branch to be completely lawless, and if the rules of the American Presidency are off, they are off. Vance can’t count on a smooth transition of power into the next Presidency/Dictatorship/Unending Technofascist Nightmare Regime, and he’s got several competitors who would like to snatch it away, two of whom have a real shot at it.

Overall, the Trump Cabinet is bleak. The Whiniest President has assembled a crack team of people who have zero expertise on anything but shouting on Fox News, with the notable exception of Marco Rubio. Unfortunately, Rubio has given himself over to rubber-stamping evidence-free extrajudicial "drug boat" bombings and staring into the middle distance wondering if it’s too late to start over as a plumber’s apprentice. Drains may clog, but they never tell an ally to say pretty please when he asks for help with a thug who keeps annihiliating hospitals.

The other members of Trump's cabinet spend their time screeching down all attempts to educate them about their jobs and turbo-loathing each other. The overall White House atmosphere is somewhere between crabs in a bucket and dinner with the Skeksis.

JD Vance is in the lead only by technicalities. His advantages are that he is the guy who is supposed move into the Presidency and he has the financial backing of Peter Thiel. However, Thiel, a multibillionaire who has recently been giving hours-long lectures on the Antichrist, is just a little bit out of touch with what the average American wants in a leader. Most people think that the President should have a basic humanoid level of appeal. For example, he should be able to successfully make chitchat at a doughnut shop beyond compulsively asking the workers how long they have been there.

While we’re looking at that clip, I’ll also mention that most people feel on an instinctive level that an American President should seem like he has eaten a doughnut before, and that he should have done so willingly. He should also have used his hands to eat the doughnut, and not whatever Vance uses, presumably a combination of a pocketknife and an oyster fork. A President should also probably be able to find a barber who doesn’t hate him to the point of using a Spin-Mop transition between the top of the head and the back.

JD Vance doesn’t tick any of those boxes. And despite all the attempts at stern glaring and the chin moss, he doesn’t have a grownup face. He always looks like a toddler wearing a Businessman costume.

Even after all the sad GOP attempts to pump him up, Vance is unlikely to be able to hold on to Trump’s cult of personality, which by definition requires having a discernible personality. Trump himself has made it humiliatingly clear that he doesn’t see JD as his real successor.

The top two contenders who Daddy really loves

Stephen Miller, who has (Allegedly!) already been doing the job of the President as well as the jobs of a few cabinet secretaries, is absolutely going to make a move. Laws or no laws, I don’t see him prying his gnarled little claws one-by-one from the reins of power, even if he were physically capable of doing such a thing.

Even if Vance gets the titular Presidency, Miller is going to take a big swing at continuing his douche-behind-the-curtain routine, and if JD tries to shake that off, things are going to get ugly. (I am not for one second suggesting that Vance will step into the role of President and come into his own as a human being. Just that he will want to sidle away from Miller’s old-school fascist garbage in favor of the new-school fascist garbage he’s been getting spoon-fed by Thiel, Curtis Yarvin, and teenagers on 4Chan.)

As a bonus, Congressional Republicans are terrified of Miller in a way that they are not of Vance. (I’m assuming this is in part because they have not seen the speech in which Miller, wearing a suit and tie and sounding like Sith Urkel, rage-snivels about how he is so much more hardcore than gangbangers.)

Is Stephen Miller only person on Earth more charisma-free than Vance? No. Stephen Miller actually has a powerful reverse charisma previously undiscovered by science. People and dogs instinctively cringe away from him as you might expect, but so do birds and rodents. He is never shown walking across the White House lawn because there’s always a tiny stampede of bugs fleeing his presence. If you look carefully, you can see plants uprooting themselves to get away.

Even Trump can tell that Stephen Miller is repellent, calling him “Weird Stephen.” To restate that point: Donald Trump, whose two documented best friends were Roy Cohn and Jeffrey Epstein, gets the heebie-jeebies from Stephen Miller.

Miller pairs his amsirahc with a simmering malevolence that scares the feeble into making poor decisions. They think that if he can be appeased for a moment, it might be possible to escape. Sort of like throwing a decoy wallet at a mugger or a honey-glazed ham at a hyena, only it’s letting Stephen Miller (Allegedly!) murder innocent people on fishing boats.

RFK Jr. is the only major dog in the fight who has something akin to normal personal magnetism. He's been briefly knocked back on his heels because he pissed off a big chunk of his base by falsely and ridiculously linking autism to Tylenol and circumcision instead of falsely and ridiculously linking autism to lifesaving vaccines, but that’s not his whole base. There are plenty of weak-willed Americans who would love to have kings, and the Kennedys are the closest thing we have to a royal dynasty. There are the dilettante fitness bros who are impressed by Kennedy’s jeans-clad focus on just the vanity muscles, and then the beta-authoritarians—no small percentage of Trump’s base—who can’t help but fall in line behind RFKJ’s indignant fury that he has not yet been handed a Presidency on a monogrammed silver tray. RFK Jr. has the same asset that Trump has: An inexplicable pull on a large chunk of the population who think that rich equals shrewd and see rank ignorance and sociopathic tendencies as manly assets.

Vance cannot win against the other two in a straight fight: RFK Jr. has more king juice and Miller is the one with a death grip on the hairy underside of the Trump administration. You are welcome for that image.

Vance also will not survive a dictatorship run by either of the other two. They would need to humiliate him and get him out of the way to eliminate the key ingredient for anyone who wants to follow proper succession, assuming GOP members of Congress ever wake up and return from the Phantom Zone.

Miller will use Vance to work out his increasingly overt Vlad the Impaler fantasies, while Kennedy will subject him to a slower death of guzzling beef tallow and colloidal silver. (No one will bother to get Don Jr. or Eric out of the way. They’ll get a stipend, a podcast, and a few million bot subscriptions to help them feel special.)

And if Vance is dumb enough to wait until the power vacuum opens, there will be so much chaos that some outlier like Russ Vought could have a chance. Even Rubio might shake the crescent wrenches out of his pockets and give a shot.

If the Vice-President-for-the-Moment has any sense, he’ll start working and shanking to cement his position immediately. It won’t be that difficult a task if he has any real sinew. (He does not have any real sinew. It will be a difficult task.)

The enemy of my enemy is still probably my enemy, but hoo boy, are Miller and Kennedy my enemies. I will lay out Vance’s one and only possible strategy in my next piece.