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I've said it before and I'll say it again. JD Vance is like the dog that finally actually caught the car. He never wanted to be in politics in the first place. He's not good at it. He's a terrible negotiator and a worse diplomat. He couldn't find Greenland on a map, with color coded stickers and a giant neon arrow pointing directly at it. He's as stupid as he is vile, and his wife is so over his bullshit she's barely hiding her disdain behind a Reagan era Stepford haircut and enough 8:00 mimosas to tranquilize a giraffe.

But, despite all odds, somehow JD is here now, in a role he is utterly unsuited to, doing things he hates doing, with absolutely none of the skill set required to even approach a level of "barely competent" at doing it.

He caught the car. And now he has no idea what the fuck to do with it.

@Lana In many ways, Trump was also a dog that caught the car. And yet here we are…

@deivudesu JD Vance is exactly like Trump, but minus the charisma.

@Lana Hmn… Tough (and fraught) to make predictions at this stage… But I think it's fairly established that he was handpicked as the more pliable/predictable version of Trump by his fascist oligarch masters…
He is undeniably not as terminally moronic as Trump (low bar), but indeed has the charisma of a 10-day old roadkill.

But I am not convinced "charisma" is that tangible a metric: Trump objectively had a very narrow and limited appeal, but still managed to build a personality cult out of it.

@deivudesu you don't become leader of a cult without charisma. It's a required component. Vance has none. No, that's not true. Vance has negative charisma. He lacks charisma so hard, he owes the universe charisma.

@Lana I have the faint feeling (and nothing else to back it up), that charisma as we knew it, is not as relevant in that field as it used to be: the number of people who will ever get to see a version of either of them that's not been heavily filtered and distorted, is fairly tiny compared to the vast majority who will only get the carefully-massaged (/outright made-up) content bites…

@Lana But even setting that aside, looking at the crowded field of semi-successful dictators and fascist leaders, I'm not sure I would call the vast majority of them "charismatic"… (they drew crowds, but that usually had a lot more to do with a movement they were the figurehead and/or enforcer of, than a natural personal appeal)

@Lana Sorry, I should have been more specific: I was talking about *authoritarian leaders* (/dictators etc), not cult leaders. Sure: plenty of overlap, but also a very different way to build up their following.

And while Trump's following is cultish, it is no more cultish than all these other successful dictators before him.

So while Koresh, Hubbard or Jones might have been charismatic, I'd argue Hitler, Pol Pot or Stalin are a lot less clear cut (to say nothing of 2nd gen like Assad)

@deivudesu strongly disagree with the hot take that Trump is not a cult leader.

@Lana I guess we'll just have to disagree

To be clear: his following *obviously* has plenty of cultish traits.

But so did the following of practically every other successful populist leaders of the past… There is still quite a few major differences between a "cult" in the strict sense, and a populist movement with a cult of personality.

I don't think marking this difference is a particularly hot take, but

@deivudesu yeah we're not pretending that Joe Biden is the master ringleader of a cult. GTFO with that horseshit. Muted for a week.