Et Tu, VP?

When absolute power is just a heartbeat away, Donald Trump must take great care in selecting his running mate.

“Guess the Running Mate” is always a popular game at this point in the election cycle. There’s even a portmanteau the media trots out for the occasion: “Veepstakes.” Countless articles and blog posts and tweets are written about this, and many cable news segments are devoted to it. It’s content gold. Which obsequious vassal will Trump pick? Stay tuned!

Most of the time, this winds up being much ado about nothing. The vice presidency, as former VP John Nance Garner famously told soon-to-be VP Lyndon Johnson, ain’t worth a bucket of warm spit.¹ Despite the relatively expansive portfolios of 21st century VPs Dick Cheney, Joe Biden, Mike Pence, and Kamala Harris—who, contrary to popular opinion, has served as well as a person possibly can in that inherently meh capacity—the office remains what Hannibal Hamlin, Lincoln’s first vice president, called it in the 1860s: a “nullity.”

Basically, winning the much-ballyhooed “Veepstakes” means being stuck for (at least) four years in a descriptionless job that is hated by literally every single person who has ever done it, Harris (reportedly) included. As Woodrow Wilson wryly observed, a VP’s “importance consists in the fact that he may cease to be vice president.” That sudden cessation has only happened nine times in U.S. history, most recently in 1974—a full half century ago, and then only because the sitting POTUS resigned in disgrace.

But the 2024 election cycle is not “most of the time.” Despite what the media seems to think, this isn’t Hillary picking Tim Kaine. The conventional wisdom about “balancing the ticket” holds no sway. None of the traditional strategies matter. For one thing, Donald Trump has little incentive to hurry in picking a running mate. More suspense means more “Veepstakes” content—and more footage of the Tim Scotts and Kari Lakes of the Republican Party publicly prostrating themselves to prove their doglike loyalty to Dear Leader.

More importantly, Trump’s VP selection may wind up being the most consequential in the history of the United States: bigger than Andrew Johnson, bigger than Harry Truman—bigger even than Teddy Roosevelt.

Consider: Trump turned 78 this month. He is morbidly obese. He doesn’t eat well. He doesn’t sleep well. He is (allegedly) an habitual drug user. He exhibits signs of dementia, which runs in his family. Three of his four siblings are dead. He himself almost died of covid when he was president. And he is under what must be an unimaginable level of stress. Much virtual ink has been spilled fretting about Biden’s age, but the actuarial tables suggest that Donald, not Joe, is more at risk of not making it through a second term intact. Father Time is undefeated, as they say in sports, and the one p***y Trump will never be able to grab belongs to Mother Nature.

True, evil preserves itself remarkably—cut to the malevolent nonagenarian Rupert Murdoch ogling his fifth bride—but the fact is that, should Trump prevail in November, it is probable if not likely that whoever he picks as his running mate may, ahem, cease to be vice president.

This could come about innocently, with Donald wolfing down one well-done Mar-a-Lago cheeseburger too many. But in the all-bets-are-off Year of our Lord 2024, something more sinister cannot be discounted.

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Trump, as I write in Rough Beast, is

a wannabe strongman. He’s an authoritarian at heart. He’s the Mussolini of Queens, an American Hitler. Donald Trump does not want to be the 47th President of the United States; Donald Trump wants to be the nation’s first dictator.

At this point, no serious commentator doubts this. The neocon dignitary Robert Kagan said as much in a Washington Post op-ed in November: “Let’s stop the wishful thinking and face the stark reality: There is a clear path to dictatorship in the United States, and it is getting shorter every day.”

Mike Godwin, the Godwin who developed Godwin’s Law—that is, that “as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one”—said that it is appropriate to compare Trump to Hitler: “[W]hen people draw parallels between Donald Trump’s 2024 candidacy and Hitler’s progression from fringe figure to Great Dictator, we aren’t joking. Those of us who hope to preserve our democratic institutions need to underscore the resemblance before we enter the twilight of American democracy.”

Academics who study fascism have been shouting from the rooftops for years now, warning us about his autocratical intentions. Trump is actively cultivating Hitler comparisons—we found out this week that he makes jokes to Jewish executives about the ovens—and has spoken openly many times about his nefarious plans.

When democracies die and dictatorships begin, Robert’s Rules of Order goes out the window along with tradition and civility, and we suddenly find ourselves in third-century Rome. Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown, etc. Et tu, Brute, etc.

I realize that this seems unnecessary, if not outright ridiculous, to think about, much less write about. I feel icky doing so. But, I mean, I’m not the one who brought dictatorships into the chat! It is our civic duty to take this strongman idea to its logical conclusion with regard to Trump’s VP. So please bear with me.

There are three things we can be reasonably sure about:

1. In the event of the death of a sitting president, the vice president would assume the presidency. (John Tyler established that precedent decades before the Civil War.)

2. Trump wants to be, and will certainly try to be, a dictator. (I cover this in the fifth chapter of Rough Beast, as discussed, and plenty of fascism experts have written about it and will continue to do so, not least Ruth Ben-Ghiat.)

3. Trump would assume dictatorial powers not by tearing up the Constitution, but by flexing his Unitary Executive muscles and having his corrupt lickspittles on the Supreme Court make rulings to suit his despotic purposes. (See also: Sam Alito’s upside-down insurrection flag.)

Which means that,

4. Trump would be the rare dictator who had a specific heir apparent—one who wasn’t a son or other relation, but who the laws of the land state must succeed him in the event of his death or incapacity.

So imagine, if you will, this horrifying scenario: Trump wins, crookedly or otherwise, and re-takes the White House on January 20, 2025. He empowers the Heritage Foundation weirdos to implement all the hateful Project 2025 plans. When people take to the streets to protest—I like to think we’d take to the streets to protest when they start rounding people up for mass deportation—he declares martial law (or “Marshall law,” as Marjorie Taylor Greene put it). Many if not most cops are more than happy to participate in this show of force, because they are free to beat up, maim, and even kill protestors with impunity, and use all the second-hand military gear they’ve stockpiled. And so ends democracy in the United States. We had a good run.

Now let’s say you’re Trump’s VP. You are ruthlessly ambitious, ghoulishly amoral, and completely devoid of scruples—otherwise you wouldn’t have put your hat in the ring in the first place. You’ve watched him—or, rather, his loyal disciples, because all he does is watch TV and cheat at golf—establish a dictatorship. And you recognize that he’s old, and he’s weak, and he’s stupid, and he’s too focused on vengeance to fully exploit his newfound power. And you know, you just know, that you would make a better strongman than Donald. How long will you sit on your keister watching Creamsickle Caligula have all the fun before you break out your Gibbon and start getting ideas?

Which option do we think this hypothetical VP would prefer: bucket of warm spit, or absolute ruler of the most power nation that ever existed? Put it this way: If I’m Trump, and I’m picking a running mate, I’m going to go with someone who won’t take “one heartbeat away from the presidency” as some sort of personal challenge.

Let’s look at some of the people rumored to be under consideration for VP through that lens:

• Marco Rubio, who sits on the Senate Intelligence Committee and who recruited the MAGA judge Aileen Cannon, has been actively betraying the United States for years now. Can he really be trusted to sit and roll over after a dictatorship is established?

• How about Elise Stefanik, who cannonballed into the Trump pool long after she knew it was a fetid Superfund site? Did she do that to pay homage to Donald, or to satisfy her own enormous political ambitions?

• J.D. Vance seems harmless, with his eyeliner and rouge, but he is an inveterate New Right figure who has spoken openly about American monarchy, and is probably more loyal to his whoremaster Peter Thiel than he would ever be to Trump.

• Kristi Noem likes to kill things.

“Come on,” you might be thinking. “You’re being ridiculous. This can’t happen here. Those Republicans you just named would never do that.” Ah, but let me remind you that these are the same people who separated children from their parents at the border, who pump their fists when refugees drown in the Rio Grande, who want to impose the death penalty on doctors who perform medically necessary abortions, who politicized the pandemic response so that 300,000 Americans died of covid unnecessarily (including Herman Cain and any number of rightwing talk show hosts), and who were totally cool about executing Mike Pence. MAGA is a death cult.

The neoreactionary Dark Enlightenment types insist that what the United States needs is a Red Caesar. Here, for example, is Hillsdale professor Kevin Slack, one of the movement’s thought leaders, in his War on the American Republic: How Liberalism Became Despotism:

Small republican communities may have little power against an insulated national bureaucracy, but perhaps the New Right’s own cultural revolution is the fertile soil for political revolution, either as autonomous islands of republican civilization in an increasingly fragmenting order or the bulwark for a Caesar. At some point in the decline of every empire, with its dissolute senators, it finally dawns on a truly great leader, one born of the family of the lion or the tribe of the eagle, “Hey, I could run this thing.” The New Right now often discusses a Red Caesar, by which is meant a leader whose post-Constitutional rule will restore the strength of his people.

But, like, they do know what happened to Caesar, right? Ancient Rome was a violent, brutal place. Reigns didn’t last long. One year—A.D. 238—there were six emperors. There was a lot of palace intrigue and intra-family assassination. Caracalla killed his brother Geta. Elagabalus and his mother were killed by the Praetorian Guard, who installed his cousin Severus Alexander, who was himself killed with his mother by some insurrectionist generals. Constantine the Great had four sons; he killed one of them, as well as his wife and his brother in law; later, one of the three surviving sons killed the other two, so he could rule by himself. And those are just a few examples off the top of my head. We expect a totalitarian United States to be immune to this kind of thing why? American exceptionalism? Ozempic®?

There are lots of pros to being a dictator, no doubt—as Mel Brooks said, “It’s good to be the king!”—but there are some cons, too: not least the fact that strongmen are constantly worried that someone will go Macbeth on them.

Let me be perfectly clear: I do not want any of this to happen—indeed, I resent having to consider it at all. But this is the sort of thing that does happen, historically, under tyrannical rule. And so Trump, the aspiring strongman, should keep in mind, when selecting his running mate, that he may also be choosing the agent of his own destruction.

When in Rome. . .

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Photo credit: Julius Caesar statue, Skitterphoto, Pexels.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this piece listed Trump’s age as 77. He’s a year older than that.

1. He actually said “warm piss,” which makes more sense, but it was intentionally misquoted at the time—and I think “warm spit” is funnier.