Republicans can't replace their old man nominee, so they're pretending JD Vance is the GOP candidate

"What a stupid question this is!" Donald Trump recently raged at a journalist during a lengthy public meltdown that was billed as a "press conference." The reporter had correctly noted, "You have not had a public campaign event for nearly a week now." This factual observation set Trump off on a diatribe full of lies. "I’m leading by a lot," he insisted. "I am campaigning a lot," he pushed back. In reality, Vice President Kamala Harris is up two points over the former president in national polling. And while she's been hitting the road, even holding multiple rallies in a day, Trump has mostly been hiding out at Mar-a-Lago, only doing one campaign event in the last week in the MAGA-safe space of Montana. As Philip Bump at the Washington Post showed in a recent analysis, "Trump is holding far fewer rallies" and public appearances than he did in both 2016 and 2020.

Last week's hastily assembled press conference was Trump's attempt to fake "campaigning" without actually leaving his house. The Washington Post reported that "When he heard his team had summoned reporters to Florida for a briefing without him, he asked them to arrange for buses to take them to his club so he could hold a news conference." His team needs to do a better job, in that case, of keeping secrets from their boss because that press conference, like most of Trump's public appearances before mainstream news media, was a disaster. As Joe Scarborough noted on MSNBC the morning after, "his people just don't want him to go out and give speeches. I'm sure they didn't want him to go out and give the press conference yesterday, but Donald Trump is still driven by that belief that 'I alone can do it.'"

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Trump's campaign managers surely know that the more voters see Trump, the more they hate him. Trump's team didn't go after President Joe Biden on the age issue just because it was low-hanging fruit. It was also a way to distract from the fact that their own candidate, who was never that cogent to begin with, is rapidly decompensating from age and the stress of being convicted of 34 felonies. Now Biden's out, and the "Is the candidate too old?" spotlight is on Trump.

Republicans won't be following Democrats by changing their candidate, however. Unlike Biden, Trump is a narcissist who will never accept the truth about his decline. And unlike Democrats, Republicans are too afraid of their leader to tell him the truth. But it's also clear that the GOP wishes they could do a switcharoo. Right now, the Trump campaign is acting like their candidate is not the ranting orange degenerate at all, but his much younger — though still quite weird — running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio.

Vance has been tailing Harris across her swing state tour. On their own, his events have been failures, with crowds "generally in the dozens or low hundreds," Dana Milbank of the Washington Post reported. But, because reporters are already in town to cover the overflowing Harris rallies, Vance has been able to get press attention. So with Trump hiding out at Mar-a-Lago, Vance is the face representing the campaign. Someone casually tuning in would possibly think that the Republicans, following the Democrats' lead, had dumped their elderly candidate for someone younger. On Sunday, for example, Vance appeared on three — ABC News’ “This Week,” CBS News’ “Face the Nation,” and CNN’s “State of the Union” — out of five major Sunday political news shows.

At first blush, this would seem like a poor idea. Vance lacks charisma, isn't half as clever as he thinks, and has spent so much time marinating in the world of extremely online fascism that he just seems weird. He's a bearded doppelganger for the equally charmless Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who Republican voters couldn't reject fast enough during the presidential primary. Running a carbon copy of a guy who couldn't beat Trump in a primary seems, on paper, to be a uniquely stupid campaign strategy. Under the circumstances, however, it makes sense. Vance is annoying, but he can speak in complete sentences, largely avoiding all talk of electrocution sharks and Hannibal Lecter. There are fewer logistical issues in a Vance-centric campaign, as well. He's decades younger than Trump, and so has the energy to travel. Even if the rumors that he wears eyeliner are true, Vance cannot need the hours Trump must spend in hair and makeup just to be seen in public. No doubt the campaign wishes they had a substitute candidate who was less aggravating, but Vance surely looks better than their alternative: an ever-nuttier Donald Trump.

The Harris campaign certainly thinks they'll do better the more Trump is on TV. They continue to troll him about his failure to campaign. After his strange press conference Thursday, the Harris campaign sent out an email with language like, "Donald Trump took a break from taking a break to put on some pants and host a p?r?e?s?s? ?c?o?n?f?e?r?e?n?c?e? public meltdown," and "Split Screen: Joy and Freedom vs. Whatever the Hell That Was." The humor was fun but also served a larger purpose. By going viral, they made it likelier an already-unhinged and jealous Trump would hear about it, and react by vetoing his campaign staff's wish that he would shut up and sit in a closet.

It's a smart move, because Trump, ever the slave to his own narcissism, seems to be agitating to get back out in front of the cameras and microphones. After wisely canceling the ABC News debate scheduled for September 10 — which will showcase the dramatic differences in age, energy and coherence between Trump and Harris — he angrily canceled the cancelation. His team has held firm in keeping him from scheduling new campaign events this month, but in the face of regular, taunting emails from the Harris campaign, they may not be able to keep his hunger for attention in check. Redirecting his desire to rave and complain to Truth Social, where few will ever read it, can only satiate Trump for so long.

This is the one small way Vance's lack of appeal serves the Trump campaign. If Vance were witty and charming and capable of drawing audiences larger than a bowling team, Trump would start feeling envious. Trump is already bent out of shape because Harris is drawing such enormous crowds. If his running mate was showing him up, the older man could not be contained. Trump would be booking more rallies, so he could be soothed by the MAGA mob. But with the Harris events as a comparison point, such rallies would start drawing the attention of a media that has mostly ignored them all year. The last thing Trump needs is for swing voters to catch a glimpse of him ranting about how he loves January 6 to a throng of bloodthirsty bigots. The Harris campaign is betting, however, he won't be able to resist for long.