DAN MCCARTHY: NeoConservatives have been extremely clever and have used the vice president's office as their power base within Republican administrations.

He's used to being a CEO where you hire someone, you can fire them at will, and you expect them to be loyal and their job and whole future career depends on the business they're working for and the person in charge of that business.  13:22  Of course, in government, none of that applies.  In government, you have people who will stab you in the back, even if they're drawing a paycheck from you.  And you have people who see their career advancement in their ability to cash in on their betrayal of you . . .  Daniel McCarthy

Even if Trump wins the presidency, he'll only be in for 1 term.  This makes the Vice President more important for this election.  

 

Thank you to Tom Woods and his show, "The Trump VP Choice: Brace Yourself," on March 14, 2024.

Dan McCarthy is the editor of the conservative Modern Age: A Conservative Review magazine. 

3:27  Yeah, before I do that, I want to really emphasize what the stakes really are.  Obviously, the fact that Donald Trump has already served one term as president means that he'll have at most one more term if he wins in November, which means that his vice president is really set up to become the Republican Party's nominee in 2028 and quite possibly president thereafter.  Now, historically, really going back to the Reagan Administration, NeoConservatives have been extremely clever and have used the vice president's office as their power base within Republican administrations.  And that's true of every single Republican administration from Reagan through to the first Donald Trump term.  Think about it.  With Ronald Reagan, you had as Vice President, George H. W. Bush.  Now, Reagan was not a NeoCon.  Reagan was somebody who believed in trying to shrink government.  He wanted to emphasize cutting taxes.  He wanted to emphasize freedom.  And in foreign policy, even though a lot of people thought of him as being this apocalyptic, showdown with the Soviet Union UberHawk, he was, in fact, seeking genuine peace through strength.  You saw that he didn't want to get us entangled in Middle East conflicts.  He pulled us out of Lebanon, in fact, when American troops were murdered there by terrorists, 1983.  He was very careful to negotiate with the Soviet Union he always made a very clear that the Soviet Union was morally evil but he didn't think they're going to war with the Soviet Union was going to be either the answer or necessary thing he thought instead that reaching through the humanity of the Russian people and even the humanity of Russian leaders was going to be sufficient to start to unwind the Cold War and bring us to a peaceful resolution of it.

5:00  George Bush, on the other hand, he was always from his days back in the CIA a very hawkish individual, and of course, once he becomes President after the Cold War, he embarks America on this new global mission which has become this debacle over the last 30 years.  It's George H. W. Bush who gets us into . . . first we have this mini-war in Panama, 1989, then we later have this First Gulf War, which, in fact, becomes an endless war, open-ended.  The First Gulf War doesn't end in 1991 with throwing Saddam Hussein's forces out of Kuwait; instead, it becomes this protracted policing effort in the Middle East.  We have troops in Saudia Arabia.  We have a no-fly zone over Iraq, and basically the scene is set when the Iraq War, George H. W. Bush's son, George W. Bush, becomes president.  Now people know that George H. W. Bush was a Vice President who was not on board with Reagan's agenda

5:57  Did not know that Vice President Quayle, under the presidency of George H. W. Bush, had as his Chief of Staff the little kingpin of NeoConservatism, William Kristol.  So Bill Kristol goes on to found The Project for a New American Century, goes on to found the Weekly Standard, and today he's running The Bulwark.  Bill Kristol was Chief of Staff to the Vice President when Dan Quayle was the VP.  So that goes to show how smart these people are to invest in an office that most people consider to be worthless.  There's a famous historical description of the vice presidency worth "a bucket of warm spit."  And you could imagine that if you're a staffer, Chief of Staffer, for example to the vice president well that seems like less than nothing you have almost no direct policy influence but in fact you are right there in the executive branch having all kinds of indirect influence and really be able to influence things powerfully.  Of course, when the second George Bush, George W. Bush, becomes president after the 2000 election, he has a long-time American Enterprise Institute-connected, former Secretary of Defense intellectual, Dick Cheney, who becomes a key player in the War on Terror as it was called at the time, and generally, the expansive foreign policy, the really aggressive nation-building and world-transforming revolutionary foreign policy that George W. Bush pursues.  So, once again, the vice president's office with Dick Cheney becomes the hive and the nexus of NeoConservative power.  Even the George W. Bush Administration, which was already quite neoconservative, you can see that even if you have a bad president you can have an even worse vice president.  

7:58. Well then finally we get Donald Trump, and Donald Trump is a complete repudiation of the Bush Legacy.  He's a repudiation of George H. W. Bush and also a repudiation of George W. and, of course, he humiliates Jeb Bush in the 2016 primaries.  Well, Donald Trump chooses as his vice president Mike Pence, and Mike Pence seems like a pretty typical Republican and not really any more neoconservative than the ordinary Republicans of the 2000s or 2010s.  But Mike Pence's office among his staff furs there are people who actually play a very powerful role behind the scenes in sabotaging some of the better people some of the better non-interventionists and foreign policy realists for example who had a shot at getting nominations within the Donald Trump Administration.  And, of course, people with in the vice presidents office are also in on the conversations about National Security staffing and other things, and therefore they're able to keep neoconservative resumes in the pipeline with the endorsement of the vice president's office, which is one of the reasons why Trump winds up being so outflanked within his own administration by people who do not agree with him on fundamental policies whether it's trade or immigration or specially foreign policy and War so all of that is a preamble to say that the stakes could not possibly be higher not only because Donald Trump's pick for vice president this time has a very good shot at becoming the Republican nominee in 2028 and becoming ultimately perhaps president but also because that person and his or her office in the next Trump Administration is going to be either a major source of neoconservative influence within the administration or for once we could have a dramatic change, where you actually have a vice president and a vice presidential staff that are loyal to the president and loyal to a non- Neoconservative agenda. 

9:58.  I raised an objection to you about Trump not being a good chooser of personnel.  Is Trump better, worse, or the same person that he was in 2016? 

10:50.  Well it's not just about Trump, it's about the people around him.  And Trump went into the White House in 2017 without having a network of political contacts that you need in order to fill White House offices.  It's not that there weren't people out there, but there are always these filters in politics.  Remember, the RNC by that point was actually quite close to Trump.  You had Jared Kushner, Trump's own son-in-law, a number of people in very influential positions were able to tell Trump, "Okay, bring this person in."  Trump had no idea who most of these folks were. 

11:30. How do these people get into his Circle they don't just come out of the sky.

11:35.  His son-in-law had been part of the family so that's a special Vector of influence when you're running for the Republican nomination As Trump was in 2016 try to not try to pull the rug out from under him which I thought they were going to do now the head of the Republican National Committee at that time to my surprise actually gave Trump a fair shot he didn't completely sabotage Trump as I expected in the primaries and then subsequently at the convention itself that earned a certain amount of respect from trump it was rather short-lived because Trump realized very soon that the RNC was actually quite a problematic Institution but at that time he thought well you know they've given me a shot and remember Trump is by nature very transactional and he's actually quite he could be loyal to people who are part of a coalition that is invested in him, so if he gets the impression that these people are supporting him he will actually be quite willing to give them a certain degree of support in return.  The other thing about Trump, one of his advantages, but also his disadvantages, is that he's not ideological at all.  He has pretty sound personal instincts.  He has a pretty common-sense view of the world, but he doesn't really doesn't spend his days and nights thinking about who's a conservative or neoconservative, who's a paleoconservative or a fusionist.  So he's quite naive, I think, about these inner workings of politics.  He's used to being a CEO where you hire someone, you can fire them at will, and you expect them to be loyal and their job and whole future career depends on the business they're working for and the person in charge of that business.  

13:22  Of course, in government, none of that applies.  In government, you have people who will stab you in the back, even if they're drawing a paycheck from you.  And you have people who see their career advancement in their ability to cash in on their betrayal of you, or their previous connection with you.  They don't feel any sense that their prosperity or doom depends on their loyalty.  So they have terrible incentives