Vance's Chances
The callow Vice President has only one option.
[Hello! This is Part II of a piece about what's next after the Good Thing Happens. You can find Part I here.]
What is a Vice President to do when it’s this clear that the rules of the Presidency don’t apply anymore? Especially when he has zero popular appeal and is so thoroughly—even urgently—disposable to his rivals?
Vance’s best move—his only move—is, while Trump is still in office, to rebrand himself as an entirely different human being. That part shouldn’t be hard; he has already done it several times. Vance can even go back to one of his previous names. Heaven knows his current brand recognition won’t do him any favors.
Vance doesn’t need to go all the way back to Fake Hillbilly or even back to Cringey “Centrist” Writer. He just needs to go back as far as Never-Trump Republican and make a small adjustment: He must become Constitution Guy Who Has Always Loved America, The Rule of Law, and Doing Things Properly.
It’s the only thing that can save his chances at the Presidency or even at surviving long enough for future TV punditry. (It’s also admittedly a move that can bite Vance right through the neck if he doesn’t play it carefully. Trump allegedly tried to get the previous VP hanged for having the teensiest qualms about violating the Constitution. Vance is really going to have to thread that needle. The whole situation would be a real shame if he didn’t so richly deserve it.)
He would have some real support if he made the move. A lot of old-school Congressional Republicans are absolutely gibbering for a return to the days when they could sort of pretend to be following the rule of law. Sure, Ol’ Mitch stole a Supreme Court seat, but it was all in good fun, and they mostly didn’t have to think about what it would mean to have their names and faces highlighted in the Cowards Who Enabled the Fascist Regime section of future documentaries.
Several Republicans have also noticed that Donald Trump is handling the economy in much the same way the Oregon State Highway Division handled a whale corpse in 1970.
…only with less finesse. With tariffs still spiking prices and driving away foreign trade and health insurance premiums about to skyrocket to the point where people will have to choose between getting medical attention and their rent, any Republican politician who isn’t a true cult member is bracing for a ferocious backlash and midterm elections that will require a more expansive metaphor than “bloodbath.” A blood flume, perhaps.[*]
To be honest, there just might be a few GOP reps who are already including a pulmonary embolism in their secret bedtime prayers.
All Vance has to do is assure them that things will go back to, well, not normal, but to a pre-Trump Republican stranglehold. Tell them that they can get back to ribbon cuttings and giving tax breaks to their corporate pals and everyone will stop pointing out all the fascism.
As Constitution Guy, Vance can please the old school and avoid ruffling Trump’s meringue of hair too much by taking a page from the Susan Collins “Very Concerned, But Not So Concerned That I’m Going to Do Anything” method. It’s tried and true, and a shocking number of conservatives buy it. He’ll need to do a lot of head shaking and brow-furrowing and mentioning that good old tea-stained document and then quickly taking it back and showing his belly to President Trump. Maybe hit a few political shows and position himself as the adult in the room. He should definitely get new pants.
Behind the scenes, Vance will have to shank his political frenemies like he has never shanked before. He’ll need to stab with both enthusiasm and care, like he’s opening the packaging on a brand-new Chesterfield. He'll need to voice “concerns,” backchannel deals, and leak like a Signal conversation full of buckshot.
Vance should also keep weaseling out to meet with the Murdochs, who would probably like a little fascism, but not so much fascism that it becomes inconvenient for business. Among other issues, if Miller gets the reins and leftists, women, immigrants, people of color, and LGBTQ folks do get thoroughly crushed, there is not a single remaining reason for conservatives to watch Fox News. It will probably also be an issue if RFK Jr. gets the crown and the Fox News audience starts dying. Well, continues dying, but dying more rapidly on account of the unchecked bubonic measelpox.
Yes, Vance would have to answer for all the Trump administration policies to date, but he’ll have some plausible deniability since he took eight vacations during his first seven months in office. Also he’s really comfortable with just lying.
He really could pull it off: JD Vance could take over an unearned Presidency, muster enough leverage to toss both Miller and Kennedy, and then keep promising billionaires that yes, yes, we’ll make that full pivot into technofascism any day now while the Congressional GOP scrambles to get back to the kind of permanent Republican control that Mitch McConnell always envisioned: Certainly not a real democracy, but nothing that would make a comfortable old white guy feel uncomfortable for a moment.
The only flaw in this plan is that he’s not going to do it.
JD Vance is too internet poisoned to give up his consuming goal of owning the libs, and too thirsty for approval to give up being on Trump’s Inner Team of Sycophant Winners for even a moment, even if it means greater rewards in the long run. Remember that Vance’s villain origin story is that he went full MAGA because people didn’t like the terrible movie that got made of his terrible book that a kazillion people bought and pretended they had finished. A normal human being, having so improbably won the bestselling book lottery, would kick back on a pile of money and spend the rest of his life on the James Carville circuit of irrelevant but easily booked political commentators.
But Vance can’t do that. He can’t do a lot of things. He can’t get through a debate that has fact checks, he can’t order food like he grew up in this galaxy, and he can’t give up short-term dopamine hits and pro forma praise from GOP operatives.
The most likely scenario for Vance is that he gets to have the POTUS title as the slimmest fig leaf of pretense that we’re still living in a democratic republic while the more formidable monsters go Full Fash. But the minute he swears in, he’ll be tangled in a poisoned web of obligations.
Miller, even if he loses or cedes the initial power struggle, is not going anywhere. And that would be true even if he didn’t have to return to the White House every morning to sleep in a coffin full of his native soil.
And it’s not just Miller who will be immovable. Even the most incompetent of Trump’s cabinet members must be compiling escalating scandal bombs they can drop if Vance tries to replace them. (OK, not the most incompetent cabinet members. Kash Patel is busy trying to get his tie out of the big printer’s automatic paper feeder, Dan Bongino is still stuck in whatever hedge maze they bundled him into, and Pete Hegseth is focused on his haircut and butt lift vision boards.)
Peter Thiel is the most overt owner of a chunk of Vance, but Vladimir Putin has grown accustomed to the lifestyle of having the President of the United States as his cupbearer, and he’s not going to simply slink away. If Vance has had a single moral lapse in his adult life, odds are that Putin has documentation. One wonders if that’s why Vance was so quick to dismiss those Hitler-lovin’ Republicans in their 20s and 30s as a bunch of crazy kids who should immediately be excused.
And Peter Thiel is far from the only corporate billionaire in line. Elon Musk spent millions of dollars to get Trump and Vance elected and tanked the brand of the company that pumps up his stock-based wealth. Heaven knows what sulfurous bargains Mark Zuckerburg, Jeff Bezos, and other wealthy indoor kids struck with Trump, but like all pay-over-time deals, those bills come due with a vengeance. And we haven’t even gotten to El Salvador and the Saudis.
Vance—if he is lucky—is going to be absolutely hog-tied by obligations someone else made, many of which he may not even know about yet. That’s a fitting way for Trump to go; He’ll be thrilled to stick someone else with his debts one last time.
The good/horrible news for the rest of us is that JD Vance will continue to be JD Vance: A goober who rode a wave of money, luck, and abandoned principles to the top and has not bothered to develop any further skills that might help him meet the moment.
While Vance is in the Oval Office getting torn to pieces like last year’s scarecrow, RFK Jr. will start charm campaigning to replace him, triggering an absolute termite mound of other Republican contenders to writhe out and start campaigning more overtly.
While the would-be usurpers claw at each other’s faces, Vance’s attempts to continue most of Saint Trump’s policies and funnel tax money to billionaires, cronies, and hostile foreign nations might actually start to peel disgruntled viewers away from Fox News. After all, you can lie to the base about what’s happening in other people’s lives (Portland! A zombie-ridden pile of rubble!) for a long time, but it’s tougher to insist that the cost of living is going down when Sell a Kidney to Make Rent is now a permanent slot on the chore wheel.
The chaos of 11,000 conservative factions who all hate each other trying to take over the country will be horrifying, but it’s also our best chance of getting the cracks to broaden. The GOP’s margin in Congress is graphene-thin, matching the courage and patience of many of its members. It will only take a few to break, panic, or remember that they had principles once and then it’s finally time to start impeaching and removing the dastards who have so filthily betrayed our nation.
It may well be that our only real hope of wrenching our democracy back depends on JD Vance’s utter lack of spine and leadership.
And that means we have a real shot.
[*] That’s assuming, of course, that there are any polling places not overwhelmed by masked bargain-basement cosplay yuckabucks who throw cans of tear gas anytime someone makes them feel ootsy.
