Politics - News Analysis

Prepare for Trump to Explode in 3, 2, 1: Some GOP Senators Want Trump to Dump Vance

They're scrambling at this point.

It’s  become pretty clear that many Republicans don’t think Donald Trump is listening to the right advice, politically speaking.

But it’s a wonder that they ever thought he was going to listen to any advice he didn’t want to hear in the first place. Trump notoriously ignores anything outside his own personal circle of friends. And that circle has always been determined by one simple qualification: Whoever’s been the most loyal to him personally.

That’s why it’s likely to fall on deaf ears when he finds out that a lot of GOP Senators and House Representatives think he should ditch JD Vance as his running mate.  After all, it’s widely known that the two people who convinced him to pick Vance — his oldest son Don Jr. and their buddy Tucker Carlson — have been the most loyal of all.

According to a new piece in The Hill, some conservative lawmakers think he should have picked a woman or a person of color to broaden his appeal. One anonymous GOP Senator to the outlet “I don’t think Trump likes any discomfort. He can create discomfort himself, but he doesn’t like external discomfort coming in, and JD’s struggling. I would assume he’s not real happy.”

If Trump IS upset about having picked Vance, it’s his own fault. It’s not like he didn’t know a lot of what was going to be used against him before he made his selection.

Vance was famously opposed to Trump’s candidacy in 2016, and even publicly said he believed one of the women who accused Trump of sexually inappropriate behavior. Vance hasn’t even decided which character he wants to play yet.

Tomorrow, will he be the working-class kid from Ohio? The Scots-Irish descendant of warriors? The man with “hillbilly” roots in Kentucky?

My guess is the Ohio one. That’s a must-win state, and Kentucky isn’t. And Republican voters don’t care about ethnicity unless yours makes you brown.

Lindsey Graham himself tried to talk Trump out of picking Vance on his plane on the way to Milwaukee for the RNC. He urged him to go for a bigger name, like Marco Rubio.

And other Republican senators privately warned weeks ago that if Trump would make a serious political mistake if he picked a white man as his running mate.

“Even Trump is smart enough to say two white men on the Republican ticket in 2024 is a bad idea when you have really good alternatives, and he has really good alternatives,” another GOP senator told The Hill in the spring. “Tim Scott — I think Tim’s No. 1.”

The dilemma for Trump would be two-fold against replacing Vance: Number one, the former president will not want to be seen as admitting he’d made a mistake. And number two, he can’t look like he’s just trying to get back at the Democrats for Biden’s dropping out of the race and replacing him with Kamala Harris.

But if he does replace Vance, it’s almost guaranteed that’s the angle he’ll pitch it from.

meet the author

Andrew is a dark blue speck in deep red Central Washington, writing with the conviction of 18 years at the keyboard and too much politics to even stand. When not furiously stabbing the keys on breaking news stories, he writes poetry, prose, essays, haiku, lectures, stories for grief therapy, wedding ceremonies, detailed instructions on making doughnuts from canned biscuit dough (more sugar than cinnamon — duh), and equations to determine the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow. A girlfriend, a dog, two cats, and two birds round out the equation, and in his spare time, Drewbear likes to imagine what it must be like to have spare time.

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