Just about the best news J.D. Vance got since joining Donald Trump on the Republican presidential ticket may have been the Associated Press running a fact-check with the headline, “No, JD Vance did not have sex with a couch.” That the news wire subsequently pulled the story—not, alas, because they found evidence their top-line conclusion was incorrect but because it “didn’t go through our standard editing process”—hardly diminishes the exculpation.
Vance has had a rough go since joining the Trump ticket, as the media and Democratic opposition pore through his record, surfacing peculiar policy ideas like higher taxes for childless Americans and more voting power for those with offspring—the two key planks in his agenda to eliminate the national scourge of “childless cat ladies.” (He later clarified that he’s “got nothing against cats” but remains contemptuous of women without children.) Not since Dan Quayle picked a fight with television character Murphy Brown has a number two engaged in such a self-defeatingly quixotic escapade. And none of that even gets at the increasing scrutiny of his shape-shifting sycophancy, which my colleague Alex Shephard epically and exhaustively detailed on this site, concluding that Trump’s running mate may be “the worst vice presidential pick ever.”
The early polling on Vance certainly suggests he’s on course to join Sarah Palin on the short list of genuine albatross selections. CNN’s Harry Enten crunched the numbers and found that Vance is the only vice presidential nominee since at least 1980 to emerge from the nominating convention with net-negative approval ratings. It’s gotten so bad for Vance that Republicans, and even Vance’s new boss, are openly second-guessing his selection. But in doing so, they’re only making things worse for themselves. After all, as I wrote last week, a running mate’s main electoral function is to shape voters’ perceptions of the presidential nominee by opening a window into their judgment. In that regard, then, Vance has become an inescapable reminder that Trump—who built his reality TV profile as the “You’re fired!” guy—has terrible judgment in hiring.
Trump’s seditious denouement on January 6 had the effect of memory-holing much of his administration’s more mundane scandals. But we can dredge up a few names just to remind ourselves of how incompetent and corrupt the Trump administration was: Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, who resigned after squandering hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars on private travel; Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt, who resigned “after being embroiled in one ethics controversy after the next,” as CNN put it; Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, who “resigned under the weight of more than a dozen federal investigations into his actions,” according to The Washington Post (Zinke is back in Congress, of course, where he is speculating that the recent attempt on Trump’s life was part of a government “plot”); Mike Flynn, the national security adviser who lied to the FBI in the Russia probe and went to jail (Trump pardoned him); swamp thing and Trump campaign chief Paul Manafort, who went up the river for tax and bank fraud (Trump pardoned him too); alt-right guru Steve Bannon and trade troll Peter Navarro, who were convicted of contempt of Congress; would-be Batman villain Roger Stone, who was convicted of lying to Congress (Trump commuted his sentence before, ultimately, pardoning him too).
The list goes on and on. But don’t take my word for it—take Trump’s. Vice President Mike Pence was “delusional” and “not a very good person,” according to Trump (maybe that’s why he pointed an angry lynch mob in Pence’s direction); James Mattis, Trump’s first defense secretary, was “the world’s most overrated general”; Mark Milley, whom Trump appointed chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was so traitorous as to possibly deserve “DEATH” (Trump’s caps, not mine); John Kelly, one of Trump’s many chiefs of staff, was “by far the dumbest of my Military people”; Trump was “never a big fan” of White House counsel Don McGahn but hired him anyway; as for Attorney General Jeff Sessions, “he went through the nominating process and he did very poorly,” Trump recalled. “I mean, he was mixed up and confused.” Poor Trump, forced to witness his own appointees’ incompetence but apparently powerless to do anything about them.
Then there were the former women of the Trump administration. Stephanie Grisham “didn’t have what it takes and that was obvious from the beginning,” according to Trump. Grisham started with the Trump campaign in 2015 and served as his communications director and press secretary in the White House before becoming Melania Trump’s chief of staff—all despite clear incompetence “from the beginning!” Truly Trump is a personnel softy. Alyssa Farah Griffin was a “Backbencher in the Trump Administration,” who “had only glowing reviews of the Trump Administration until long after she left”—long, in this case, being roughly a month, when she publicly condemned Trump after the January 6 assault on the Capitol. “When you give a crazed, crying lowlife a break, and give her a job at the White House, I guess it just didn’t work out,” Trump said of reality TV villainess Omarosa Manigault Newman, raising the question of why even a softie like Trump would give that kind of break. It seems like the only former staffer Trump didn’t later insult and disown was Rob Porter, who resigned in the face of spousal abuse allegations. (“We wish him well.… He did a good job.”)
Observers might be confused how the man who swore he hired only the “very best people” would surround himself with such a cavalcade of feckless dolts. When Fox News host Bret Baier asked him that question last year, Trump blamed his own Washington naïveté for the bad apples in his otherwise spectacular, gilded administration. “I now know Washington probably better than anybody,” he said. “I know the good ones and the bad ones, and we will have really great, strong people.”
Having run the administration with the highest turnover rate in history presumably gave Trump plenty of experience to avoid making the same mistakes, but it’s not like later-term personnel were much better than their predecessors in his own estimation. John Bolton, Trump’s third national security adviser, was a “dope” who “Never had a clue, was ostracized & happily dumped.” Mark Esper, Trump’s last confirmed defense secretary, was “weak and totally ineffective”; Attorney General Bill Barr, who parted ways with Trump only after belying his claims of widespread 2020 voter fraud and later said that Trump “shouldn’t be anywhere near the Oval Office,” was “Weak, Slow Moving, Lethargic, Gutless, and Lazy” (though once Barr endorsed him this year anyway, the magnanimous ex-president retracted the “Lethargic” label).
This time, however, Trump has a secret weapon! His older son, Fredo Don Jr., has “fashioned himself as a MAGA enforcer who would seek a ‘veto’ over any administration appointments that he views as being at odds with his father’s agenda,” The New York Times reported earlier this month. It’s just possible, however, that making his unqualified son an unappointed personnel czar won’t solve the problem of Trump’s chronic staffing disasters. The fundamental problem may be that Trump the (very) elder prizes neither competence nor integrity in his team. Instead the prime qualifications for entrée into his inner circle are bottomless obsequiousness and, most importantly, slavish, unquestioning loyalty.
Pence checked the first box but not the second. Vance has promised to do both, which is why one of Don Jr.’s first acts as chief personnel enforcer was to push hard for Vance as number two. The Vance experience has gone so swimmingly that Anthony Scaramucci (a “highly unstable ‘nut job’”), whose short stint in Trump’s revolving gallery of communications directors is best remembered for the coinage it inspired regarding brief stints in office, recently wondered “how many Scaramuccis J.D. is going to last.” (The Mooch subsequently “personally thank[ed]” Vance “for knocking me out of the position of the worst Donald Trump hire. I didn’t think it would happen but here we are and I am grateful”; he’s not right about himself—zero indictments keeps him out of the top tier—but he may be about Vance.)
Hitting a P.R. rough patch is not in itself fatal in Trump world. It can be a veritable badge of honor. But drawing attention for views odd even in the culture-war right is bad; that Vance is pulling the spotlight from Trump is worse. So if the Harris campaign continues its initial hot streak and Trump gets panicky, would it surprise anyone if he hits the eject button? That’s too many steps down the road in this crazy election year to usefully speculate on, but we can say one thing for certain: If Trump does dump Vance, he will make clear that his latest bad hire has one thing in common with all the others—it wasn’t Trump’s fault.
