Why Trump Should Drop J. D. Vance But That May Not Be Why He Does…

When Donald Trump first ran for President he had the good sense to have Mike Pence as his running mate. Trump, after all, would have been a bit of a worry to all those very conservative voters who thought that someone who lived in New York might just be a bit too cosmopolitan for their taste, but if a man like Pence could serve under him then… well, that’s a bit reassuring, isn’t it?

With J.D…

Hey, did anyone watch “Scrubs”? I mean, I know that in “Hillbilly Elegy” he’s called J.D. but I can’t help wondering if he noticed that he had the same first two initials as J.D. in that series and decided to pretend that he was just as interesting as the fictional main character of “Scrubs”…

Either way, he seems like the sort of man who knows what he wants. He wants to be President eventually and he’s prepared to out-do Trump to show how much he can be offensive and attack those people who don’t fit into his view of what an American should be.

Just to be clear here. Trump doesn’t like people who criticise him, Washington people, immigrants unless they’re from “nice countries”, women who have an opinion, Hollywood, Democrats, Republicans who don’t support him, people from minority groups, Californians and… Ok, he pretty much doesn’t like most US citizens but because so many don’t like some of the other groups, they seem to miss that he actually doesn’t like them very much either. The MAGA supporters seem to get a kick out of him being the person who isn’t afraid to say what he thinks and isn’t afraid to say things even when he hasn’t thought.

“The media,” Trump will tell them, “are trying to make me look bad by reporting exactly what I’ve said without understanding the fact that I wasn’t serious when I sounded like someone who had no idea what they were talking about and so what if I talked about sharks, has anyone in the media wrestled a shark? I haven’t and it’s up to you ask yourself why they’re talking about sharks just because I mentioned it? I mention a lot of things and they only ever report the ones that… how about that Biden, eh? Is he confused or what? Why aren’t they talking about him?”

So we have J.D. Vance selected as his running mate. When you think about it all the great comedy duos had a point of difference. Laurel was small; Hardy was large. Dean Martin would sing; Jerry Lewis wouldn’t. Costello was easily confused; Abbott seemed to know what was going on. (That’s Lou and Bud, not Peter and Tony. In their case, it was the other way around.) In many of them, one of the duo was the cool, straight man who had the plan, while the laughs came from the child-like innocent who didn’t understand the ways of the world. However, with The Trump ‘N’ Vance Show, it’s not quite clear exactly what role each is going to have. I mean, if Trump tries to project himself with gravitas as the elder statesman, that leaves all the good lines to Vance, and I can’t imagine Trump wanting his underling to have all the best lines.

Ok, they’re not a comedy duo… at least, not intentionally. But even in politics, it’s better for the two running mates to each have a different role. One can be the calm, thoughtful partner who is there to apologise or explain when his sidekick has overstepped the mark. In the case of Trump and Vance, I could imagine Donald telling us that when Vance called Kamala Harris “a childless cat lady”, that anyone who has a cat is not the sort of man we want running the country, only to double down and demand her birth certificate when it’s pointed out that the current Vice President is not a man.

Vance detailed his version of the Great American Dream in his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy. While the basic idea of the story of the poor boy who overcame his circumstances is appealing and certainly the stuff of yet another movie about not letting your upbringing dictate your life, there are a few problems with this for his role as the man to bring home the bacon for Trump with a certain demographic. The clear message from Vance is that if you’re born into misfortune you should be able to rise above it without any help from the state and if you don’t then it’s your own fault!

On the one hand, Trump and Vance are too much alike: Self-satisfied and happy to attack their opponents with the sort of nasty streak that makes politics seem less like an exchange of ideas and more like a fight in the primary school sand-pit. On the other, Trump is the beneficiary of inherited wealth, who likes to pretend that he made it on his own. Vance, whatever else, did actually start from humble beginnings and his actual story undercuts Trump’s “I started out with a lot and even though I managed to bankrupt myself several times, that didn’t matter because I could always find some suckers to help me out!”

Of course that fact alone wouldn’t be enough to dump Vance. A far better reason would be the idea that there’s nobody that Vance is likely to win over who isn’t already voting for Trump.

However, if Trump does dump Vance, I suspect it will be because he’s started to out-do him and get more publicity. Remember that the main focus for Trump has always been ratings or numbers in the crowd. If Vance starts to get more quotes than he does, it might be too much to accept.

 

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About Rossleigh 1447 Articles
Rossleigh is a writer, director and teacher. As a writer, his plays include “The Charles Manson Variety Hour”, “Pastiche”, “Snap!”, “That’s Me In The Distance”, “48 Hours (without Eddie Murphy)”, and “A King of Infinite Space”. His acting credits include “Pinor Noir Noir” for “Short and Sweet” and carrying the coffin in “The Slap”. His ten minutes play, “Y” won the 2013 Crash Test Drama Final.

24 Comments

  1. I’m not sure that Trump can ditch him now that he’s been nominated at that strange convention. But then, this is Trump…

  2. And this morning this comes through…..

    Trump: “You won’t have to do it anymore. Four more years, you know what, it will be fixed, it will be fine, you won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians” he added.

    “I love you Christians. I’m a Christian. I love you, get out, you gotta get out and vote. In four years, you don’t have to vote again, we’ll have it fixed so good you’re not going to have to vote,” Trump said.

    So is JD there for life like Trump intends to be?

  3. Times, processess, strategies, philosophies have all changed since the lead up to revolution and constitution of the now USA, because anything goes now, any method, any idiot, any reason, any totally selfish greedy ambitious drive, without restraint. Anyone, and more and more fools and crooks, get into high office politically and in corporate and business life. The Capone, Madoff, Milken, Harding, Nixon types emerge, often with calculated backing.., and, from Hearst to Murdoch, the Great Lying machine of media cranks into action relentlessly. Throw in the California-Texas axis with military-industrial-financial power and we got Nixon, Reagan, the Bushes (shrubs or weeds) to bear. This is sickening, self defeating, injurious to world peace, balance, harmony, progress. Nothing appears to restrain or guide such as Bezos, Musk, Suckerberg, Gates. Monstrous…so, to have the worst imaginable candidates here, now, in Trump and this empty and totally untrustworthy Vance, spawned out of filth, seems dangerously ruinous.

  4. Trump has the boot licker he desires.

    Trump lives in the moment, the only philosophic roots he has are those he sees right this minute and JD is bending over, licking his boots, so he will do his bidding.

    The unfortunate prospect for JD is that should he at any point turn in Trump, not do his bidding, he needs look no further back than January 6 2020 when Trumpians went looking for the VP Pence to hang him for the treasonous act of upholding the constitution which takes a secondary role to the will of Trump.

  5. What is needed is for Americans to wake up and dump both of these blots on the landscape who are only going to make the Divided States even more of a joke than it currently is viewed as. These sub-human parasites that remind us of primitive cavemen or primary school yard bullies instead of potential leaders of a country, a country that is going backwards and downhill faster than lies come out of the convicted felon’s foul mouth. I’ll never understand how even one person could seriously think a vote for these circus clowns could in any way improve their lives.

    @Kerri. That is very scary to think about.

  6. Not much to say, article says most of it.

    So far, the US elections has been about avoiding policy for personalities and populism. I begin to suspect that the USA is so brainwashed, it is all over the shop like a dog’s breakfast…as was intended by the scum actually running the place.

  7. I just hope that, given how anti-trans the MAGAts are (and J.D. is one of the leaders in that field), that whenever the Dems (especially Harris) refer to him from now on, they use the surname on his birth certificate: Bowman. If it’s good enough for him to enforce others using only birth-assigned names, it’s good enough for him to have to use his own.

    ps: Pumpkin Palpatine is as Christian as Þökk.

  8. trump has been scammed. JD isn’t who he says he is. He is a con artist. Once again trump shows superior judgement. This is the smartest man in the room, the man with an IQ of 150. what more needs to be said?

  9. God bless, or Buddha, Jehovah, Muhammad, whatever, whoever, thank you GL, a Kamala Harris belly laugh from that … wonderful!

    And for the heads-up on The Psychology of Stupidity. Got it, thank you internet.

  10. The Donald seems to becoming more and more desperate with Kamala Harris looming as his opponent.

    https://www.news.com.au/finance/markets/world-markets/ill-sack-him-bitcoin-surges-on-trump-threat/news-story/7c3992f10b9b40d10e899fb3cceccf48

    ““This November, the American people are going to reject Kamala Harris’s crazy liberal extremism in a massive landslide,” the Republican told the crowd assembled in a hockey arena.”

    Yep, they’re going to allow even more dangerous and potentially more deadly RRWNJ’s to take over the country. I was going to say, “Ssuurree they are.” But must we never underestimate the brainlessness of the masses.

  11. I’m going down the back to eat worms. They willingly sacrifice themselves, they’re self-organizing whether alone or in teams, they have a vastness of no fuss sexual proclivities, they turn shit into ‘gold’, apparently arrive from and return to nowhere without doubt or complaint, and they’ll eat me when I’m gone.

    Some say Trump and Vance have the aspirations of worms. No way. They just don’t make the grade.

  12. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese!

    In 2023-2024, I reported two illegal debt schemes administered by Services Australia. Your office forwarded my report to Amanda Rishworth and refused to take action. The illegal schemes are as follows.

    #1 Fake review scheme. Instead of a formal review decision, Services Australia provided me with their objection decision made by an anonymous “delegate or authorised officer”. This is a void document, yet Services Australia used it to force me into significant debts. I was paying the debts for 3 consecutive years and still suffer the consequences.

    #2. Family Assistance Office automatically issue debt notices for a whole Rent Assistance if a parent was deemed ineligible for FTB (Family Tax Benefit). In my case, that was over $4000 that later was waived “due to special circumstances”. There were no special circumstances. The real reason was that it was illegal.

    That’s a lot of suffering for welfare recipients affected by the schemes. Australian taxpayers are blissfully unaware they are paying for this abuse.

    Prime Minister, you have to answer why you did nothing to stop it.

  13. Take notice on Centrelink customer’s comment, tho.. From the scavenging of aggressive neoliberalism to dismemberment of social infrastructure,
    full circle.

    People like Stein and Sanders are marginal to what goes on behind the doors of the plush suites of Wall St, City of London etc and within the thinktanks the oligarchy has coopted to design the Big Ripp-Off.

  14. The Trumpster must be congratulating himself on his brilliant choice of the mirror image half wit,who is proving to be an Olympic standard ring kisser (should be a new category at the next games).While he’s there(Vance), he should be eyeballing Drumpf’s brain.Meanwhile,speaking of our American ‘friends’,an article in the Guardian has one of the opposition’s leading liabilities,bat ears Birmo,taking his turn bent over in front of Rumpel Blinskin, over the murder of Zomi Francom.Mediocre Marles is lining up for his shot.
    Dutton will shortly be out somewhere braying his undying support for the war criminal Netanyahu,and castigating the government for not sending in the SAS.I wonder if Bibi made him an honorary Zionist.?

  15. The Donalds campaign raised $138.7 million in July and Kamala Harris’s campaign raked in $310 million. Makes we wonder if The Trumpster is going to demand that she reimburse him for the millions that was spent on attacking Biden.

  16. Well, if Trump is elected, he will fix the electoral system so that you won’t have to worry about donations or voting. He told a Christian group that he would fix it :

    Christians, get out and vote, just this time. You won’t have to do it anymore. … You got to get out and vote. In four years, you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good you’re not going to have to vote.

    He can do that, either by gerrymandering the system or corrupting the state operated electoral commissions, as he tried to do in Georgia last time around.

  17. GL

    He is also scared of the ABC America TV format of closed mikes with no audience as he feeds off the audience, interrupts and talks over his opponent. He also feels comfortable and safe with FOX and their moderators.

    Harris has sensibly told him that the next debate is already set for 10 September and she’ll be there even if he isn’t.

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