I’ve heard various takes and reactions to Trump’s JD Vance decision. I’ve thought of it as a choice that shows Trump thinks he’s in the driver’s seat and doesn’t have to appeal to any groups for support. I’ve heard others say that this is to nail down Blue Wall states in the Midwest, in part on the basis of people who remember the Vance of Hillbilly Elegy. It’s quite possible that the biggest thing is the more mundane and human fact that Vance did the best at cozying up with Don Jr. over the last year. But the most substantive and real thing is that this creates a deeply and coherently authoritarian ticket: big into Trumpian executive power, very anti-abortion right down to unleashing red states to surveil women’s travel and reproductive health services, deeply anti-U.S. alliances, the whole package.

Jon Chait has a new article up at New York Magazine in his series of articles about Joe Biden and the need for him to end his candidacy to make way for a younger, more viable candidate. His main issue now is that the people in the Democratic Party who were pushing hardest to get Biden to step aside have, he says, simply given up and accepted losing the presidency. He then analogizes this move to the atmosphere after 9/11 in which Democrats rallied around George W. Bush as an act of national unity. He finds this perverse because there’s nothing about national unity that makes you suddenly accept the ascension of the primary driver of political violence and national chaos simply because that person became the target of violence.

I find myself disagreeing with most of these particular claims but agreeing with the overriding one: I recoil at the center of my being from Democrats’ tendency to just fold at the first, second and third sign of difficulty.

If there was any question about what the rest of this campaign is going to be like, I think we got the answer with the selection of JD Vance. Vance is no dummy and he is probably the most revanchist nationalist choice Trump could have made. He’s definitely an anti-U.S. alliances person, isolationist in a very Trumpy way, but more coherently so. He was out aggressively over the weekend blaming Democrats for the attempted assassination of Donald Trump. I expect that to be the theme of this week’s convention, whatever the early claims about national unity. He’s one of those guys who initially found Trump disreputable and beyond the pale and then did a full makeover to embrace the man and his politics after Trump took over the GOP. Notably Vance comes out of the Peter Thiel world in Silicon Valley. So he likely brings a significant amount of money with him, which won’t hurt. It’s the kind of choice you make if you’re pretty confident you’re going to win because this takes you from 100% Trumpy to more like 130% Trumpy. It’s a fateful choice. We’ll see if that prediction is right.