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I don't love the pick. Vance used to call Trump xenophobic and anti-Muslim only to about-face on immigration and many other issues once it was time to run for Senate and change his views so he could win the election. He did not even vote for Trump in 2016!
For instance, here is an except from a 2016 National Review article by Vance:
"The institutional offshoots of this peculiar moment have monopolized the conversation. Donald Trump is the voice of poor white America. The Black Lives Matter movement is the voice of dispossessed blacks and their sympathizers. Yet if these voices have monopolized the conversation, they certainly haven’t monopolized the good ideas. Trump’s policies, such as they are, offer little substance to those suffering from addiction, joblessness, and downward mobility. And the Black Lives Matter movement, focused primarily on police violence, cannot alone address the full spectrum of problems faced by the black underclass."
But we're supposed to believe that this guy is suddenly a populist? I'm not sure that Vance's "change of heart" is anything but opportunism.
I dunno, I have been and am pro-Trump and I mostly agree with this:
Trump doesn't have much of a vision, he operates on 110% perceptions and vibes. I've been saying since 2016 that I vote for him not because I think he will fix America, but because he's a metaphorical Molotov cocktail thrown through the window of the Uniparty HQ. 2016 Trump was just one Molotov and failed to do lasting damage, and so I hope 2024 Punished Trump will be a dozen of them and will actually catch the structure on fire and opens space for people with actually good ideas to maneuver. Vance has to flatter Trump's ego to have a shot at changing America in the way he would like. I think he's too smart for his apparent conversion to be real. He's riding coattails and waiting for the right moment.
Not a Trump fan by any means, but my feeling is that because Trump operates on perception and vibes, he has no goal for being President beyond status. Which means that beyond a few personal crusades, he simply lets the Uniparty in Congress do whatever they want. Beyond the media circus surrounding Trump in everything he does, was his first term substantially different from a hypothetical generic Republican President? I don't think it was and I don't think a 2nd term would be, because if it doesn't interest him he doesn't care.
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From Trump's perspective, that's a feature, not a bug.
What Trump requires, more than anything else, is loyalty. He was furious at Pence because Pence didn't deliver that in a crisis, because Pence had commitments that preceded and overrode loyalty to Trump. That's not an issue with an amoral opportunist. The opportunist will follow Trump for as long as it's in his interests to do so, and you can trust him to follow those interests.
Trump is not a principled or ideological politician, much less a man. He focuses more on deals, favour-trades, and personal allegiance. I think Vance makes sense for him.
It hardly seemed obvious on January 6, 2021 that it would have been in Trump's VP's own interest to engage in a Scooby-Doo-esque scheme to steal the Presidency just because the incumbent had a mental break after losing the election.
If Vance had a Damascene conversion to Trump as a consequence of Trump gaining power, one should consider the possibility that he'd have had the inverse conversion as a consequence of Trump losing power.
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That resonates with me, I used to buy the media narratives on Trump as well.
“You used to say bad things about Trump” is going to be true for a lot of Trump voters in this election.
If anything, a former never-Trumper who has just been so disgusted by the dems that he's reluctantly come around to MAGA seems like the exact thing Trump should want in a running mate. This whole election seems to be dominated by that vibe, and I know A LOT of disaffected centrists who are planning on holding their noses and voting for Trump for the first time in November.
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Especially swing voters, who matter most.
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As an example. this popular twitter post was retweeted by Elon and seems to be resonating with many people. Of note, other twitter users argue she's just engagement farming because she's posting so frequently, but some people are just weird and actually do that.
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You were complaining about Islamophobia in 2016? It's one thing if you're a voter but another if this guy is potentially going to be the president. It shows that Vance either has poor judgement or is willing to change his mind to please whatever crowd he's grifting off of at the moment.
I bought into the “Muslim ban” framing, yes.
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I think a lot of people on this forum bought into media narratives pretty heavily when they were younger. I know I did.
If Trump's going to accomplish anything in a second term, he needs to work with people in this bucket. The supply of smart conservatives is small enough as it is.
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