Real quick, I talked to the best JD Vance impersonator on the Internet Dan Wilbur yesterday for two hours about the psychology behind JD Vance’s cringey awkwardness and Wilbur’s comedy career. Check it out below, and if you’re in the NYC area he’s performing as JD Vance at Caveat on November 2nd in his hilarious show “Hillbilly Allegedly: An Evening With The Vice President.”
Dash Talks With Comedian Dan Wilbur Pt 1
Dan Wilbur does the funniest impression of JD Vance on the Internet.thehalfwaycafe.substack.com
Dash Talks With Comedian Dan Wilbur Pt 2
Dan Wilbur does the funniest impression of JD Vance on the Internet.thehalfwaycafe.substack.com
Now, for a rare serious post, I’ve had some fun imagining that a big blue wave outcome in the midterms might motivate Donald Trump to want to quit being president.
Trump is a crybaby and sore loser, so I wouldn’t put it past him to do the political equivalent of flipping the game board by resigning.
Now, I know the counter-arguments that Trump is a narcissist who categorically cannot admit failure, fault, or unpopularity, and, of course, that he’s delighted by the White House’s power to rob the American people and sell the public good and all our national security interests to the highest bidder for personal mob boss gain. He loves those perks, and they’re lucrative incentives to stick it out another two years. He’s also very motivated to keep the Epstein Files cover up going.
But his egomania seems to me capable of reading the room and understanding in his lizard brain that his legacy is in full meltdown.
And he’s got an easy out where he can simply admit to his obviously failing health as an excuse to resign. If I were Trump, with such abysmal approval ratings and an administration bursting at the seams with exploding corruption scandals that Democrats will be investigating imminently, I’d want to quit. He’s doing a shit job, everything sucks now, and everyone knows he’s making it all worse.
Which is why I’m not so much arguing that Trump definitely will resign, I’m arguing he has probably considered it, or at the very least SHOULD be thinking about it. Not for the country’s sake (lol he’s incapable of conceptualizing American public interests as separate from his own personal interests), but for his own sake to avoid two more long, grueling years of agonizing ego death.
Imagine with me for a moment how the next two years are likely to go for Trump if the polls are accurate in projections Democrats will win both the House and Senate.
Beyond the unambiguous voter rejection of his 2nd term so far at the ballot box, a Democratic House and Senate will dramatically change the political calculus of Trump sycophancy in Congress with Republicans now self-interested in pivoting toward the nearing post-Trump era of Republican politics.
Moderate Republicans who barely clung to their seats might just adjust their weathervane spines toward proving their centrism and bipartisan “I-get-things-done” bona fides to 2028 voters by occasionally voting with Democrats and feigning shock and disgust at the corruption and incompetence Democrats’ investigations of the Trump Administration everyone knows will inevitably discover.
Republicans in safe red seats might suddenly find more courage for impeaching Pete Hegseth, Kash Patel, RFK Jr., and the other meritocracy-destroying morons Trump has appointed who have no aptitude to run hotdog stands but are in charge of the Department of Defense, the FBI, the Department of Health and Human Services, etc.
A substantial chunk of Republicans who know Russia isn’t America’s friend might finally find the courage to oppose Trump’s Putin bromance and attempts to handicap Ukraine.
A solid chunk of Republicans might find the legislative self-respect to insist Trump has no constitutional authority to tariff countries and upend global trade based on emotional whim. More Republicans might stick up for our Canadian, European, and Southeast Asian allies against Trump’s unAmerican sphere-of-influence diplomacy that’s dismantling the rules-based order previous generations of Americans heroically built from the ashes of WWII that has kept the world so much safer and more prosperous than anytime in human history.
Also, many of the Republicans who want to run for president in 2028 will be electorally incentivized to begin whitewashing their previous Trump brown-nosing and distance themselves from him to run as “traditional conservatives” against the potential administration rivals JD Vance, Marco Rubio (maybe, delusionally, Pete Hegseth too?).
The potential presidential candidates from Congress, like Ted Cruz, John Kennedy, and Rand Paul, might see convenient political advantage in quietly assisting, or at least not obstructing, Democrats’ efforts to investigate the complicity of Trump’s cabinet in all the law-breaking and fraud.
It would be political malpractice for potential governor and “D.C. outsider” candidates, like Ron DeSantis, Chris Christie, and Glenn Youngkin, to not campaign hard against the toxic D.C. swamp Trump created, and campaign on cleaning up the Republican Party and putting a stop to all the excessive corruption and reckless spending.
And the potential “true MAGA heir” candidates, like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Tucker Carlson, will wax poetic about how Trump betrayed the MAGA movement to enrich himself and grift Republican voters every chance he got.
Quitting will save Trump from this ego-death of watching his former bootlickers flee his sinking ship like rats. And compete over who will most turn the page on his regrettable reelection. And rat on him in the upcoming investigations for immunity deals. And leak embarrassing details for media attention.
Meanwhile, the dam is starting to collapse on his Epstein coverup. And Jared Kushner’s scandals are unfolding toward Rosenberg-level infamy. Allegedly serving as an Israeli agent to hijack US foreign policy and start a war of Netanyahu’s choice in Iran that has wrecked global supply chains and energy prices while Jared was allegedly laundering billions of dollars in collective bribes from Saudi Arabia and the UAE through Azerbaijani banks, and negotiating a ceasefire in Ukraine despite having massive back-end business deals with Moscow oligarchs for Russian fossil fuels?? Investigations into all this will go nowhere good for Trump’s legacy.
Honestly, his presidency is such a clusterfuck it would behoove Republicans to think about stopping the bleeding of their party’s poll numbers and 2028 hopes, and tell Trump he doesn’t have the votes to survive an inevitable bipartisan impeachment.
And on top of all this, Trump’s health and cognitive aptitude is disintegrating before our eyes. I think Trump might just be too old, low-energy, demented, and dependent on constant medical interventions to endure another two years of this!
Which is why I think Trump’s pathological inability to accept any responsibility or blame might actually lead him to quit.
His second term is an abject failure, and he’s shattering the mythology his voters believed about his first term. Proverbially “passing the hot potato” to JD Vance so all the burning dumpster fire are Vance’s problem is kind of the smartest, and funniest, thing Trump could do to preserve his fragile ego.
In fact, quite literally, the most Trumpy thing Trump could do is resign and then start telling anyone who will listen that he handed Vance the greatest economy in the history of the world and Vance squandered it, and inflation was totally defeated until Vance took over, and that no one ever heard about affordability until Vance came around, and that the Iran War was won until Vance lost it.
That honestly to me seems more in line with Trump’s character than sitting through two years of torturous accountability while utterly neutered politically by a Democratic Congress.
What do you think? Let me know in the comments!
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