Donald Trump was seen with a noticeable layer of makeup on his right hand on Friday as he left the White House, amid ongoing speculation about his health. The 79-year-old is believed to have used makeup to hide bruising on his hand on several occasions since returning to office, but the application appeared particularly thick during his visit to The People’s House museum.
I do kinda fear JD Vance being president. It’s mostly a “devil you know” kinda fear. There’s the off chance that he’s just the same same as Trump, but younger and, in the worst case scenario, more competent.
Vance is pretty unpopular even with the Nazi base. Without the Führer, the whole movement will fizzle out.
Probably not so much fizzle out as implode spectacularly through infighting about who is going to be their next führer. Vance was handpicked by Trump and has the respect of nobody. Everybody in the RNC will try to become the new king.
He was handpicked by Peter Thiel. But you’re right that he has as much of a chance to be the next Führer as Rudolf Heß had.
Cults of personality tend not to last once the personality dies.
They don’t tend to die of natural causes while in power though, right?
I could be wrong, but I don’t see Vance holding vast swaths of the American public in the palm of his hands the way trump does. I don’t get it, because I find everything about Trump utterly repulsive, but he does seem to have an almost preternatural sway over his followers. I can’t imagine factions of the right having the same fear of going against Vance that they do for Trump. I think there would be more opportunity to build coalitions against the march towards fascism with Vance in the top job. But maybe I’m just a dreamer.
The issue is that it isn’t that Donald has a magic sway over his followers. It’s that he gives them permission to be their worst selves.
He hinted, twice, to crowds that they should get the Covid vaccine. And was booed. Twice.
He’s riding the tiger and does an impressive job at it.
When he leaves, he will leave a vacuum. And that vacuum will be filled, unfortunately.
Yeah pretty much my take.
Trump has 3 relevant characteristics, he has evil intentions, he’s incompetent, he’s popular.
Vance has evil intentions, he’s less incompetent, but he’s less popular.
I really feel this is why they’ve been pushing EOs and other methods to increase the power the executive has. Even if Vance comes into power and has the charisma of a used napkin, he can just silence dissent anyway.
More competent should be better. It takes a special kind of stupid to betray your country as much as he has.
He might have a better position on the boat but we’re roughly all in the same boat. If he causes a greater depression, that certainly won’t be good for him. It’ll be a lot worse for us of course, but that doesn’t matter here.
The problem is Vance is the main one pushing the christo-fascist stuff. Trump is a greedy stupid narcissist which can (and has) caused plenty of short term damage. Enough short term damage can stack up to long term damage, but even that is recoverable. Over a long enough time scale foreign relations can be patched, soft power slowly restored. Nothing he has done domestically has been too catastrophic yet. Vance though has the potential intelligence to do some seriously long term lasting damage, the kind of stuff that would E.G. enshrine his particular flavor of Christianity as the national religion and make anyone who isn’t male and white a second class citizen. Once society gets tilted in that direction restoring it becomes incredibly hard. Like overthrow the government hard.
Trump in contrast is basically a toddler throwing a temper tantrum. Sure he might break stuff, but broken things are easier to repair than things that have been maliciously constructed. The fascist systems Vance might build are far scarier than whatever Trump comes up with because what Trump makes never lasts. Just wait a little while and it will naturally collapse from greed, incompetence, and infighting. Vance I fear could make something stable though.
The silver lining in this I suppose is that Vance lacks the conman skills that have allowed Trump to weaponize morons and force others to go along with his delusions. Without the throngs of MAGAts supporting him Vance won’t be able to strongarm the rest of the GOP the way Trump has which would hamper his efforts.
Peter Theil
Don’t let your fears get in the way of your dreams. They are like moles. Only real way to get rid of them is systematically, one by one.