Vance Rising and Year-end Odds and Ends
Veeply Roundup
We haven’t done a Veeply Roundup in a while and there are lots bits we haven’t had a chance to share. So here are a few quick things we are following, including Vance’s efforts towards the 2028 elections, Chile’s lack of a VP, and a super-quick review of Netflix’s House of Dynamite. Then we turn to some non-Veep stuff: I grade the National Security Strategy and share a very specific memory of the late Norman Podhoretz.
Vance and Friends… Coming in 2028?
Last week I wrote on Vance’s challenges managing the GOP far-right. But in the meantime, he’s consolidating his position for 2028. Vance is locking up donors, working hard on the midterms, and mobilizing influencers. Despite the Nazi-bullshit, things look good for J.D. Vance.
Maybe.
Vance’s wooing of Elon Musk, as reported in The Washington Post, highlights the VP’s coming challenges. According to the Washington Post Vance played peacemaker with Elon Musk when Trump got annoyed with DOGE. Musk started using his vast social media platform to criticize the president and threatening to start a third party. Vance, who shared Silicon Valley links with Musk, helped to de-escalate the situation and bring Musk back to the fold. One of Vance’s moves was to get Musk ally Jared Isaacman confirmed as NASA administrator. (This is critical for Musk’s SpaceX.) Isaacman had made donations to Democrats, a big no-no in Trump world. Vance and Wiles worked the issue—even having the White House aide blocking Isaacman transferred to a position abroad.1
Smart inside baseball by Vance. The problem is that a lot of people have grown to really hate Musk. Associating with him is the kind of double-edged sword successors face when running for president.
Presidencies accumulate troubles. To modify Lincoln’s adage: you can make all the people happy some of the time and some of the people happy all the time, but you can’t make all the people happy all the time. Becoming president requires building a coalition both within the party to be nominated and among the public to get elected. The problem is that different parts of the coalition have different priorities and it is impossible to satisfy them all. Choices must be made and some choices will satisfy some groups while perturbing others. Both immigration crackdowns and tariffs are very popular among core GOP constituencies, but both policies will over time contribute to rising costs.
A skilled politician can manage this challenge—for a time. Rhetorical skills can paper over differences and adroit policymaking can mitigate the internal contradictions. Donald Trump possesses the former. His supporters believe everything he says. In his disorganized way, Trump sometimes manages the latter by doing loud showy things (like imposing high tariffs) and then walking them back or changing his mind as the consequences become evident.
But these tensions will continue to grow, and you can’t make all the people happy all the time. This will manifest on the campaign trail and become even more difficult should Vance reach the White House. Vance will be expected to fulfill the vision laid out by Trump, but he’ll find it impossible to satisfy all the components of the coalition that brought him to the White House. Only an exceptionally skilled politician might manage this. It would be foolish to underestimate JD Vance who has risen far in a very short time. But neither should we underestimate the challenges he will face.
Chile: Missing Veeps I
Chile has a new president, Jose Antonio Kast. The big news is that this is a sharp turn rightward for Chile, and possibly part of a trend across Latin America.
But for Veepologists the news is about what isn’t. Chile doesn’t really have a vice president. The elected position was eliminated in in the 1833 Constitution, and the nation has muddled through since.
But there still is a “vice president” in the Constitution. The vice president is a temporary president. According to Article 28, if the president cannot take office, the president of the Senate becomes vice president and leads the country until the president can take office. If the president is unable to take office the vice president calls for new elections and governs in the meantime. According to Article 29, if the president is ill or out of the country the vice president is the senior Minister who becomes vice president and governs in their stead. If the presidency is vacant, this minister becomes vice president and calls for elections. If the senior Minister is unavailable, it goes to the next senior minister and so forth.
This is a new and different type of vice presidency.
Chile regularly discusses re-writing their Constitution (although the re-writes so far have failed at the ballot box). Perhaps for the next re-write they might consider re-establishing the vice presidency? I’d be happy to fly down to Santiago and provide my insight. I could even assemble a team of experts to provide a variety of perspectives.
Call me…
House of Dynamite: Missing Veeps II
There have been many, many analyses of the Netflix movie House of Dynamite and its depiction of a nuclear crisis. The general consensus among experts has been that while it is very well-made, the basic scenario doesn’t make sense. There is no logic to firing a single nuclear weapon out of the blue at the United States. If you’re going to launch a surprise nuclear strike, you go all in. Given the limited attack, the time pressure on the president to decide on response is artificial—there is no reason to launch an immediate retaliatory strike if it’s a single nuclear missile.
That being said there were many items in the movie that did feel real, particularly the depiction of the Situation Room.
My pet peeve is that in the movie the National Security Advisor is out and his deputy is very young and barely knows the president. This is simply not the case. I teach about the National Security Council. The Deputy National Security Advisor is a very senior position and is nearly always filled by a seasoned national security pro (many of whom go on to be the National Security Advisor and to other high-level positions.) A few examples of Deputy National Security Advisors include Colin Powell, Bob Gates, Sandy Berger, Stephen Hadley, and Antony Blinken. Since Gates, the Deputy National Security Advisor has also chaired the Deputies Committee, which is really the workhorse level of the government consisting of the number two or three officials at the national security departments.2
My other question about House of Dynamite is where was the Veep? We see a blank square in the Zoom, but we don’t hear from them. On a situation of such national consequence one would think the president would want the VP’s thoughts. This brings me to the real strength of the movie. Even if the scenario is illogical, the reality that there are vast apparatuses devoted to quickly launching nuclear strikes should give us pause. Having this apparatus able to respond rapidly only encourages rapid decisions under conditions of uncertainty. This is not a recipe for prudent decision making. There are small steps that can be taken to reduce these tensions without compromising national security.
Other News
Occasionally I like to share things that aren’t about vice presidents. I hope that’s ok.
The real meaning of the National Security Strategy
In my last class of the semester, after the students had their say, I gave my bottom-line on the National Security Strategy. I asked:
Why do we have national security strategy?
Students stated it was to provide a framework for U.S. action around the globe.
“Sure,” I agreed. “But there’s a more direct reason. Congress requires it.”
I continued:
Congress is the first branch of government. The president is ultimately accountable to the people, but first to the representatives of the people—that is Congress.
The NSS is a contradictory mess intellectually.
But it is also just badly written. If this was an assignment for this class, I’d give it, at best, a C. If you are getting Cs in grad school (at least in my experience) you should probably leave the program.
You’ve all experienced my red pen (note: strictly speaking they are comments on a google doc) This document would have been hit hard.
Handing in this ChatGPT hodgepodge by Stephen Miller’s assistant just shows that the administration doesn’t take Congress seriously and Congress hasn’t given them much reason to do so
I’ve argued before, Congress needs to undergo significant institutional change—establishing a counterpart to the National Security Council—to claw back its power over foreign affairs.
My encounter with Norman Podhoretz
Long-time editor of Commentary, leading light of the neocons, and elder statesman of the New York intelligentsia Norman Podhoretz died this year.3 I have a particular memory of him.
In the late 1990s and the aughts, I was a very junior member of the neocon conspiracy. I read Commentary from cover to cover and dreamed of writing for them. I relished Podhoretz’s feisty essays. For a time, I worked for a small think tank that Podhoretz supported. Assigned to write a thank you note, I wrote it as dayenu—that is a Passover song which thanks Hashem for the many blessings granted the Jewish people. The refrain, dayenu, means “it would have been enough.” My thank you note went something like:
If you had only mentioned our work in Commentary, it would have been enough.
If you had only steered donors in our direction, it would have been enough.
Sometime later, Podhoretz came out with a book My Love Affair with America. He wrote it because, in the wake of the Clinton scandals, some of his conservative brethren were turning on the United States as corrupt. Podhoretz disagreed (I agree with him on this and still do!) One of his chapters was entitled “A Dayenu to America.”
Love or hate Podhoretz, he was a hell of a writer, and it pleases me to think that I gave him an idea.
Trump also eliminated the National Space Council, headed by the VP, with an executive order. Pence did important work in this position (as did Dan Quayle). Harris, not so much. Did Vance want this responsibility removed? Perhaps he saw it as a distraction from campaigning and as putting him too close to his billionaire buddies like Musk.
I dream of writing a book about the Deputy National Security Advisors and the Deputies Committee that could sit next to my late advisor Mac Destler’s book on the National Security Advisor.
There were some other big losses this year, but they are more personal and I’ll write about the separately.