Vance's Vulture Volta

The Hollow Man's Guide to Exploiting Tragedy for Fun, Profit and the Presidency

Vance hosting Kirk’s podcast or playing president - right down to the plain red tie.

J.D. Vance is having a moment. And what a ghoulish moment it is.

The baby-faced veep with the dead eyes was practically purring Monday as he commandeered "The Charlie Kirk Show" — because nothing says "tribute to a fallen friend" quite like hijacking his corpse for a campaign commercial.

Poor Charlie. One minute he's hosting a show, the next he's providing the backdrop for Vance's audition reel. It's like watching someone practice their Oscar speech at a funeral.

"The last several days have been extremely hard for our country," Vance intoned with all the genuine emotion of Siri reading a grocery list. But those calculating peepers told the real story: Cha-ching! Another tragedy, another opportunity for the spotlight. 2028, the 25th or bust. White House here I come.

This is vintage Vance — the man who shape-shifts faster than Proteus. Remember when he called Trump "America's Hitler"? That was so 2016. Now he's America's Eddie Haskell, all "Yes, Mr. President" and "Whatever you say, sir" while eyeing the big chair like a starving man stares at a cheeseburger.

The Ohio opportunist has been dropping hints about his readiness to step up like breadcrumbs leading to the Oval Office. His recent USA Today interview about his "excellent on-the-job training" was less constitutional duty, more "Please, please, pick me!"

You could practically hear him thinking: "I can't think of better on-the-job training than what I've gotten over the last 200 days." Translation: "I've been studying the succession manual like it's the Dead Sea Scrolls."

Given Trump's, shall we say, vintage condition — the man collects mysterious bruises like other people collect coffee mugs — Vance's unseemly eagerness takes on a positively Shakespearean quality. Lady Macbeth had nothing on this guy.

But here's the delicious irony: while J.D. preens and poses, Marco Rubio — remember him? — is actually, you know, doing the job. The Secretary of State has been conspicuously absent from the succession theater, probably too busy with that quaint old practice called "governing," albeit poorly.

How terribly uncool of him.

Meanwhile, the puppet masters are pulling strings with Silicon Valley precision. Peter Thiel didn't pour $15 million into Vance's Senate campaign out of Buckeye State nostalgia. No, the dead-eyed libertarian emperor was making an investment — buying himself a presidency on layaway.

Elon's been floating trial balloons about backing his boy for 2028, because why wait for democracy when you can just purchase it wholesale? It's like Amazon Prime Day for authoritarianism.

The math is brutally simple: Find an ambitious nobody. Fund him. Shape him. Install him. Voilà — you've got yourself a president who thinks he earned his way to the top but was really just assembled like IKEA furniture.

Vance has reinvented himself more times than Madonna. Hillbilly Elegy J.D. Yale Law J.D. Never-Trump J.D. Trump-Whisperer J.D. And now, the coup de grâce: Future President J.D.

Each makeover has been perfectly calibrated for maximum political advantage. He's like a political Transformer — same hollow core, different shiny exterior.

The Nixon comparisons are everywhere, but they're too generous. Nixon was a bastard — flawed, paranoid, brilliant — and chased out of 1600. Imagine being compared that? And Vance is Nixon without the gravitas, Iago without the poetry, just a sociopath in a $3,000 suit pretending to have feelings.

His performance Monday was so pitch-perfect, so thoroughly rehearsed, it resembled nothing so much as artificial intelligence trying to simulate human grief. The concerned furrow of the brow. The practiced pause. The manufactured moment of reflection.

It was grief porn for the MAGA masses.

And Trump? That useful idiot thinks he's the buyer in this transaction. Plot twist: he was always the product being sold. While he preens about his "excellent" choice of running mate, his protégé is already measuring the drapes.

The tragedy isn't just Charlie Kirk's death. It's watching his assassination get transformed into a launching pad for the ambitions of a man who wouldn't recognize authentic emotion if it bit him on the ass.

J.D. Vance wants to be president, and he'll dance on any grave to get there. The question isn't whether he has the ambition — it's whether America can survive a president whose hunger for power is matched only by his talent for mimicking human emotion.

We're watching the rise of the perfect politician for our degraded moment: a hollow man in an expensive suit, calling exploitation leadership and betrayal strategy.

God help us when the music stops.