In this world, nothing is certain except that the next Republican presidential hopeful will be “scarier” than the last.
This is one of the most frequent narratives in modern political messaging. So frequent, in fact, that it has become nearly as predictable as flu season, only drearier and with less charm.
You can practically set your watch to it.
Former White House mouthpiece Jen Psaki, for example, warned this week that Vice President JD Vance, who will almost certainly make a play for the Oval Office in 2028, is “scarier” than President Donald Trump, who once held the title of existential threat to American democracy. Watergate, the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and even the American Civil War? Nothing compared to the threat posed by Trump, the supposedly demented nuclear war-happy Moscow agent.
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But that was then. This is now. Vance is likely the next Republican to make a serious play for the White House, and the next Republican presidential hopeful is always worse than the last one, according to the same team that told us Mitt Romney, the milquetoastiest of milquetoast candidates ever to run, was a silent-film-style mustache-twirling villain.
Vance “wants to be president more than anything else,” Psaki warned during an appearance on some wine mom podcast. “He’s willing to do anything to get there.”
Speaking of people who want to be president more than anything else, Psaki’s former employer, sad sack former President Joe Biden, spent 32 years trying to win the title of commander in chief. It wasn’t until his third attempt, in 2020, during a pandemic, that he finally made it. How’s that for context?
“He’s scarier in certain ways [than Trump],” Psaki continued. “He’s young and ambitious and agile in the sense that he is a chameleon who makes himself into whatever he thinks the audience wants to hear from him.”
Yes, yes. We’ve heard it all before.
The previous looming threat to American democracy, not named Trump, was Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), who seemed, at one point, to have a serious path to the White House. Back when this seemed like a reality, the Huffington Post, which declared Trump in 2017 to be the “Most Dangerous Man in the World,” warned that “No One Is More Dangerous For The White House Than Ron DeSantis — Including Donald Trump.” This was similar to when Washington Post columnist Max Boot wrote that “DeSantis is smarter than Trump,” which “may make him more of a threat,” but that was also after he claimed in 2020 that Trump was “the worst threat to our democracy since the 1930s.”
When it wasn’t DeSantis, it was Romney, the great pussycat of American politics, whom Psaki’s old (both literally and metaphorically) boss once accused of conspiring to put black people “back in chains.”
The former Massachusetts governor was also accused of homophobia, bullying, and cruelty to animals. Romney was even blamed for supposedly allowing the death of a woman who had been diagnosed with cancer.
In 2008, the great threat was GOP nominee Sen. John McCain, who was characterized as being possibly worse for the White House than even President George W. Bush. The Arizona senator was portrayed as more hawkish, possibly more militant, a “man of the hard right,” and “as slippery and evasive as” Bush. This was a hell of a thing to read even at the time, considering that, up until the 2008 election, McCain had enjoyed a great deal of positive media coverage for his tendency to break with the GOP. But that was then. Now, there was an election to win, and McCain, the onetime maverick of the United States Senate, was supposedly as bad, if not worse, than Bush the “moron” dictator, according to the news media.
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It’s even more fascinating now to read such takes, given that McCain has experienced a sort of retrospective image rehab in the same press that once depicted him as possibly worse than Bush.
Speaking of which, recall that, in 2003, we were warned that George W. Bush was “incomparably more dangerous than Reagan or any other president in this nation’s history.”
Meanwhile, between 1980 and 1996, when both George H.W. Bush and Bob Dole were accused of lurching to the hard right, Ronald Reagan himself was portrayed in news media as uniquely “dangerous,” soulless, and “reckless.”
“It will take 100 years to get the government back into place after Reagan,” then-White House reporter Sarah McClendon said two years after the Gipper’s presidency. “He hurt people: the disabled, women, nursing mothers, the homeless.”
NBC News’s Bryant Gumbel once remarked of America’s 37th president, “As opposed to a man like Reagan, Nixon is, was highly regarded as a genuine statesman with a first-class mind.”
Even Nixon wasn’t as bad as Reagan!
Get the picture?
The next guy is always going to be worse than the last guy, regardless of who he is.
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Trump? Romney? McCain? Bush?
It’s all the same. Does the GOP candidate have a shot at the White House? If so, then he is the most dangerous man ever to seek the office. Just fill in the details later.