This is the thing about Vance that will be a problem for those trying to replace Trump.
Trump is easy to manipulate, because he’s really only motivated by two things: Money, and adulation. Give him both of those, and he won’t give a shit about anything else you do.
But Vance? As far as I can see, the only thing that really motivates him is climbing the ladder, getting more power every chance he gets. When he started out, he accomplished this by sucking up to Peter Thiel and those types. Now, he’s sucking up to Trump. But when and if he finally ascends to the presidency? What “more power” could he be offered to manipulate him? At that point, he will be the power that others crave to suck up to. And we have no idea what he’ll actually do in that position.
He won by running as a character he played on TV. His whole schtick of a ruthless, but effective, corporate magnate was written for the apprentice, just as much as Tony Soprano was written for James Gandolfini.
Trump didn’t make himself the candidate. The campaign team did. People like Bannon, and Kristi Noem’s paramour Corey Lewandowski, and pardoned felon Paul Manafort.
I don’t think Bannon and Miller are capable of pulling off that trick twice. Nobody ever has. Success breeds hubris, though. They and probably a lot of other people behind the scenes are sifting through the pile to see if another pony is hidden inside. The concept is real; the actors may be miscast.
I think Bannon and Miller are to MAGA what George Will and Charles Krauthammer were to the old GOP. They imagine themselves as the intellectual geniuses charting the course of the movement, but in fact they’re irrelevant blowhards whose ivory tower ideology is completely ignored by the actual power brokers, who act resolutely in their own self-interest.
I keep hearing people say things like that. Or ‘carisma’. For the life of me I don’t see it. He’s a butthead with absolutly no taste or intelligence . He can barely make a coherent sentence.
Obama had je ne sais quoi. Trump’s just a stupid bully.
I think in Trump’s case, it was about him. Not only, but primarily. It wasn’t some magnificent campaign, it was Trump himself - his peculiar charisma appealing to millions of voters who hadn’t routinely been voting.
Who are these actual power brokers? Why would they have picked Trump in 2016 over a full field of pliable actual politicians? Other than donating money, how did these power brokers make Trump both the nominee and the winner? How did they let him lose in 2020?
I’ve already said that Trump was almost unique in this way. Yet he had been making noises about running for President for decades and no one took him seriously. They had to have been people behind him doing the work that got him out in front of people. And they weren’t power brokers, but ideologues.
I don’t think Bannon and Miller are particularly significant. DJT’s rise was due to his ability to channel the inner demons of the worst of us in just enough numbers to win the presidency. He is like a tuning fork that when vibrating, resonates with the scum of the earth.
Yeah. I can’t answer the OP’s question because I have no idea, and I don’t think they can actually do any such thing; but I think it very likely they’ll try, just to keep the gravy train rolling.
Yes. People like to think that everything is run by evil masterminds (I call it “romantic cynicism”), but all the evidence I’ve seen is that none of the then-leadership wanted Trump, and Trump himself probably didn’t expect or intend to win. It was a vanity campaign & publicity stunt that catapulted Trump to the Presidency because the Republicans spent decades carving a Trump-shaped hole in themselves that Trump stepped into without planning to.
Trump won and sucked the Republicans into being his personalty cult without ever even really trying because he’s a superstimulus, a caricature of all the traits that the Republicans spent decades training their base to admire in order to gain their support. They just didn’t expect somebody like Trump to show up and steal their base from them.
I don’t think it has to be happening now, and definitely not in public, but it will have to happen by 2027.
A few here are old enough to remember how Jimmy Carter came out of nowhere to win the presidency in 1976. If the story and timing are right, you don’t need a lot of lead time.
“Jimmy Who?” people asked in 1976 as the virtually unknown James Earl “Jimmy” Carter came out of nowhere to capture the Democratic nomination for president, eventually winning the presidential election. Carter was able to accomplish this unlikely victory for one key reason: He was the anti-Nixon in the midst of the Watergate era. His “I’ll never lie to you” pledge resonated with voters disgusted with the corruption of the Nixon administration, allowing Carter to become president more for what he was not than for what he was. The Outsider President – LMU Magazine
It’s called “politics.”
Deal-making, pulling strings, pressure, blackmail, you-scratch-my-back-etc., uncovering secrets-- not a straightforward process conducted in the bright sunshine.
More along these lines:
I’ll go along with this. And yeah, who are the “actual power brokers”? Chances are, we’ve never heard their names in public.
Right – at the end of last century the Wills and Krauthammers fancied themselves ideological gurus of Movement Conservatism while dismissing how the Limbaughs and Gingriches were developing a culture based around identity grievance confrontation. Or even while welcoming that they did that work, to grab the votes of the riled up rabble. The “Establishment GOP Career Politicians” of the intervening years were too much at ease with that, because it worked to get them elected.
Early signs of this starting to go off the rails came with the rise of the Tea Party which in its start included a big element of dissatisfaction with the W/Cheney-era Neocons, as the lower ranks started saying, “hey, where’s that God, Guns and Gender-conformity ideal you’ve been selling us the last 30 years? all we see around us is foreign wars, rainbows and opioids” and fielding primary candidates who actually meant it, though otherwise unserious about governing.
What the “respectable” GOP of 2016 did not realize was that it was not them in 2016, it had been Romney/Ryan in 2012 that was the last gasp of “the base” accepting they must let Establishment Republicans run someone serious, competent and “presentable in polite society”. Some opportunists like Bannon and Miller saw that and saw that Trump could fill the hole and took the big chance for the big payout.
The question now would seem to be: COULD they hit the winning bet again, only by deliberate design rather than by seizing an opportunity? Or will yet another “dark horse” be the next winning bet?
Another idea – Trump is an insult comic with mastery of timing.
It is about Trump having better timing when it comes to when the Overton Window has been moved to the point where throwing out the next tranche of bigotry will be acceptable.
I think I agree with yourself, and several others here, that Bannon and Miller have little influence over who the GOP nominates. Where I may disagree is in thinking that Donald Trump is a skilled strategist.
I think I’ve shared this 2018 article here before. It is utterly nauseating. And so true. Like seeing those early cancer cells dividing under the microscope.
[This should be a gift link. I don’t know if the Atlantic will ask you to register. I have a throwaway yahoo address that I use for such requests.]
It’s a really long article, so keep the tissues and the vomit basin handy. Here are a couple of snippets.
…
In the clamorous story of Donald Trump’s Washington, it would be easy to mistake Gingrich for a minor character. A loyal Trump ally in 2016, Gingrich forwent a high-powered post in the administration and has instead spent the years since the election cashing in on his access—churning out books (three Trump hagiographies, one spy thriller), working the speaking circuit (where he commands as much as $75,000 per talk for his insights on the president), and popping up on Fox News as a paid contributor. He spends much of his time in Rome, where his wife, Callista, serves as Trump’s ambassador to the Vatican and where, he likes to boast, “We have yet to find a bad restaurant.”
But few figures in modern history have done more than Gingrich to lay the groundwork for Trump’s rise. During his two decades in Congress, he pioneered a style of partisan combat—replete with name-calling, conspiracy theories, and strategic obstructionism—that poisoned America’s political culture and plunged Washington into permanent dysfunction. Gingrich’s career can perhaps be best understood as a grand exercise in devolution—an effort to strip American politics of the civilizing traits it had developed over time and return it to its most primal essence.
…
“One of the great problems we have in the Republican Party is that we don’t encourage you to be nasty,” he told the group. “We encourage you to be neat, obedient, and loyal, and faithful, and all those Boy Scout words, which would be great around the campfire but are lousy in politics.”
For their party to succeed, Gingrich went on, the next generation of Republicans would have to learn to “raise hell,” to stop being so “nice,” to realize that politics was, above all, a cutthroat “war for power”—and to start acting like it.
…
Again, this is my premise and my question.
We won’t see it coming until it’s sitting on our chests cutting off our breathing.
“…Have little PUBLIC OR OVERT influence…” maybe…
The nuts & bolts process of selecting the nominee does not go on in public or in front of cameras. And with the decline of serious investigative reporting, we won’t find out how it came to be until years later. That article about Gingrich is from 2018, seven years ago, FFS. Did we realize what was happening at the time and what the long range effect would be?
Seven years from now, one thing we can be sure of is that Donald Trump won’t be president. But WHO will be running the country out front where we can see them and in the back room where we can’t?
I’m not saying I understand the charisma or je ne sais quoi, but it’s definitely there.
Think about it this way… nobody loved either of the Bushes or Reagan while they were in office quite like they do Trump. They didn’t hold rallies where people showed up and cheered for them.
Personally, if I had to opine why Trump’s so popular, it’s because he just bravados and bullshits his way through everything, and nothing sticks. To a lot of people on that side of the aisle, that’s proof positive that he’s special and especially powerful. On top of that, he’s extraordinarily wealthy relative to most people. even if 90% of his purported wealth turns out to be hot air.
That combination makes him look like he’s on to something vital and that he’s manifested his wealth, power, and non-stick properties through his personal abilities and mojo.
I know that Vance doesn’t have that sort of magnetism. He’s had to face consequences, has been poor, and has had to work for stuff. You can’t really do that Trump stuff if you’ve faced that stuff, because someone will punch you in the face at some point or throw you in jail.
Reagan didn’t have buildings named after himself in his lifetime because he didn’t ask for it. If his staff had suggested something like the Trump Cold Card, Reagan would have informally vetoed it. So – no Reagan cult of personality. But that’s not the same as lack of love.
Sure, they did not life Reagan, let alone Bushes, “quite like they do Trump.” This doesn’t mean a MAGA Trump successor would be unelectable, or unable to consolidate power.
P.S. Despite what I say above, Ronald Reagan was accused of having a cult of personality. Here’s a quote I found on the web, although I’m not 100 percent convinced of the sourcing:
or intelligence 
. He can barely make a coherent sentence.