Dan McLaughlin writes for National Review Online about an important choice for the vice president.
JD Vance wants very much to be president. The further we get into Donald Trump’s second term, the more Vance’s ambitions to succeed him become the dominant story in our politics. Which means that it’s time to start thinking about what he might do to advance — or derail — those ambitions. …
… Only one man — Martin Van Buren — has previously made the transition Vance seeks, from new second-term vice president to election in his own right without the president dying in office. As of now, Vance still has pole position for the 2028 Republican nomination. He is likely to keep the upper hand unless one of two things happens in the next 26 months: he falls out with Donald Trump, or (far less likely) Trump suffers a dramatic loss of credibility with Republican voters.
But one very large question still looms over Vance’s presidential ambitions: Does he want to be president more than he wants to be a loyal friend to Tucker Carlson? Because sooner or later, he will have to choose.
Carlson, once a prime-time TV personality on Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, and PBS, columnist for New York, and cofounder of the Daily Caller, has been spiraling ever further into conspiracy theories, antisemitism, and propaganda for America’s enemies ever since he was let go by Fox in April 2023 amid the fallout from Carlson’s role in the network’s colossal defamation settlement with Dominion Voting Machines. That was apparently the last straw atop Rupert Murdoch’s mounting concerns with Carlson’s January 6 conspiracy theories, among other things.
Space does not even begin to permit a full recounting here of the ways in which Carlson, since moving his program to X/Twitter, has become steadily more extreme, paranoid, and detached from reality.
