In Reply to: Taking it a step further posted by UCLART on August 31, 2025 at 13:16:06
On the one hand, Vance does not have an ounce of Trump's cult leaderish charisma. Run him on any election, he will lose hands down against a ham sandwich, so to speak. If he's in charge, the only way he has the congressional republicans and the judiciary back him unconditionally is if every one of them has an ICE goon holding a gun to their heads. He does not have the skills or the personality to hold the Trump coalition together after the first week, IMO.
On the other hand, I don't think he has the same egomaniac handicap. He's not all in on an agenda to glorify himself. He is a man of cause, with an ideology, and a methodical agenda, and with the kind of intelligence level that can run circles around Trump (admittedly, not a high bar in the first place). I think he can be tactical as well as strategic and have a good grasp of the best way to get from point A to point B.
What's worse is, he is pretty much a front for Peter Thiel, and is completely in the ideological grip of Curtis Yarvin, who is the major theoretician of American dictatorship. Both Thiel and Yarvin are very very very bad news for America. If Musk is hella bad, the Thiel/Yarvin axis is pure evil.
So, the bottomline, as I see it, is that it will be very hard for Vance to hold on to power through conventional means if he ends up in charge, But he also has all the intellectual and political constitution and the intelligence to navigate his way to an actual and open dictatorship. And with all the data that Thiel's Palantir appears to have at their fingertips, things can get very ugly very fast under him.