Vanity Fair complains about ‘terrifyingly competent’ Trump 2024 campaign

Writing for the outlet, Gabriel Sherman attests that President Donald Trump has a strong, competent, efficient team running his campaign for a second term in office.

"How worried should you be?" He asks. "Very."

Sherman complained that even Trump's legal troubles aren't enough to derail the campaign. In fact, that "legal peril" has only bolstered his support, as evidenced by the reaction to Trump's mug shot, taken when he was booked and arraigned in Fulton County, Georgia after DA Fani Willis brought a RICO indictment against him and 18 other co-defendants.

"To Democrats and the fraction of Republicans horrified by the idea of a second Trump administration, it symbolized his dangerous criminality. For MAGA and the majority of GOP voters, it would be visual proof of Trump’s persecution by the deep state," Sherman wrote. Mug shot merch brought some $7 million into the campaign's coffers.

"If Trump wins back the White House, his increasingly extreme and violent rhetoric is poised to become policy," Sherman worries. And the real concern, for Sherman, is that it just might happen.

"While his 2016 agenda was frequently stymied by infighting and incompetence, available signs point to a second West Wing staffed by loyalists who would actually carry out his policies. The takeover of the Republican National Committee, which Trump recently completed, installing his daughter-in-law Lara as cochair, is a blueprint to keep in mind," Sherman states.

As if that wasn't bad enough for Sherman and Vanity Fair, Jason Miller, Trump's senior campaign adviser, told Sherman that "resident Trump knows who can deliver and who can’t. The backstabbers who were around in 2016 won’t be in this next White House."

In other words, Trump is insanely popular among his base, he took nearly half the vote in 2020, his support has not waned during Biden's administration, and now he's got a campaign team that is proven, competent, loyal, strong, and focused.

For Sherman, and indeed for many Democrats, this is like the moment in Adam Sandler's film Happy Gilmore when the hapless golfer who had nothing but a great long game suddenly learns to putt: Trump's team, Sherman worries, might be engineered to go all the way.

After digging into who might staff the West Wing under Trump during a second term, and just how damaging it would be for the "administrative state" to be "disintegrated," Sherman has only one thing to say: "God help us, indeed."