Anytime we have a sitting US president that has exceeded the average lifespan, it’s a warranted endeavor to explore what happens after…they bite the dust. So, how would President Vance hold up?
It’s impossible to know exactly how a Vance presidency would play out, but we can draw on some historical parallels. Obama and JFK were junior senators just like JD Vance, so they would all have comparable levels of experience when entering the White House. However, Obama had a nice network of qualified advisors, Vance does not. JFK rose to the occasion during the Cuban Missile Crisis, so Vance could very well do the same in his situation.
Should this all come to fruition, any success will have to come from Vance himself. He surely won’t be getting any (meaningful) help from the circle Trump leaves behind.
Hey everyone, Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Los Canyon. This is the famous jumble of Los Canyon. And yes, that is the trail behind me. If you can see it, your has got better eyes than I do. Anyway, today we’re taking a question from the Patreon crowd. Specifically, let’s assume that,
Donald Trump being 80, does what 80 year olds dies and exit stage, right?
What would a president JD Vance white House look like? The short answer is no idea. JD Vance is a junior senator. And so you never know, when he’s confronted with real world problems and actually, he’s in charge of something, how he’s going to react.
But let me point out two things to you. We have two presidents who were junior senators who, became president and they kind of give us goalposts, guidelines. I’m not saying that he would turn out like either of them, but it’s really our only points of reference. The first is Barack Obama. Barack Obama, in my opinion, he’s going to go down in history.
He’s one of the top ten worst presidents we’ve ever had. His problem was that he was so anti-social that he just didn’t want to have meetings with anyone, including his own cabinet secretaries. And so for eight years, we didn’t functionally have a foreign policy. We had very little domestic policy. We just had a bunch of speeches from time to time.
The difference between JD Vance and Barack Obama is very simple. Barack Obama did build an independent coterie of people around him when he went to the white House, and then he was able to tap the Democratic Party for expertise to fill his cabinet. JD Vance doesn’t have that option. He was almost a no. One when Donald Trump picked him.
So he has no independent followers, especially followers who have, skills that could be applicable to governance. And Donald Trump is absolutely destroyed. The Republican Party as a source of talent. So if he were if JD Vance were to become president, he would become president alone with no one around him except for the people who used to hang on to Donald Trump.
And as we’ve seen from the people who hang on to Donald Trump, most of them are not particularly competent in their chosen fields. So it could be ugly. The other option is JFK junior senator, was at best a mediocre president. Maybe if he hadn’t been killed, it would have turned around. Who knows? But something to keep in mind is the Cuban Missile Crisis.
One of the reasons that the Soviets pushed when they did is because they thought the American president was weak. A lot of us probably did at the time. And lo and behold, JFK had nerves of steel. And the Cuban Missile Crisis was more or less resolved to America’s, long term advantage. So we can’t rule out that J.D. Vance has it in him somewhere.
But just like JFK, if it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen because of J.D. Vance. It will not happen because of the circle of people he surrounds himself with, which makes it overall a risky bet.
