Is Donald Trump dropping JD Vance?
The question I’m most frequently getting asked now is about who Kamala Harris’ running mate should be. Everyone on the reported shortlist would be just fine with me. Beyond that I don’t really have an opinion, because I don’t have access to the kind of detailed internal polling data that Harris does. Suffice it to say she’ll make a smart choice. Interestingly enough, the question I’m second-most frequently asked is about Trump dropping JD Vance.
Given that Vance has crashed and burned out of the gate and lacks the capacity to turn things around, it would be logical for Trump to drop him. But if Trump were functioning on a logical level, he never would have picked Vance to begin with. Vance was a terrible idea even back when Trump thought he was running against Biden. It’s clear that Trump lacks the cognitive capacity to make a rational pick.
In that sense, there’s no way to know whether Trump will do the rational thing and dump Vance. Trump’s brain was scrambled eggs when he picked Vance, and it’s still scrambled eggs. For all we know, Trump might delusionally think Vance is doing great. After all, Trump’s babysitters are keeping him pacified by telling him that he already has so many votes he doesn’t need any more (which he keeps going out and idiotically repeating at rallies). So it’s entirely possible that Trump, in his increasingly small and isolated universe, might not even understand that there’s a problem with Vance.
So while the Republican Party certainly wants Trump to replace Vance at this point, there’s no predicting whether Trump will actually do it. That would be like trying to predict whether Trump can remember on any given day whether Obama or Biden is the current President. Dementia doesn’t travel in a straight line.
There is also the question of whether Trump could replace Vance. The Republican Party could adjust its rules to allow such a move to happen, and would probably accommodate Trump if he were willing to switch to a more sensible running mate pick. Such a move would invite legal challenges from any number of groups, which would then come down to the whim of the courts in various states. Again, there’s no predicting the outcome, other than to say that the longer Trump waits to make a switch, the harder it’ll be for him to pull off ballot-wise.
But again, Donald Trump is someone who doesn’t appear to know where he’s at most of the time, and keeps confusing the people around him for each other. When it comes to his running mate, do we really expect Trump to do anything differently than what the people around him told him to do when they convinced him to pick Vance to begin with?
I would guess that Trump will only ditch Vance if the people who talked him into Vance to begin with change their minds and talk him into someone else. That would put egg all over their faces, and it would put egg on Trump’s face for having to so quickly pull the plug on his own pick. In that sense there’s a good chance Trump will keep Vance no matter how much of drag Vance becomes. But again, we’re trying to predict what an incoherently senile man will or won’t do. Trump could announce tomorrow that Hannibal Lecter is his new running mate, and no one would be more than modestly surprised.
