When a hot air monster MAGA miscreant pairs himself with a which-way-wind weather vane mini-MAGA whisperer what have you got, a double attack.
On women. First, abortion. Why settle for one clown we'll dooble down, second, cat-women.
Why Trump Chose J.D. Vance
VIDEO
By Eric Cortellessa July 15, 2024 5:49 PM EDT
It wasn’t the theatrical reveal that Donald Trump wanted, a made-for-TV moment in which the former President would stroll on stage with his VP pick. Instead, he announced on Truth Social that Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio will be his running mate. “After lengthy deliberation and thought,” Trump wrote on his social media platform, he chose Vance because he was “the best person suited to assume the position of Vice President of the United States.”
By selecting Vance, Trump has elevated a leading light of the right-wing populist movement spawned by Trump’s rise rather than someone from another faction of the conservative movement. Vance has been a vociferous critic of U.S. aid to Ukraine and other foreign entanglements; a proponent of restrictive immigration policies and an aggressive deportation operation; and a champion of Trump’s protectionist trade regime and high tariffs on imported goods. “It's part of the agenda to re-industrialize the country,” Vance told me in April.
In other words, Trump chose a MAGA favorite who he believes can shore up Rust Belt voters in the battleground states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. He’s also popular with a specific subset of Silicon Valley donors who can tap into their vast reservoirs of wealth in the coming months.
---------- [Insert: J.D. Vance May Be The Worst Politician I've Ever Seen This is before even taking the couch into consideration. By Charles P. PiercePUBLISHED: JUL 29, 2024 10:17 AM EDT [...] “Christians, get out and vote! Just this time. You won’t have to do it anymore. Four more years. You know what? It’ll be fixed! It’ll be fine! You won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians. I love you, Christians! I’m a Christian.” (Narrator: No, you are not, you heathen poltroon.) P - The Harris campaign jumped all over it instantly, not giving the former president* the benefit of any doubt which, truth be told, he forfeited about 100,000 lies ago. It doesn’t matter what he actually meant, folks. He doesn’t know, either. He’s just...weird. P - And then there’s J.D Vance. I do not say this idly, because I’ve covered some real meatheads in this racket—What up, Ron DeSantis?—but Vance may be the worst public politician I have ever seen. No kidding. [...]...He expressed his opinion concerning the political salience of people without children, especially women without children. And glorioski, what an opinion it was: P - We're effectively run in this country, via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they've made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too. And it's just a basic fact. You look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC - the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=174829939
Dwell on that. How cold-hearted, vicious, and stupid, does a person have to be to make such an extreme cynically contrived statement as that. Vicious because it is. Stupid because in context of an election campaign it is. Worse, it could only appeal to mean-spirited others . And whatever happened to the freedom to not bear children of your own. Also, there are millions of abused and abandoned children in the world who would cherish having a mother and a father of their own. More and more every day.] ----------
Vance, 39, has an unorthodox biography. As he chronicled in his bestselling 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy, he grew up in rural Ohio surrounded by social and economic decline. After serving in the Marines as a combat correspondent covering the Iraq War, Vance enrolled in Ohio State University, graduating summa cum laude in political science and philosophy. He then went to Yale Law School and became editor of the Yale Law Review. His path from there hardly resembles the traditional arc of an America First disciple. Vance worked at the elite law firm Sidley Austin—the same one where Barack and Michelle Obama met—and moved to San Francisco to become a venture capitalist, working with entrepreneur Peter Thiel.
---------- [Two from five years ago: "How Trump Took Over the Media By Fighting It" [...]...All along, Trump's defiance of decorum, good manners and campaign tradition was counted by his supporters as an asset: If the press and the elites and the fact-checkers wanted to label him a Four Pinocchio liar, his fans would gladly take that as an backhanded endorsement of their man, additional evidence that the press was against him. [...] Barely rid of our current Trump, are we jumping the gun to be fretting about the next one? Nobody approaching his celebrity, shamelessness, and charisma seems interested in the office. Like Trump, Ted Cruz has tried on the costume of comic book villain, but he’s way too dark: there is no joie de vivre in his performance. Trump supporter and billionaire Peter Thiel can’t run because he’s not a natural-born citizen. But I can guarantee you that in a secret room in some political skunk works, consultants are searching for somebody with high name-recognition, preferably rich (to work around the campaign finance laws), to take the Trump baton. Some captain of industry? A movie star with a big Twitter following? Kanye, anyone? P - The Trump campaign playbook, written by him over the past 15 months, is just begging for somebody to pick it up and create shiny things for the press to chase in 2020. [...]Will Trump's ugly attacks on all and sundry be as successful for him in 2020? Will his mobster connections remain as unimportant to so many voters as they have been? 2019 - https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=148368489 .. and .. The Double Standard at the Heart of the Republican War on Facts [...]In practice, public fact-checking depends less on the often-slippery facts and more on the response of the public figures being scrutinized. For fact-checking to be useful, everyone—both the public and politicians—must first agree that facts are useful things and false statements should be condemned and apologized for. The problem is that's not the country we are living in. P - The prime example of this is Trump, who has been the target of a barrage of skeptical fact-checking for years now and has mostly ignored it the way he ignores most criticism and correction from the media. Though the president constantly denounces the press—up to and including calling journalists "the enemy of the people"—he rarely makes substantive arguments about why the media is wrong, instead issuing vague blanket denouncements of "fake news." [...]When a big part of your job is defending Trump's nonsense, or explaining how actually Trump meant something different from what he said (as billionaire right-winger Peter Thiel was doing as far back as 2016), it's hard to simultaneously maintain a rigorous adherence to reality. P - But non-Trump Republicans also have a tendency to push aside inconvenient truths and wave off arguments against their policies rather than grappling with them. The most obvious recent example of this was congressional Republicans claiming the experts were wrong about their tax-cut package increasing the deficit, and then, after the experts were largely proven correct, pivoting to demanding government spending be cut to reduce the deficit their tax cuts had helped increase. [...] Trump and his allies can always cry fake news and have the support of millions who simply trust their leaders more than journalists. Democrats have no such bailout option. 2019 - https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=148258559]
It's weird, eh. Time, in a very real sense, seems to be still. ----------
After publishing Hillbilly Elegy, Vance was widely seen as a tribune of the working class. The book is infused with a self-styled conservatism that promotes personal responsibility and self reliance. To critics, it was a disparaging portrait of the deindustrialized heartland that blames the victims for their own downward mobility.
Vance is wildly inexperienced and widely loathed. With Joe Biden out of the race, he’s a huge liability.
It’s not just that Vance doesn’t know how to speak to people generally—though that’s certainly true. It’s that he doesn’t know how to speak to the exact people he wrote an entire book about! He only knows how to pander, but he can only successfully pander up. Everyone else gets a lame joke about how soda—excuse me, Diet Mountain Dew, official beverage of the hill people—is racist now. Which points to another way Vance hasn’t changed: He despises the people he grew up around as much today as he did when he was happily calling them layabouts and drug addicts on CNN and NPR. The only difference is that he’s now asking for their votes.
The origins of Vance’s metamorphosis has been a source of endless media speculation. But by the time he became a Senate candidate two years ago, he was a full-throated populist nationalist. His tirades against U.S. assistance to help Ukraine to defend itself against Russia’s invasion caught the attention of Donald Trump, Jr., Trump's eldest son. He soon brought Vance on his popular right-wing podcast Triggered and the two formed a close friendship. Since then, Trump Jr. has been one of his most important advocates, encouraging his father to endorse Vance for Senate in 2022 and to pick him as his running mate in 2024.
In his Truth Social post, Trump commended Vance’s credentials and life story. For the former President, Vance has two profound virtues at once. His hardscrabble background gives him a genuine connection to the white working-class voters who animate Trump’s base and will have outsize influence in the election. At the same time, his rebellion against the elites whose circles he once traveled in gives him an apostate’s appeal.
---------- [Modi’s Long Game [...]---------- [The Mass Psychology of Trumpism [...][They see themselves as victims. He plays on that by claiming to be on their side and that he is their savior. They believe him. He has said he is their "retribution", meaning through him they are able to get revenge. And at least some experts say revenge is the motivation for people to vote against their own interests. [...]Att: B402 -- Opinion | What the Science of Addiction Tells Us About Trump [...] This isn’t a metaphor; it’s brain biology. Scientists have found [...] It’s worth asking whether this helps explain Trump’s fixation on his grievances and ways of exacting retribution for them. The hallmark of addiction is compulsive behavior despite harmful consequences. Trump’s unrelenting efforts to retaliate against those he believes have treated him unjustly (including, now, American voters) appear to be compulsive and uncontrollable. The harm this causes to himself and others is obvious but seems to have no deterrent effect. Reports suggest he has been doing this for much of his life. He seems powerless to stop. He also seems to derive a great deal of pleasure from it. P - The science of addiction provides another cautionary insight: Trump’s revenge habit hurts not only himself and the targets of his retaliatory wrath, but the rest of us, too. [Insert: The psychology of punishment is key to why people vote against their own interests, says an Oxford neuroscientist https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=173985298]] ---------- However, Jaffrelot writes that Modi also made the elite and powerful feel like they were the underdogs. He painted dissidents as extremists, terrorists, or anti-Indian. Activists who defended the rights of the marginalized and the weak were called enemies of the state. Modi has repeated that playbook as prime minister, skillfully using draconian laws enacted by his predecessors to jail dissidents. In response, India’s bureaucracy, judiciary, and security establishment have often shown themselves to be pliant. P - Under Modi, India has detained thousands https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=174825872] ----------
Those characteristics make him distinctive from Trump’s other top running mate contenders. North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum was seen as a safe choice well-liked by the business community. Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin was another donor-friendly prospect who could help Trump win a state that has gone for Democrats in the last four elections. Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida held the potential to grow the Republican tent and court Hispanic voters. Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina would have marked a pitch to Black voters and been a popular choice with evangelical Christians.
For his part, Vance was the most ideologically aligned with Trump. Sources familiar with Trump’s thinking say the former President was impressed with his recent television appearances, emphasizing his articulate charisma and ability to think on his feet. The two also developed a personal relationship in recent years. Trump will often call him at random to discuss political strategy. “Sometimes he takes my advice. Sometimes he doesn't take my advice,” Vance told me last spring. “Sometimes he gives me advice.”
If Vance helps Trump with blue collar voters in the midwest, his history of opposing abortion access could hurt the ticket with suburban women. In recent months, he has adopted Trump's position that abortion should be a states-rights issue. "I think states largely should figure out the abortion question themselves," Vance told me, but he didn't rule out some restrictions. "I think it's reasonable for the federal government to set some minimum standard, and then let the states figure out 90% of abortion policy from there."
-- [JD Vance and I share Appalachian roots. He’s just the latest to exploit the region for personal profit. In reading ‘Hillbilly Elegy,’ I saw a writer dealing in stereotypes for political ends By Meredith McCarroll Globe Correspondent,Updated July 17, 2024, 1:08 p.m. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=174783766] --
Vance was the most aggressive of the contenders for the job. Hours after Trump survived an attempted assassination on Saturday, Vance blamed President Joe Biden for the attack. “Today is not just some isolated incident,” Vance wrote. “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all cost. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.” Authorities have not identified the shooter’s motive.
Should Trump win, Vance will become a front runner for the 2028 Republican nomination. Many are expecting a spirited contest among Trump devotees who hope to succeed him in leading the MAGA movement. Some in Trump’s inner circle doubted that the former President would want to choose a potential heir. But in J.D. Vance, he just might have done that.
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