J.D. Vance tried on the crown today and it didn’t fit.

At exactly 11:36 a.m. in Plover, Wisconsin, J.D. Vance stepped onto a makeshift stage inside a manufacturing plant dressed in Trump’s favorite costume: a dark blue suit, a deep red tie, and a fake grin meant to hide just how awkward and unqualified he is for the position he holds. The Hollies’ “Long Cool Woman in a Black Dress” was blasting from the speakers: Saturday night I was downtown, working for the FBI, sitting in a nest of bad men… a soundtrack chosen to evoke the kind of blue-collar familiarity they believe will excite the crowd and create an artificial sense of connection for those watching from home. Flags were everywhere, each one strategically placed to stay in frame no matter where the cameras pointed. The crowd, small but prepped, dutifully chanted “USA, USA, USA” on cue.

He quieted the crowd with a rushed, almost impatient string of “thank you all, thank you, please, please,” and then launched straight into the messaging points he was there to deliver.

It started with an awkward attempt to pronounce “Wisconsin” in a folksy way, like someone trying to fake a local accent. It landed with a thud. He paused, waited for a laugh that never came, and then quickly pivoted into the only word that truly mattered in the 45-minute performance to follow: fraud.

And it wasn’t just a word he dropped once. It was the centerpiece of his whole performance, and he started laying the groundwork within seconds of speaking. “I think Kelly Loeffler, our Small Business Administrator, is one of the unsung heroes of the Trump administration,” he said. “She has single-handedly rooted out hundreds of billions of dollars—” and then he caught himself. “Hundreds of millions of dollars, I should say… and on to billions of dollars over the next couple years of fraud against the American people.” Billions, millions, it didn’t matter. Whatever number sounded scary enough to make people believe someone was stealing from them. The actual figure was irrelevant. That’s the game. And it all orbited around one word: fraud. The word he was sent there to test.

But then, without skipping a beat, he pivoted from government-scale theft to the most painfully self-serving moment of the entire speech. “I will say I took special note of one thing she said,” Vance continued, still talking about Loeffler. “Kelly said I am the coolest vice president in American history. And I said, Kelly, that is a low standard. That is a very low bar, but I do think I clear that bar.”

One second he’s claiming hundreds of billions of dollars have been stolen from the American people. The next, he’s fishing for a laugh about how cool he thinks he is. The pivot was so jarring, so tone-deaf, that it almost felt like a talking point someone had written for him because they’ve realized it doesn’t really matter what comes out of his mouth anymore. Just throw something out there. Hope for a giggle. Give the base a sound bite they can repeat: “J.D. Vance, coolest vice president ever.” It’s the same Trump formula: say something absurd enough that it becomes the headline, and nobody talks about the substance. Or in this case, the complete absence of it. It was just weird. And one political observer online captured it perfectly when they pointed out that Vance apparently believes he’s cooler than Thomas Jefferson and Theodore Roosevelt.

Thomas Jefferson authored the Declaration of Independence, shaped the very foundation of American democracy, and then served as Vice President before becoming the third President of the United States. Harry Truman was Vice President for just 82 days before Franklin Roosevelt died, and the full weight of ending a World War landed on his shoulders, including the decision to use a nuclear weapon. Lyndon Johnson was riding two cars behind President Kennedy in Dallas when the shots rang out, and within hours he was standing aboard Air Force One, hand raised, taking the oath of office while Jackie Kennedy stood beside him in a blood-stained pink suit. He didn’t crack jokes about being cool. He went home and passed the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and Medicare, reshaping American life in the shadow of a national tragedy. Theodore Roosevelt was Vice President for less than a year before President McKinley was assassinated. He became the youngest president in American history and went on to break up monopolies, protect millions of acres of public land, and redefine the role of the federal government in standing up for ordinary Americans against unchecked corporate greed.

Because even in a room full of supporters, they could feel how deeply disrespectful it was, not just to the office of the Vice President, but to the memory of the men who were so instrumental in the shaping of our country. And the fact that he said it anyway told us everything: how egotistical and insecure he is, and how bad he is at hiding either one.

And that’s the part Trump’s enablers are watching very closely right now. Because J.D. Vance wasn’t in Plover, Wisconsin, just to spread fear about the made-up crisis of a country under attack by fraud. Or to help a vulnerable Republican win a tight reelection. He was there to audition for the role of Trump’s replacement. And the audition is not going well.

And aside from being an ineffective communicator, who is J.D. Vance? That’s the question that really needs to be asked. Because we all know who Donald Trump is. He’s a terrible person. He’s cruel and dangerous. But at least we can see him coming. His chaos, his instability, it comes naturally to him. He doesn’t know how to hide it, and he doesn’t try. That’s actually one of the only things that’s ever worked in our favor: we always know what we’re dealing with.

But J.D. Vance is a chameleon. And that is something else entirely. A chameleon is more dangerous because chameleons convince people they fit in. That they are safe. That things are normal when they aren’t.

J.D. Vance is anti-immigrant while being married to a woman of Indian ancestry. He was a Never-Trumper who once compared Trump to Hitler and warned about the rise of fascism. He has switched religions multiple times. He has been all sorts of things, and then suddenly, seemingly overnight, he became Donald Trump’s biggest fan. We don’t know who J.D. Vance actually is.

But even more dangerous than a man who is openly evil is a man who can change his skin to match whatever room he walks into. It’s what authoritarian movements have always counted on to grow and succeed. Not just the tyrant, but the polished functionary who knows how to smile while turning the screws. The man who blends in until it’s too late.

And that’s exactly what the people behind the curtain are counting on. Because Peter Thiel, the billionaire tech investor and co-founder of Palantir, is the man who bankrolled Vance’s political career. Thiel is an immigrant himself. He can never be president. So his closest path to the Oval Office is by proxy, through the man he built from scratch precisely because there was no real core to begin with, just an ambition ready to be molded and placed one heartbeat from the presidency.

And if Trump’s decline continues, and it will, Vance is the vessel through which the Trump enablers, the people pulling all of Trump’s strings, intend to keep their grip on this country. And that’s why he was in Wisconsin today, wearing Trump’s costume, playing Trump’s music, standing in front of Trump’s flags, and trying to make Trump’s base believe he’s one of them. Because if the MAGA movement needs a new mask, J.D. Vance is the one they’re ready to wear.

And there’s a reason they’re pushing him this hard, this fast. Because the President of the United States has all but disappeared. Since delivering that record-breaking, one-hour-and-48-minute State of the Union address two nights ago, Trump has held no press conferences, no public remarks, and no open-press events. Every meeting on his schedule has been closed to cameras. His Truth Social account has been nearly dormant, and the few posts that have appeared don’t sound like him. They read like staff work, scrubbed, sterile, almost all missing the unhinged, barely coherent energy that has always made his voice unmistakable.

The only visible moment from the president today was a carefully staged, unannounced photo op with New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. The meeting wasn’t on either leader’s public schedule. There were no press questions or remarks. No open pool. Just Trump, seated behind the Resolute Desk, grinning and holding up newspaper printouts that Mamdani’s team had made for him, like a child showing off a drawing for the refrigerator. Mamdani stood. Trump sat. That was it.

Two nights ago, this man delivered the longest State of the Union address in modern history. Today, the best they could manage was a seated photo op with props. And the only post shared on Truth Social today that even sounded remotely like Donald Trump was about the White House ballroom. A judge had dismissed a challenge to its construction, and Trump, or whoever was posting for him, wrote:

That last line really stuck with me. “It will stand long into the future.” That is not how Donald Trump talks. Donald Trump talks about himself. He talks about winning, about enemies, about revenge. He doesn’t write lines about things that will outlast him. That reads like a man, or a team around him, reckoning with mortality. And I keep asking the same question: Who is the real Donald Trump right now?

Because either that State of the Union took everything out of him and he’s now in some kind of physical or cognitive recovery, or the deterioration we’ve all been watching for months just took another steep turn downward. And his handlers are no longer managing the chaos. They’re managing the silence.

And the polls that dropped this week, the very same week J.D. Vance was being paraded across the stage in Wisconsin, tell the story the White House doesn’t want anyone to read, but we all already know.

A Reuters-Ipsos poll released Monday found that 61% of Americans now say Trump has “become erratic with age.” That includes 30% of Republicans. The same poll found that only 45% of Americans describe him as “mentally sharp,” down from 54% in September 2023.

Those numbers didn’t come out of nowhere. They came from what we’ve all been watching: a president who falls asleep in meetings, whose schedule keeps getting lighter, and whose handlers are now managing the silence instead of the chaos. The people around him see those numbers too. They know what’s coming. They know the clock is running out. And that is why J.D. Vance was in Wisconsin today.

And while Vance was on that stage, he wasn’t just selling the big fraud lie to the base. He was selling a version of the president that doesn’t exist. Because one of the most telling moments of the entire speech came when Vance described his supposed daily conversations with Trump.

“Here’s the thing. It’s funny. I talk to the president multiple times a day,” Vance said. “It’s kind of the job of the vice president. You talk to the president a lot. Every day, the president will say, ‘What have we done today? Got any more? Got any more?’ The president has such an intense work pace, and I sometimes think, Mr. President, we’ve got to take stock of all of the incredible things that we have accomplished over the last year.”

An intense work pace. That is what J.D. Vance wants us to believe. That the 79-year-old president, who has been visibly falling asleep in meetings, who once again has practically disappeared from public view for two straight days, who confuses countries and can’t carry a straight thought, is somehow burning through the day demanding more from his team.

Nobody believes that. The president does not have an intense work pace. He watches television all day. He posts on social media. He rages at perceived enemies. And the only things being accomplished are the systematic dismantling of our rights, the gutting of our institutions, and the deepening of suffering across this country. There are no “incredible things” to take stock of, unless cruelty counts as an accomplishment.

But Vance said it anyway, because that’s how this works. You say the lie often enough, with enough confidence, and it starts to fill the space where the truth should be. It crowds out what people can see with their own eyes and replaces it with the version the regime needs them to accept. And they’re not doing it because they think it will fool everyone. They’re doing it because they believe we’re not smart enough to see through it. They believe the American people don’t have the mental capacity to think for ourselves. That if they say “fraud” enough times, we’ll be scared. If they say “accomplishments” enough times, we’ll be grateful. If they say “intense work pace” enough times, we’ll stop noticing the president is disappearing right in front of our eyes.

Everything we are watching today has happened before. When an authoritarian leader begins to decline, whether from age, illness, or the slow erosion of the mind, the movement doesn’t stop. It adapts. The machine behind the man was never about just him. It was always about power. And the moment the figurehead starts to falter, the people who built the machine start looking for the next one.

After Lenin suffered a series of strokes beginning in 1922, Joseph Stalin didn’t wait for him to die. He quietly assumed Lenin’s duties, maneuvered himself into position behind the scenes, and built the infrastructure of succession while Lenin was still alive but incapacitated. By the time Lenin died in 1924, Stalin had already secured enough control that the transition was barely a transition at all. The figurehead changed. The machine kept running.

In every personalist regime, the same vulnerability exists. Scholars who study authoritarian systems call it the succession dilemma: the leader builds a cult of personality so powerful that no one is allowed to grow strong enough to challenge him. But that same instinct, the impulse to crush potential rivals, hollows out the leadership pipeline. So when decline becomes undeniable, there’s a scramble. And the scramble is dangerous, not just for the regime, but for the people living under it. Because desperate movements don’t slow down. They speed up. They grab harder and they become more reckless and more cruel, because they know the window is closing.

That’s what we’re watching now. The Heritage Foundation, Peter Thiel, Stephen Miller, Susie Wiles, and the network of billionaires and ideologues who spent the better part of 16 years building this machine are staring at the same polls we are. They see the 61%. They see the erosion inside his own base. They know this man is not going to be able to hold this together much longer. And they cannot afford to lose control of the White House, because the White House is how they hold power. It’s how they get richer. And for many of them, it’s not even about the money. It’s about us not having it. It’s about keeping ordinary Americans desperate enough, exhausted enough, and distracted enough that we can’t fight back. It’s about control. It has always been about control.

But now that their useful idiot is deteriorating, they need the next one ready. The problem is, the next one isn’t working. The crowd in Wisconsin wasn’t feeling it, and the people behind the curtain are watching all of it, asking themselves the question that every authoritarian movement dreads: what happens when the figurehead fades and the replacement can’t carry the torch?

That question is the crack in the wall. And it’s one we need to push against with everything we have. Because even as the regime stumbles, they’re working to make sure we can’t see it.

But while he was talking, something else happened today that should have every one of us on high alert. Because the same people who destroyed CBS News are now on the verge of owning CNN.

Today, Warner Bros. Discovery declared that Paramount’s bid to acquire the entire company, including CNN, HBO, and all of their studios, is a “superior proposal” to the Netflix deal that had been on the table for months. Netflix walked away. And that means David Ellison, the man who took over Paramount just last year, backed by the fortune of his father Larry Ellison, one of the wealthiest men on the planet and one of Trump’s biggest donors, could soon control not just CBS, but CNN as well.

This is the same David Ellison whose Paramount quickly settled Trump’s $16 million lawsuit against CBS over their 60 Minutes interview. The same ownership that installed Bari Weiss, the conservative provocateur, as editor-in-chief of CBS News. The same regime under which reporting critical of the Trump administration has been shelved, softened, or completely cut before it ever reached the public.

And Donald Trump himself has repeatedly, publicly, called for the sale of CNN in connection with any deal involving Warner Bros. Discovery. He said it out loud. He wanted this. And now it’s happening.

If this deal goes through, and it appears that it will, the same forces that gutted one of America’s most trusted news organizations will now have their hands around the throat of another. And every time a major newsroom is captured, the pipeline of truth gets thinner, the space for accountability shrinks, and the people in power get one step closer to controlling not just the government, but the story of the government.

That is how democracies die, and we are running out of traditional ways to stop this attack on the truth. Which means the survival of independent media has never mattered more than it does right now. Voices not tethered to corporate messaging and journalists not answering to billionaires are our last line of defense.

And I don’t say that lightly. I believe, with everything in me, that the midterms will be won or lost based on whether enough Americans have access to the truth. So thank you to everyone who is already supporting, sharing, and standing shoulder to shoulder with those of us speaking truth over propaganda. This may end up being more powerful than any traditional form of protest. And if you’re just getting started, here’s the most important thing you can do: identify your top five favorite voices in the resistance movement and support them today.

We have just over eight months until the midterms. Eight months to decide, at least for the near future, what kind of country, and what kind of world we want to live in. It’s going to take all of us, and it’s going to be a marathon, not a sprint. But I know we’re up for the battle. We have already proven that Americans are capable of persistence and courage. This is going to be another time we prove to the history books that we are a people who do not back down when it matters most.

The machine behind Trump is scrambling. The replacement is failing his audition. And the polls are showing the cracks in his grip on this country. And every single day, more people are waking up to what this really is. That is why I still have hope for America. And you should, too.

I’ll see you tomorrow,
Heather

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This commentary represents my personal opinions and analysis of matters of public concern, informed by publicly available information. Any references to individuals constitute opinion and commentary protected under the First Amendment.

Picture of the day: Out running errands this morning, feeling thankful for this beautiful “winter” day in San Diego.