TRUMP PICKED VANCE BECAUSE HE WANTED A LOYALIST, NOT AN HEIR

Ezra Klein has written a pretty good piece on Project 2025. It's good on the reason you should ignore Trump's disavowals of the project and its architects:

... now Trump is the leader of the Republican coalition. He cannot credibly divorce himself from the groups working day and night to secure his victory and staff his presidency. There is no competing power center that the media or the public can assume will do the governing that so bores Trump.

Klein says that Trump wants to be more ideologically flexible than the authors of Project 2025 -- "But if Trump wins, he will need plans and he will need people," he writes, and the people best positioned to run his administration are Project 2025 ideologues:

The MAGA coalition — particularly its elected officials and Washington staffer class — has grown beyond Trump. It has more views on more issues than he does. It has absorbed more specific and unusual ideologies than he has. It is more hostile to abortion than he is, or than he wants to appear to be. It is more committed to deregulating health insurance than he is, or than he wants to appear to be. There is a great gap between the MAGA leader who slept with a porn star and the factions in the MAGA movement that want to outlaw pornography, as Roberts proposed on Project 2025’s first page.

But I don't agree with Klein when he says this about J.D. Vance, who's closely allied with the people behind Project 2025:

Everyone knew Mike Pence did not represent Trumpism. But Trump chose Vance to be the heir of the MAGA movement.

The notion that Trump chose Vance as an heir is now conventional wisdom, but I find it implausible. Trump may be the most narcissistic person who's ever lived. I don't think he cares at all what happens to his movement, or to America, once he's gone -- when he's dead, in his view, nothing important will exist, except monuments and other tributes to him. He's put some distance between himself and the person who'd be his most obvious heir, his son and namesake. Don Junior is almost more MAGA than Dad and centers his life on Republican resentment politics. Yet Dad still keeps him at arm's length. And the other obvious heir, daughter Ivanka, keeps Dad at arm's length.

Yesterday I criticized a New York Times op-ed by Jason Zengerle, but I think Zengerle's tale of how Vance was chosen is plausible:

[Tucker] Carlson was a crucial advocate of Mr. Vance when Mr. Trump was deciding on a running mate. In June, after receiving word that Mr. Trump was leaning away from Mr. Vance and toward Senator Marco Rubio of Florida or Governor Doug Burgum of North Dakota, Mr. Carlson reportedly called Mr. Trump from Australia, where he was on a speaking tour. He warned Mr. Trump that Mr. Rubio and Mr. Burgum were neocons who supported military adventurism overseas. If Mr. Trump chose one of them for his running mate, Mr. Carlson said, U.S. intelligence agencies would try to assassinate him.

Beyond that, I think Vance persuaded Trump that he wouldn't be the kind of Establishment figure who'd oppose Trump when Trump as president sought to do something outrageous. Rubio and Burgum seemed likely to go behind Trump's back and prevent him from, say, withdrawing from NATO or building a moat with alligators on the southern border. I think Trump sees Vance and someone who'd back him without question if he did those things (and Vance really would).

I also think Trump likes people who criticize him, then recant and kiss his ring. He appreciates Lindsey Graham for precisely that reason. Rubio was also a critic who became a Trump defender -- that's one reason I think he remained on Trump's shortlist until the very end. But Vance seemed like more of a MAGA purist, particularly on Russia and Ukraine.

Klein writes:

Vance represents MAGA as it has evolved — esoterically ideological, deeply resentful, terminally online — unleavened by Trump’s instincts for showmanship and the winds of public sentiment. It is telling that it is Vance, not Trump, who wrote a glowing [foreword] to [Heritage Foundation president Kevin] Roberts’s forthcoming book. Trump is where MAGA started, but Vance and Roberts is where it is going.

I think Vance and the creators of Project 2025 really are the future of the Republican Party (or the MAGA movement, which is the same thing). But I don't think Trump cares. He just wants Mafia-level loyalists around him if he wins.