Trump picks the worst person in the world to be his running mate

We really should have seen it coming. After sorting through every available option, the coup-attempting convicted felon being feted today as the Republican Party's candidate for president chose Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance as his vice presidential pick.

There's been speculation about what it all means, but I don't think we need to overthink this one. Vance has been an unapologetic voice for American authoritarianism, one who has been adamant in defending both Donald Trump's coup attempt and the insurrectionists who attempted to carry it out. Trump wanted a toady, and there's really no toady out there who's more toadying than J.D. Vance.

Vance has said that, had he been vice president in 2020, he would have carried out Trump’s scheme for the vice president to overturn the election results. He has fundraised for January 6 rioters. He once called on the Justice Department to open a criminal investigation into a Washington Post columnist who penned a critical piece about Trump. After last week’s assassination attempt on Trump, he attempted to whitewash his radicalism by blaming the shooting on Democrats’ rhetoric about democracy without an iota of evidence.

He is, in other words, Completely Batshit. Trump still appears to feel betrayed by former Vice President Mike Pence for not going along with the fascist plan to announce that the 2020 presidential election results had to be thrown out because Reasons, and Trump has long prioritized surrounding himself with people willing to do crimes for him. Vance made his case for the vice presidential slot by vowing over and over again that Trump ought to be able to throw out elections and pressure the Department of Justice to investigate and arrest his political enemies; it doesn't take a genius to figure out why Trump would have chosen him over more dubiously obsequious figures like Sen. Marco Rubio.

The compulsive toadying of Rubio, Sen. Lindsey Graham, and other high-profile Republicans is quite obviously feigned; they do it to court Trump's frothing base, not because they have any sympathy for the delusion-spewing malevolent narcissist himself. Figures like J.D. Vance and House Speaker Mike Johnson appear, on the other hand, to be true believers in the authoritarian movement currently overwhelming their party. They don't just want Donald Trump's base, they want to press forward on Trump's whole agenda of grievance, lawbreaking, and delivering massive retribution against the Americans they perceive as the movement's enemies.

The good news is that in choosing a running mate for the purposes of soothing his own raging id, Trump has likely done himself no favors on the campaign trail. Vance comes with enormous baggage, in the form of all that stuff he has said and keeps saying, and it's difficult to imagine Trump will gain any voters at all from the choice. Anyone who can stomach J.D. Vance, one of the few people in Washington, D.C., who can rival Sen. Ted Cruz's eternal public creepiness, is already squarely in Trump's MAGA camp.

Undecided voters will, in aggregate, certainly not be impressed by Vance's addition; indeed, it will be hard for Trump-wary voters to look at Vance as anything but Trump's Mini-Me. A ticket of two eternally aggrieved and privileged white men constantly railing against anyone and everyone who doesn't look like them? That truly sounds like the most tedious thing in the world.

A campaign ticket that consists of "your angriest uncle and some random crypto-bro, and both of them are trying to sell you timeshares" sounds outright unpleasant, in fact. I'm not seeing any net upside. Trump may have chosen him because Trump needs to surround himself with people willing to do crimes if he wants to pursue his agenda of pardoning himself for everything he can pardon himself for, then aiming the Justice Department at anyone and everyone who dared to charge him in the first place. But Vance will probably make it tougher, not easier, for Trump to win that prize.

I'm still not optimistic about the November elections. We've seen, over and over, many of the nation's top media outlets abandoning pretenses of neutrality to boost Trump and denigrate President Biden. The nation's wealthiest people are quite certain that they're willing to support outright fascism if the alternative is abiding by (shudder) government regulations. The Supreme Court has broadcast instructions to lower courts that effectively immunize Trump from consequences for any criminality he's pursued in the past or might in the present. And the polls show that the majority of the public is indifferent to all of it, still more focused on pocketbook issues like the price of groceries and devoid of much interest in learning who ought to be blamed for it.

For the two candidates to be in a dead heat, despite all Trump has done, suggests that America is much farther along in the dismantling of democracy than most people are willing to admit. Disinformation and manipulation of the media landscape has created a free-for-all in which consumers can't easily distinguish between the true and the false even when they try; despite the dangers of the moment, most voters still remain tuned out.

It's possible democracy scrapes by again as American women turn out to deliver retribution against the political movement that successfully killed off federal abortion right after decades of promising to do it. It's possible nonwhite Americans turn out in similar numbers to retaliate against a movement that gets more openly white supremacist by the day. We can hope.

Trump deciding to tie himself to the eternally dislikable J.D. Vance may slightly boost the chances of that happening, in that the choice offers on-the-fence voters no reason to think anyone will rein Trump in from his worst and most despicable promises. There's no plausible deniability involved; the Trump-Vance ticket is one premised on dismantling democracy while using government primarily as a tool for eliminating Republicanism's enemies. Neither of them has the political chops to even try to hide it, so that's what the Republican campaign is going to be about from here on in.

If Trump wins, it won't be because Vance won him a single vote. It'll be due to the concerted efforts of vapid faux-journalists obsessed with manufacturing false "balance" while far-right billionaires flood the race with enough money to purchase Rhode Island. They're the ones who will be making November a fascism crapshoot, not this feckless shill for the rich and the crooked.