Within a fortnight of Trump accepting but certainly not selecting Vance as his running mate, rather this pick forced on him by a major donor, Vance made history. Specifically, he recorded the worst immediate polling figures for a Presidential running mate selection in American history. He’s now in sizeable negative territory and I’m certainly not surprised.
The Vance story has been a huge beat-up.
He made his name through his autobiography “Hillybilly Elegy”, this a reasonably enjoyable “poor boy makes good” read, but ludicrously over-hyped.
But pre-politics what does “making good” constitute in his case? Certainly not financially as Forbes has his current net worth at an insignificant US$10 million. That sum would scarcely get him in the New Zealand top 100 Rich list.
He’s on record as having savagely and correctly attacked Trump in the past, thus his acceptance of the deputy role made him a hypocrite prepared to sell his soul to pursue an improbable ambition.
I’ve never had any doubt that Trump will lose the coming Presidential election. That’s becoming increasingly evident and with Vance in tow he will, as Trump himself might say, lose “bigly”.
Vance’s brief political career to date has seen him only narrowly scrape through elections.
In short he clearly is charisma-free and I’ll wager that within a week of Trump losing against Harris, Trump will publicly turn on his enforced running mate to blame.
Notwithstanding his “Hillybilly Elegy” effort Vance strikes me as possessor of an extremely dull personality and as the polls reveal, that’s clearly a widespread sentiment.
His first post selection public utterance was a Trump style, incredibly dumb attack on Kamala Harris as a childless cat lady. That was extraordinarily poor taste and bounced badly with the public. In particular it struck a negative chord with the huge fan base of the world’s most popular female popstar, Taylor Swift, also a childless cat lover.
Trump is an abomination. Absolutely nothing good can be said about him. He’s a disgrace, not merely to America but to the entire human race.
19 Comments
A dreadful person indeed, but Kamala as president? Crikey!
We would have made a very happy marriage Bob!! I agree with everything you say!
😂🤣
I predict that Trump will see the writing on the wall, pull out from the election and declare himself “President” while claiming he had no choice due to election “cheating”. Hopefully most sane people will laugh, and Trump will become just an embarrassing footnote in US history
BRITISH WRITER PENS THE BEST DESCRIPTION OF TRUMP:
Someone asked “Why do some British people not like Donald Trump?” Nate White, an articulate and witty writer from England wrote the following response:
A few things spring to mind. Trump lacks certain qualities which the British traditionally esteem. For instance, he has no class, no charm, no coolness, no credibility, no compassion, no wit, no warmth, no wisdom, no subtlety, no sensitivity, no self-awareness, no humility, no honour and no grace – all qualities, funnily enough, with which his predecessor Mr. Obama was generously blessed.
So for us, the stark contrast does rather throw Trump’s limitations into embarrassingly sharp relief.
Plus, we like a laugh. And while Trump may be laughable, he has never once said anything wry, witty or even faintly amusing – not once, ever. I don’t say that rhetorically, I mean it quite literally: not once, not ever. And that fact is particularly disturbing to the British sensibility – for us, to lack humour is almost inhuman.
But with Trump, it’s a fact. He doesn’t even seem to understand what a joke is – his idea of a joke is a crass comment, an illiterate insult, a casual act of cruelty. Trump is a troll. And like all trolls, he is never funny and he never laughs; he only crows or jeers.
And scarily, he doesn’t just talk in crude, witless insults – he actually thinks in them. His mind is a simple bot-like algorithm of petty prejudices and knee-jerk nastiness. There is never any under-layer of irony, complexity, nuance or depth. It’s all surface.
Some Americans might see this as refreshingly upfront. Well, we don’t. We see it as having no inner world, no soul. And in Britain we traditionally side with David, not Goliath. All our heroes are plucky underdogs: Robin Hood, Dick Whittington, Oliver Twist.
Trump is neither plucky, nor an underdog. He is the exact opposite of that. He’s not even a spoiled rich-boy, or a greedy fat-cat. He’s more a fat white slug. A Jabba the Hutt of privilege. And worse, he is that most unforgivable of all things to the British: a bully. That is, except when he is among bullies; then he suddenly transforms into a snivelling sidekick instead.
There are unspoken rules to this stuff – the Queensberry rules of basic decency – and he breaks them all. He punches downwards – which a gentleman should, would, could never do – and every blow he aims is below the belt. He particularly likes to kick the vulnerable or voiceless or female – and he kicks them when they are down.
So the fact that a significant minority – perhaps a third – of Americans look at what he does, listen to what he says, and then think ‘Yeah, he seems like my kind of guy’ is a matter of some confusion and no little distress to British people, given that:
• Americans are supposed to be nicer than us, and most are.
• You don’t need a particularly keen eye for detail to spot a few flaws in the man.
This last point is what especially confuses and dismays British people, and many other people too; his faults seem pretty bloody hard to miss. After all, it’s impossible to read a single tweet, or hear him speak a sentence or two, without staring deep into the abyss. He turns being artless into an art form; he is a Picasso of pettiness; a Shakespeare of shit.
His faults are fractal: even his flaws have flaws, and so on ad infinitum. God knows there have always been stupid people in the world, and plenty of nasty people too. But rarely has stupidity been so nasty, or nastiness so stupid. He makes Nixon look trustworthy and George W look smart.
In fact, if Frankenstein decided to make a monster assembled entirely from human flaws – he would make a Trump.
An excellent analysis of the Brits’ sentiment towards Felonious.
– a kiwi/Brit
Now do Kamala.
The US voting public is fickle and we don’t yet know if Kamala will emerge from the Democratic convention as nominee or who her running mate will be.
I think Trump is wise not to take the votes of middle America for granted as he did in 2020 and J. D. Vance helps him there and also with wealthy Silicon Valley donors who see him as a friend and ally.
Given what Trump has gone though, both in terms of cooked up “lawfare” and an assassination attempt that revealed major weakness in secret service protection, he must be a significant threat to self-interested globalist elites although I was hoping before the primaries that Ron DeSantis would emerge as the Republican candidate given his achievements as Governor of Florida but he unfortunately failed to resonate with voters.
Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance sparked controversy this week when a 2021 interview resurfaced in which he labeled women without biological children, including presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, as “childless cat ladies” with “no direct stake” in America.
Lacking charisma should not be too much of a problem for a Vice President. Al Gore, Dan Quale and Mike Pence got away with it. It was Hilary Clinton’s main weakness – she could not fill a school gymnasium without a rock star doing the warm-up. However, offending childless people will be a problem. I know many adults who are childless (and beyond child-bearing age) for a number of different reasons. To invalidate them for not having children is extremely insensitive and will cost votes. Trump should show decisiveness and pull the pin on Vance now. Great leaders are not people who never make mistakes but who recogise and rectify mistakes when they make them.
Given that Kamala Harris is now the heir apparent Tulsi Gabbard would have been a better choice; bright, attractive and patriotic. She has said she was available and was, I believe, under consideration; who can forget her epic take down of Harris during the Democrat primaries four years ago? Certainly not Harris.
You may believe she was under consideration but I would be surprised if that were the case, given that she’s not a Democrat.
I would point out that his childless cat lady was actually made in 2021. It’s just been resurrected now. However I note that since this has come to light he hasn’t resiled from his original comment.
I certainly hope you are right, Sir Robert. Trump is truly a dreadful, vile human being with absolutely no redeeming features. That the Republican party has swung in behind him with barely a dissenting voice shows how far they have fallen. Republicans who have previously criticised Trump have wimped out and are now cowering in the corner. The likes of Lincoln, Reagan, Eisenhower would be sickened by where the party is now.
Unfortunately Harris is not a particularly well liked candidate. I think if the Democrats had a more contestable process, post Biden’s withdrawal, then they might have found a more attractive candidate. Having said that anyone, just anyone, would be better than the abomination that is Donald Trump.
There is also the Elephant in the Room. Harris and her accolytes have brazenly lied for the past four years that Biden was healthy, sharp, up to the job, on point, on task etc etc. Will the US public forgive this blatant dishonesty? We shall see. No matter how awful Trump is, there is the problem of stay away Democrat voters for Harris to overcome – she is Godawful, but I guess at least she isnot Trump.
How we behave and treat others, is the most important human attribute.
Bipartisan politics is currently geared toward division and domination.
The emphasis on political parties respective “War Chests” just perpetuates this animosity. The very term escalates contempt for others. By now anyone with an ounce of decency must realize that war doesn’t solve anything.
Instead of war chest, why don’t we rename political donations as “big buckets of money intended for solving mutually agreed issues “.
I’m not surprised by the fascist utterances from the renowned quick-step couple, Felonious and Vance, for their routine is not entirely original.
In 2015, a study undertaken by three US universities found that a majority of Republicans were more inclined towards an authoritarian regime than to a democracy.
All that was required was for Bannon, Miller, Gorka and their like to tap into and leverage that sentiment.
The Republicans still have a way to go before they hit rock bottom, but they will.
You might also appreciate this analysis of Obama’s role in all this:
With Harris, however, Obama has an ideal instrument through which he can speak directly and in his preferred prose. She’s an empty vessel. What listeners hear in her is the immediacy of Obama, which is precisely what the party—the people—crave.
Trump was apparently going to select Doug Burgum, the North Dakota Governor and billionaire entrepreneur. Burgum may have added some silver-haired gravitas to the ticket as a ‘Romney Republican’ figure. Apparently, Trump’s son’s were insistent that he go with Vance instead.
Vance fulfils the first requirement of a US VP which is, the VP must never appear to be smarter than the boss.
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