It must surely be imminent. He’s not in the best health if the reports about him eating mcdonalds all the time are true. He’s 79 which isn’t that old but I dont see many fat, stressed 90 year olds on a mcdonalds diet.
Say he had a heart attack next week… then what? Presumably Vance would take over as actual president, but I can’t imagine anyone being as bad as him. Would the maga movement continue with a different cult leader? Do you think things would meaningfully change?
This is my take.
Trump’s death won’t change the shitty people who have elected and continue to support him, but those people will no longer have a focal point.
Among all his shitty traits, he does have the uncanny ability to engender support from shitty people in a way that no one else can emulate.
Vance will be POTUS. He will reverse course on Trump’s dumbassery… withdraw from Iran, hose down Hormuz, water down the tariffs et cetera. He will try to win support from the great unwashed and the oligarchy but will ultimately fail.
I think Vance’s response depends greatly on if he takes direction from his handlers in Heritage Foundation or if he gains an ego and believes he’s the new cult leader. They learned their lesson with Pence who, with the obligatory “fuck Mike Pence”, still wasn’t invested enough to commit treason.
Vance just doesn’t have the twisted charisma Trump has to be the cult guy. Heritage knows it, but they knew he had a shelf-life and only needed to get in and secure their position. The Third Reich didn’t survive Hitler but he wouldn’t let go (and they couldn’t get rid of him) until it was too late. The Soviet Union survived the death of Stalin because nobody after him tried to recreate his larger than life image, they maintained the control that was established under his reign.
If Vance does what he’s told he doesn’t need to be Trump, and if the regime continues to disregard democracy, the courts, and even declining public opinion among conservatives that rode the wave but are now leopard fodder, they don’t need another Trump, just an institution to defend. These fuckers are embedded and will be difficult to remove.