The pick of JD Vance, who underperformed Ohio’s last Republican Senator by 15% and the entire Ohio GOP ticket by 11%, has made clear that Donald Trump isn’t trying to win over any new voters.
Everything that’s unpopular about Trump is worse about Vance.
He is one of the most poisonously anti-abortion rights Republicans alive. He’s anti-LGBTQ in a way that would impress the Westboro Baptist Church. Everything Trump wants to do to drive up inflation, Vance wants to do that harder. Trump brought neo-Nazis into the GOP; Vance was a founding investor in a company that monetizes neo-Nazi content.
However, JD directly and overwhelmingly appeals to Trump’s two biggest donors, Elon Musk and Vladimir Putin.
Vance is like an 80s sitcom-adopted son to far-right billionaire Peter Thiel, a long-time Musk associate who literally opposes democracy, much like Musk.
Now Putin may not have spent $44 billion of his and his associates' money to buy a social network because he believed pulling down pics of Hunter Biden’s dick cost Trump the 2020 election. Still, he has put a significant chunk of his nation’s treasure and influence behind propping Trump up for almost a decade.
Trump has gleefully joined in the hostage-taking of Wall St. Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, pleading with Putin to keep the American until at least the election, which should have prompted many more questions about what Trump is offering Putin in return. Now, we know.
JD Vance is Putin’s reward. JD has done what Trump has not dared to do. He’s publicly made the case for carving up Ukraine and handing much of the country to Putin as a reward for the unceasing war crimes the Russian dictator has ordered.
If you’ve been following Ball of Thread, you know that getting Trump to help carve up Ukraine has been a Putin obsession since at least August 2016, when Putin’s associates made a quid pro quo offer to Trump’s then-campaign manager that involved a “peace plan” that did just that.
Paul Manafort told the Mueller investigation that he rejected the offer. He also repeatedly lied to investigators, so who knows?
But Vance has not bothered to lie at all.
What Trump has done by picking JD Vance, Project 2025 incarnate, is limit his appeal to everyone but the rising fascist right of the world. It’s a choice against democracy, against a free and safe Europe, and against freedom for pretty much everyone, except for wildly wealthy white men who can afford large chunks of New Zealand, where they try to build bunkers to hide from the damage they want to do to the rest of us.
JD Vance is Donald Trump’s gift to Vladimir Putin