A vote for Trump is a vote to catapult Vance into the Oval Office

It was funny when loony laughingstock Donald Trump serenaded his cultists with a story about Arnold Palmer’s penis, the latest reason medical experts are questioning his mental fitness. Indeed, “behavioral disinhibition,” as evidenced in his Palmer penis riff, is a dire symptom of mental ill health. We don’t know anything for sure because his handlers refuse to release his medical records. But here’s what we do know for sure:
A vote for Trump is a vote for J.D. Vance and his Project 2025 apparatchiks.
Remember last winter, when Nikki Haley campaigned in the Republican primaries with her message that if old Joe Biden were re-elected, he’d likely die in office and hand the presidency to Kamala Harris? Seems like a million years ago. But now we’re just 15 days short of judgment day, and Harris can ill afford to mince words. She’s already questioning Trump’s mental and physical fitness; she should expand on that by hammering home a version of Haley’s message:
Trump could be too sick to serve or he could drop dead – thus handing the reins of power to a far younger zealot who’d more effectively impose the agenda crafted by Project 2025.
David Frum, one of our blessedly sane conservatives, tweeted the obvious: “Trump is obviously sick and getting sicker…If elected, real power will shift from (him)…The most interesting question about a second Trump term is how rapidly and totally a Vice President Vance and his cabal of billionaire backers will be able to wrest power from the elderly and ailing Trump.”
That could happen via the invocation of the 25th Amendment. Veteran political analyst Norm Ornstein (now retired from the conservative American Enterprise Institute), said the other day: “The public must be reminded that while the vice president is the only member of the Executive Branch who can’t be fired, the president can essentially be fired by the vice president should he become significantly impaired. This is accomplished through the 25th Amendment. People must realize that a vote for Trump could easily be a vote for a President Vance.”

At this point, the MAGA campaign team is just trying to drag the deteriorating Trojan Horse across the finish line – which may happen, thanks to the usual coalition of the feckless, the reckless, the oblivious, the racist, the misogynist, and the willfully ignorant. Say goodbye to our democratic values if we wind up under the heel of a fake hillbilly who embraces the lie that the 2020 election was “stolen,” who stokes hateful lies about legal immigrants, who supports a national abortion ban (despite his lying denials).
But it’s worse than that. Vance is tight with Kevin Roberts, the right-wing Heritage Foundation leader and chief architect of Project 2025. He also wrote the foreword for Roberts’ new book. A few key sentences: “Roberts is articulating a fundamentally Christian view of culture and economics…We are now all realizing that it’s time to circle the wagons and load the muskets.”
I half-believe Trump when he professes ignorance about Project 2025 (“I have no idea who is behind it…I don’t know anything about it”), but his level of awareness is irrelevant. He’s the front man for the forces waiting in the wings.
And he’d be just one Big Mac away from handing them power.

Copyright 2024 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.