I missed the weekend's speculation about Donald Trump's health. I've told you many times that I don't believe he has dementia -- he's primarily just an ignoramus -- but I believe his physical health is bad, and it's quite possible that he had a recent health scare. Is crypto investor Adam Cochran correct when he speculates that Trump has had an ischemic stroke? Who knows!
Trump might die before his term is over. That would be a good thing on balance, but I don't think it would solve all or even most of America's problems. We'll still have a Republican Party totally committed to the decades-long project of overturning the Great Society, the New Deal, and the Progressive Era. We'll have a president who's far less popular with the base, obviously, but it's easy to imagine what he'll do to try to keep the base in line.
The key thing J.D. Vance will do if he becomes president after Trump's death is wrap himself in Trump's mantle and act as the great preserver of Trump's legacy. He'll keep all the tacky gold decorations in the Oval Office. He'll continue planning the ballroom, which he'll call the Trump Ballroom. In fact, he'll preside over a massive campaign to name paractically every inanimate object in America after Trump -- airports, roads, schools, military bases, maybe even the White House. (The Trump House?) He'll urge the Nobel committee to give Trump a posthumous Peace Prize, even though Nobels are never awarded posthumously. In conjunction with former South Dakota governor Kristi Noem, he'll begin the process of allocating funds to put Trump on Mount Rushmore.
This might not be what Vance will want to do as president, but it's what he will do. I don't know how the general public will react, but the GOP base will effortlessly shift their loyalties to Vance. He'll have no choice, really, if he wants to make any changes to Trump policies. (I think he'll be happy to permit the ongoing Project 2025 evisceration of the federal government and academia, as well as Stephen Miller's ethnic cleansing, but he might want to dial back or eliminate the tariffs, and he might not be fully on board with Robert Kennedy Jr.'s quackery.)
On one hand, I don't think Vance would be an appealing president -- he's uncharismatic and scoldy, and he and congressional Republicans will probably try to gut Social Security and Medicare, which won't be popular. In addition, he'll probably pursue full nationwide bans on abortion and pornography, as part of a campaign to raise the birthrate, all of which will come off as weird.
On the other hand, the immediate aftermath of Trump's death will probably lead to a national moral panic. When Trump dies, millions of us will celebrate the way we did after the elections of Barack Obama in 2008 and Joe Biden in 2020. We'll be dancing in the streets. TikTok will be flooded with joyful videos.
The liberal media and parts of the Democratic establishment will jointly collapse onto fainting couches. We'll be told that Trump wasn't a monster -- America's real monsters are the ordinary citizens celebrating his demise. The tut-tutting will be audible from space.
Republicans will blame liberals for Trump's death. This will come in two varieties. Crazies like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Andy Ogles will insist that the Deep State had Trump murdered, possibly using a slow-acting poison. That will sound ridiculous to most Americans, including the less batshit Republicans. But there'll be a "respectable" version of this argument: that liberals/Democrats/the Deep State mercilessly harassed Trump from his first term until his final illness, wearing him down and weakening his health. It will be said that Adam Schiff, Jack Smith, E. Jean Carroll, Alvin Bragg, and Judge Paula Xinis killed Trump as surely as if they'd literally stabbed him in the heart. Every establishment Republican will endorse this argument -- and eventually "liberal" commentators and pols will offer their own version of it: America is toxically polarized and the worst offenders are the liberals who hate Trump. Maybe those liberals can't really be blamed for the death of an old man with an unhealthy lifestyle, but it was all too much, and it has to stop.
A "liberal" commentariat that scolds this way...
Sharing this finding: Harris voters are the only group of people remotely likely to say it's OK to cut off friends/family for political views. I don't think they're *wrong* — again, it's a question of identity. But we're very different from most of America. www.theargumentmag.com/p/when-ameri...
— Lakshya Jain (@lakshya.splitticket.org) August 28, 2025 at 10:29 AM
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... is primed to blame us for Trump's death if we're joyful when it happens.
I don't know whether ordinary people will buy this argument, but it will affect elite opinion. The world of insider politics will be eager to turn the page and give J.D. Vance the benefit of the doubt. He'll get that benefit even as he's working to institutionalize Trump's fascist project as well as his personality cult.
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