Former President Donald Trump's top three contenders in the running to be his vice president if elected in November are North Dakota Republican Governor Doug Bergum, US Senators Marco Rubio (R-FL), and JD Vance (R-OH).
In a Monday, June 24 op-ed published by MSNBC, columnist and author Paul Waldman suggests that out of the three right-wing lawmakers, Vance would be "the most dangerous" choice.
"Vance has developed his own ideas about the kind of revolution he’d like to see, and Trump is clearly his vehicle to achieve it," Waldman writes.
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The MAGA hopeful "wouldn’t have to cajole or beg or threaten JD Vance to subvert democracy. He’d eagerly say yes, in pursuit of his own authoritarian dreams," theWhite Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy author adds.
Waldman notes:
Like Rubio and Burgum, he has repented for his former criticisms of his party’s leader; back in 2016 he called Trump an 'idiot,' 'noxious” and “reprehensible” and said he wasn’t sure whether Trump would turn out to be 'a cynical a---- like Nixon' or 'America’s Hitler.'
But in the years since, Vance has developed his own ideas about the kind of revolution he’d like to see, and Trump is clearly his vehicle to achieve it. Two years ago, Vance said in an interview that if Trump wins he should 'fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people' and defy the courts if they try to stop him. To change government in the way he wants, Vance said, 'we’re going to have to get pretty wild and pretty far out there and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.'
Rubio's and Bergum's "willingness to say almost anything in order to get it is embarrassingly straightforward," Waldman emphasizes.
"But Trump may want someone more loyal than an ambitious toady. That’s what he had in [ex-Vice President] Mike Pence, whose sudden attack of conscience helped doom Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election. The most dangerous vice president is not the one who goes along with authoritarianism for fear of Trump’s rage but the one who wants authoritarianism for reasons of his own."
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Waldman's full op-ed is available at this link.
