Commentary: President Vance? Brace yourself for it. Trump is already deteriorating

Get ready for President JD Vance.

Remember when some people (yes, one of them was me) used to obsess over President Joe Biden’s age and future because we were worried about a President Kamala Harris?

She’s come into her own as the Democratic nominee, especially for non-Californians unfamiliar with her career before the Senate. We are learning much more about her contributions and experience as vice president, and watching her handle the challenge of an abbreviated campaign with skill, humanity and toughness.

Now it’s JD Vance’s turn under scrutiny. Two things are different.

First, Donald Trump, 78, is showing signs of deterioration that are far more expansive and disturbing than those that led Biden to end his campaign. Trump’s speeches are interminable and devolve into gibberish, misplaced syllables, ungoverned hate speech and wildly inappropriate vulgarities — all warning signs of mental decline.

On stage at a campaign stop in Pennsylvania last week, he took a surreal and lengthy detour into … something. “Trump sways and bops to music for 39 minutes in a bizarre town hall episode,” the Washington Post said in a headline that should win an award. Since then, Trump has said Harris would ban cows, called her a “s---” vice president, and — in a speech billed as his closing argument — veered into extended musings on the “unbelievable” size of Arnold Palmer’s genitalia.

There’s a second key difference between concerns about Trump’s age now and questions about Biden’s age a few months ago: If Trump wins and can’t fulfill his term, he would be replaced by Vance — an ambitious newbie senator who is already very well known and has given Americans plenty of reasons to worry.

Since his rise to national attention with his 2017 memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” Vance’s TV, radio and podcast interviews have created a voluminous record of ideas and opinions that his Democratic counterpart, Tim Walz, memorably described as weird.

“I certainly would like abortion to be illegal nationally,” Vance has said. He has insulted “childless cat ladies,” claimed people without kids don’t care about America’s future, and floated the idea of parents having more votes than childless adults. Vance has also said his advice to Trump would be, “Fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.” And five days before Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Vance told Steve Bannon that “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine.”

If he’d been vice president on Jan. 6, 2021, Vance said early this year, he would not have certified the 2020 election because “Congress should have fought over it.” Just this month he refused to acknowledge Trump’s loss to Biden five times in one interview, and insisted at a Pennsylvania rally that there had been a “peaceful transfer of power” in 2021 (ignoring the deadly Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol by Trump loyalists). The ticket may have reached peak denialism on Wednesday, when Trump called Jan. 6 “a day of love” and Vance finally said “no” when asked whether Trump had lost in 2020.

If Trump truly wins the 2024 election, this man about half his age would be next in line for the Oval Office — a prospect that is unavoidably plausible. It is hard to imagine Trump as president at 82, when his term would end, given his apparent condition even now.

Near the end of his first stint in the White House, on Jan. 6, 2021, Trump stood by as his supporters rioted at the Capitol to try to keep him in office. Though he had only two weeks remaining in power, members of his Cabinet discussed invoking the 25th Amendment to remove him and concluded that doing so wasn’t viable — particularly because vice presidents play a key role in the removal process, and Vice President Mike Pence said he was not interested.

In a second Trump administration, those discussions could happen a lot sooner. Would Vance be ambitious enough to lead an effort to remove Trump? He certainly has seemed interested in getting ahead, and quickly.

A major factor in Vance’s political ascent was his 180-degree turn “from blue-collar bard and self-described ‘Never Trump’ conservative to hard-edged MAGA loyalist and dogged defender” of Trump, as Politico phrased it. In 2016, Vance called Trump “an idiot” and “cultural heroin” and said he couldn’t decide if Trump was “a cynical a—hole” or “America’s Hitler.” But in 2020, Vance voted for him. And when Trump endorsed him in Ohio’s GOP Senate primary, Vance had this to say: “He’s the best president of my lifetime, and he revealed the corruption in this country like nobody else.”

It’s conceivable that if Trump were in dire shape, he might consider stepping aside and handing the reins to Vance — no doubt with an agreement that President Vance would pardon Trump in the federal cases he faces. But the cases moving through state courts in New York and Georgia — not subject to a presidential pardon — would still hang over Trump, so it’s also conceivable he would refuse to abdicate no matter how incapacitated he became.

That’s unthinkable, and so is a truncated Trump presidency that would give us a President Vance. There is only one certain way to prevent both scenarios: Defeat this pair on election day.

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Jill Lawrence is a writer and author of “The Art of the Political Deal: How Congress Beat the Odds and Broke Through Gridlock.”@JillDLawrence

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