With grift, lies, and (most importantly) their tongues up Trump’s ass.
I don’t understand how that gets them any significant influence on who the next Republican nominee will be. Can you walk me through it?
IMO they’re remoras, not sharks. On their own, they’re basically nothing significant. They need a Trump figure to latch onto.
I’ve always believed that Trump won by being an approachable television personality. Approachable is a word seldom applied to Trump, yet he is more in the likeness of Ronald Reagan than mainstream politicians. People have a parasocial relationship to Trump, “the one-sided, imagined bond where fans feel intimacy with media figures they don’t know personally, a concept coined in the 1950s and amplified by social media’s perceived closeness. It involves one-way emotional investment from the fan, with the celebrity often unaware of the individual.” Jesse Ventura and Arnold Schwarzenegger rode on the public’s connections to them and so did Elon Musk for a while.
Nobody saw them coming (except for Musk, and he wasn’t a politician). Suddenly they held power while around them jaws dropped. Most likely the next parasocial political winner will drop jaws with their unexpectedness as well. But if you’re looking for people with an existing base of tens of millions, podcasters in this era are the prime pool.
He may have put himself out of contention when he wrote an OpEd (gift link) in the New York Times last week advocating for increased taxation of the wealthy.
IMO, that was a deliberate move on his part to try to position himself as the “sane” Republican candidate for 2028. I assume he’s been planning this for a long time - his term in the Senate was clearly meant to launch a presidential campaign in ‘24, but he saw that the party wasn’t ready to move on from Trump yet and sat it out.
OTOH, Mittens is now 78, and I’d be surprised if the voters want to see yet another Boomer still trying to cling to power at this point.
Yeah. Trump is the sort of authoritarian who purposefully makes no provision for his replacement. Both because anyone in a position to replace him is a threat, and because he simply doesn’t care what happens to everyone else once he’s gone. The only reason there’s even a Vice President under Trump is because that’s a legacy position, I’m sure he’d fire Vance if Trump ever got to be full-on dictator like he wants.
Answering the specific question, rather than trying to guess the playing field and Trump 3.0, I think they see themselves as potential kingmakers. I think Vance’s early strength is illusional - it assumes a more-or-less normal transition of power, which I find in doubt. For example, if Trump does go for 3.0, then Vance’s power will evaporate. I bet the two swamp creatures are waiting for the top 3 or so candidates (leaving aside Trump) to emerge from the infighting, and then offering their narrow wedge of support in exchange for better promises than they got from Trump.
I don’t think they’re capable of finding a person to replace Trump on their own - someone with whatever level of greasy charm, rabblerousing, and corruptibility to give them what they want. I mean, rather, there are so many options that it seems pointless to try to pick one to prop up with the associated costs in a crowded field.
Easier to wait for the final scum to rise to the top, and then insinuate themselves as a irreplaceable source of support in that crowded field.
The Lazy/Half-smart axis of leadership as it were.
Channeling future president Vance:
"The Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022 is just a stupid piece of paper, written by socialist terrorists, who are trying to destroy our country. I have declared it is null and void, and that the election was rigged. I ALONE will decide who won the election, and I have decided that it is ME.
Democrats: “hey you can’t do that! We’ll take you to court or something.”
Susan Collins: "I am concerned about this, and will look into it.
Supreme Court: "We must stand behind President Vance for the good of the country.
60% of Americans: "I wonder when the next season of Housewives of Madison County will be on?
Ted Cruz: “The fuck you are. I’m president now!”
Cage match in the semi-constructed Presidential Ballroom / Monster Truck Rally Arena.
Moderating:
Let’s not turn yet another P&E thread into a Pit lookalike. The OP wished to discuss a particular situation. Stay on topic or find another thread more appropriate to your comments.
For starters I don’t buy the whole idea of Bannon or Miller as some kind of machiavellian puppet master pulling all the strings from behind the scenes. Bannon was fairly influential in Trump’s rise to power but he’s just another loathsome chump who was left carrying the bag for Trump, he’s not remotely close to power nowadays. Miller comes across a bit of an evil genius but only became he’s very very evil and everyone else around him in the administration is so unbelievably incompetent. My dog would come across as a genius in the current administration. Miller is just another hateful fascist lackey whose only qualification is they owe everything trump (his only advantage is not any kind of talent it’s that he stayed loyal as a lackey Trump after 2020)
I really don’t buy there is any Trump replacement out there waiting in the wings, beyond Vance. As I said in the other thread to be involved in this administration or the MAGA movement generally your only qualification required is your an weak ineffectual lackey who owes everything to trump. That pretty much rules out anyone being high enough profile to be a Trump replacement especially with Vance probably having the incumbency.
The U.S. system required him to, last year, name someone who would be his successor if he has to leave office before January 2029. That is JD Vance.
As for Trump’s successor if he lasts until January 2029 (which I expect), here’s what he said in October:
Trump does go back and forth on third term. But what I do not see him doing is throwing Vance under the bus. Maybe there was one time in a past year, but I recall no recent mentions of his children, let alone Candace Owens, as a successor.
I actually think it would be more in Trump’s personality to periodically say he has changed his mind on Vance and Rubio being at the top of his list. The fact that Trump does not switch back and forth on successors is what I see as purposeful.
The fact that Trump already named two favored successors suggests to me that the Bannon & Miller crew have no power to name Trump’s replacement. Maybe they think Candace is terrific. So what?
If the words “the Vice President is great. Marco’s great.” came out of Trump’s mouth, then believing the exact opposite is the only sane move.
One can only believe Trump when he’s extolling himself, as he did a couple of sentences later.
“I would love to do it — I have the best numbers ever! … Am I not ruling it out? You’ll have to tell me. All I can tell you is that we have a great group of people, which they (the Democrats) don’t.”
This is too “12D chess” for me. The Occam’s razor reason that doesn’t do that is because he doesn’t actually care what happens when he’s gone. Why would he care about something that doesn’t actually directly effect him?
But that doesn’t make Vance the successor to Trump’s real source of power: the MAGA cult.
But pretty much by definition if you are a senior figure in the MAGA cult you in that position because you are spinless simpering lackey cannot pose a threat to trump, that pretty much rules you out from being an obvious candidate to succeed him
There is no one in the wings. It pretty much Vance or no one. Hopefully it will be no one, and the whole movement collapses when Trump’s pops his clogs, but who’s to say. Vance is obviously angling to inherit it by way of Charlie Kirks wife.
Even if he’s nominated, I seriously doubt he commands the same sort of personal cultish loyalty that Trump does. Anywhere.
I mean, I can’t see Congress knuckling under to Vance like they do to Trump. He may be the anointed successor, but he doesn’t have that je ne sais quoi that Trump does, and I suspect Congress will not put up with even half the bullshit they have under Trump.
That is also my point. People like Bannon and Miller will not leave this power vacuum unfilled. I’m not saying they are magicians or Machiavellian sorcerers, but I believe they will find someone or have someone in mind to fill that vacuum. As some have said, they may wait to see who emerges from the pond scum and back that person behind the scenes. But I don’t see them retiring from the game and saying, “Oh well it was fun while it lasted but we’re outta here.”
Absolutely this. Not among the MAGAts, not among the broligarchy, and not among other heads of state who kowtow to Trump even while they despise him. And certainly not among other Republicans who shrink, and I do mean shrink, in terror at the name of Donald Trump. Vance is weak sauce indeed.
I suspect a lot of what they’re trying to do right now is identify that heir apparent and position them to be the Republican candidate long before Trump’s out of office and hopefully make them familiar and comfortable to the MAGA rank and file, etc… The issue is as I see it, that MAGA is wholly a Trumpian cult of personality, not a political movement independent of him, unlike the Tea Party.
One thing I think they’ll have to figure out, or so I hope, is that typically people move up the ranks as Republican and Democrat administrations cycle through the White House. For example, the reason we saw Sean Spicer as Trump’s first press secretary back in 2016, is that Spicer had been a minor functionary in the GOP before the Bush II administration, where he held some kind of small role. Same thing for say… Ron Klain, who’d been Biden’s VP chief of staff during the Obama administration. Problem is that the Trump administration is so stuffed with sycophants and incompetents, or just gutted via DOGE that the usual pipeline has been wrecked. The next Republican administration is going to have a really uphill climb toward effectiveness just for that reason alone.
But they would have to be doing that now, in public, with the MAGA masses. They can’t wait until Trump shuffles off his mortal coil and then pull out some perfectly formed Trump replacement no one has heard of. The Maga masses aren’t going to care, especially with Vance in the Whitehouse doing his best Trump/Kirk impression.