Freaks and Geeks

By Nick Catoggio

Friday, August 08, 2025

 

It’s bad form to start thinking hard about the next presidential election before the midterms, but I can’t help it.

 

For one thing, the next Republican primary isn’t so much an election as it is a question of imperial succession. You don’t think the Soviets were talking—very quietly—in 1950 about who might follow Stalin?

 

For another, the subject was addressed recently by two influential figures on the right. (Allegedly addressed in one case, I should say.) If they’re thinking about it, it’s worth thinking about.

 

The president was asked in February whether he regarded J.D. Vance as his successor. “No,” he replied, calling the vice president one of many “very capable people” who might contend for the party’s nomination. But when he was asked again this past Monday whether he viewed Vance as his “heir apparent,” his tone was different.

 

“I think, most likely,” Trump answered. “In all fairness, he’s the vice president.” He repeated what he said in February about there being many “incredible people” who might succeed him, even mentioning Secretary of State Marco Rubio by name, but said of Vance that “certainly he’s doing a great job and he would be probably favored at this point.” As for Marco, “maybe [he] would get together with J.D. in some form,” the president speculated, seeming to imagine a Vance-Rubio ticket.

 

Hmmm.

 

A few days later, the Daily Mail reported that former Trump campaign chairman turned White House adviser turned podcaster turned federal convict Steve Bannon is “in the early stages of planning an audacious run for president in 2028.” A source claimed that Bannon has privately taken credit for the VP’s MAGA makeover when he was a candidate for Senate in Ohio and told confidants, “Love him … but Vance is not tough enough to run in 2028.”

 

Gossipy tabloid nonsense? Maybe not. Politico also heard whispers back in March about Bannon’s interest in running and couldn’t get him to deny it when they pressed him. “I think he’s serious,” one person who’s close to him told the publication at the time. Three other sources confirmed that Bannon “has long harbored presidential ambitions for himself.”

 

On Thursday he responded to the Daily Mail story with a two-word statement: “Trump 2028.” Not only isn’t that a denial, it’s realistically the only answer Bannon could have given if he is thinking about running in three years. Remember, the last time he stole part of the president’s spotlight and antagonized the royal family, he ended up temporarily banished from Trumpworld and christened with the nickname “Sloppy Steve.” The worst thing he could do for his viability right now is to anger Trump by seeming too eager to usher him off the political stage.

 

A Vance-Bannon primary fight in 2028 would be interesting, and not just for the usual Iran-Iraq War “root for casualties” reasons.

 

Scenes from the revolution.

 

Every illiberal revolution can be divided into freaks and geeks. The geeks are the intellectuals who take it seriously as an ideological project and aim to dogmatize it. The freaks are the foot soldiers looking for excuses to smash palaces and guillotine their cultural enemies, and will glom onto whatever utopian argle-bargle the geeks hand down to rationalize that bloodlust.

 

J.D. Vance is more geek than freak.

 

We shouldn’t get too cute about the distinction, as revolutionary theorists are plenty bloodthirsty in their own right. Stephen Miller is plainly one of the more intelligent and dogmatic “America First-ers” in Trump’s orbit, but he wouldn’t be half as influential on the right if he didn’t radiate the sense that he’d like to send everyone who can count to 10 in Spanish to a gulag.

 

The same goes for Vance. Recall that the most ruthlessly demagogic episode of the 2024 presidential campaign was instigated not by Donald Trump but by his running mate, the thinkin’ man’s populist. Geeks can’t get to the top of a movement as feral as MAGA unless they’re willing to fly their freak flag too.

 

Still, I maintain that J.D. is more geek than freak—so much so that I’d call him the purest geek in Trump’s administration. Whether Marco Rubio can summarize postliberal thought as articulated by nationalist eggheads like Patrick Deneen and Curtis Yarvin is anyone’s guess, but I guarantee that the vice president can. I don’t know if he took it seriously when he began his miraculous conversion from Never Trumper to proto-fascist at the precise moment he began to think about running for office, but to all appearances, he does now.

 

And so if we’re imagining how Vance might face a semi-serious primary challenge in 2028, it’s tempting to start there. As a geek and the president’s heir apparent, he’ll be the choice of both the New Right’s intellectual elite and the Trump-ified Republican establishment. That makes him ripe for attack by some lowbrow freak alleging that a party led by J.D. will drift too far from the movement’s revolutionary populist roots.

 

Think Marjorie Taylor Greene, who’s already begun laying the groundwork for an “I didn’t leave MAGA, MAGA left me” right-wing schism after Trump leaves office. While Vance blathers excitedly on the stump about whichever progressive economic policy has most recently captured his fancy, his freak opponent can and will lay into him for not guillotining nearly enough left-wing villains during his four years as VP. Why didn’t we get to see the Epstein files? Why wasn’t Barack Obama arrested for treason? Why hasn’t Big Pharma been sued over vaccines?

 

This is what I mean, or part of what I mean, whenever I refer to the rise of a “fundamentalist MAGA” wing of the GOP. Once Trump is gone, some meaningful percentage of his base will conclude that his chief failing as a leader was in not delivering enough scalps. There are many freaks on the American right and Vance’s ability to quote Curtis Yarvin won’t impress them, especially if some plainspoken Trump-ish demagogue who doesn’t sound like a Yale-educated lawyer has jumped in and is promising a guillotine on every street corner.

 

Vance the geek versus a fundie MAGA freak: That’s the match-up we might imagine if we’re sketching out a hypothetical primary. The funny thing about Steve Bannon angling to join the race, though, is that he’s not a freak—at least in the way that I’ve defined that term here.

 

If anything, he’s more of a geek than Vance is.

 

Battle of the geeks.

 

When he’s not hobnobbing with Chinese billionaires on their yachts, Bannon is the most earnest nationalist ideologue in major populist media.

 

You can turn on any MAGA program across a dozen different platforms and get the same ol’ slop about feminism and pedophile cabals and so on, but rarely will you find the host inveighing against cuts to Medicaid or encouraging Republicans to tax the rich. Bannon is the rare influencer who treats populism as containing some fixed policy content beyond “whatever Donald Trump wants this week.”

 

And while I’ve never sat through one of his podcast jeremiads, the sense I’ve gotten from reading about him is that he’s not as prone to kookiness about, say, chemtrails as the average Republican congresswoman turned gubernatorial candidate might be. He tends to stick to conspiracies that he’s essentially obliged to promote in order to maintain his audience share.

 

In short, Steve Bannon sounds like a guy who should be thrilled to have J.D. Vance as Trump’s heir apparent. They’re nationalist-geek birds of a feather. Even their views on matters like war with Iran align—or did, until Vance was enlisted to defend the airstrikes his boss ordered in June. One might think Bannon would be volunteering to manage J.D.’s 2028 campaign. Instead he’s considering challenging him (allegedly). Why?

 

The ironic answer is that, just as he isn’t freaky enough for some populist freaks, Vance may not be geeky enough for some populist geeks.

 

I suspect Bannon, as a self-appointed keeper of the MAGA revolutionary flame, views the first post-Trump Republican primary in 2028 as a death struggle for control over the direction of the movement. The thing he’s worried about above all is tech-bro libertarians throwing money around to play kingmaker, then using the influence they’ve purchased over the new nominee to push all sorts of anti-nationalist policies. An end to tariffs, the return of high-skilled immigration, even deeper cuts to the welfare state: It’s all potentially on the menu.

 

And since the freaks who populate the movement are willing to go along with pretty much anything ideologically so long as they get to keep the guillotine running, there’s a real chance that those positions would become Republican orthodoxy again more easily than a diehard nationalist like Bannon would like to imagine.

 

Nothing demonstrates his anxiety about the right regressing toward liberalism better than his raging contempt for Elon Musk, the most influential tech bro in the world. Last December, when Musk defended H-1B visas for foreigners, Bannon warned him to get with the populist program or else “we’re going to rip your face off.” When Musk fell out with the president in June, Bannon seized the moment and declared that “I am of the strong belief that he is an illegal alien, and he should be deported from the country immediately.”

 

A month later, when Elon announced that he would create a third party, Bannon dubbed him “Elmo the Mook” and said of Musk, a naturalized citizen, “you’re not an American. You’re a South African.” Hoo boy.

 

Once you understand that Bannon’s hostility to Musk is driven mainly by his fear of liberalism re-infiltrating the GOP, you’ll understand his misgivings about Vance. J.D. is, after all, the tech-bro candidate: He worked for Peter Thiel in the private sector and his super PAC received a $15 million donation from Thiel during his 2022 run for Senate. Vance even became a sort of liaison to Silicon Valley for Trump during last year’s campaign. Bannon has digested all of that and now worries, I suspect, that the VP’s nationalist beliefs will evaporate in a political world where earning Musk’s favor suddenly matters more than earning Trump’s.

 

And who can blame him? The seminal fact about Vance’s brief but spectacular career in American politics is that at any given moment he believes whatever he’s required to believe to get ahead in the GOP. In 2016, when it looked like Trumpist populism would produce a Hillary Clinton victory, he was a conservative Trump critic; by 2021, with Trumpism now the right’s dominant ideology, he was a postliberal. By 2028, if Musk and Thiel have bought their way to power-broker status in the party, Vance might very well be a seasteader.

 

He seems like an earnest nationalist geek, but he’s seemed like a lot of things over the last decade. If you were Steve Bannon and wanted to make sure that President Vance doesn’t sell out the populist dreck you hold dear, what would you do?

 

You would primary him in 2028—or recruit someone like-minded who’s more formidable on the stump, like Tucker Carlson, to do so. You might not win (and almost surely wouldn’t) but running a “fundamentalist MAGA” campaign to Vance’s right that depicts him and his donors as traitors to the “America First” agenda would at least keep J.D. honest. “Vance will flood American companies with foreign engineers because that’s what Elon Musk wants!” is a fine message on the stump if what you really want is to pressure your opponent into making promises not to do such a thing.

 

That’s what Bannon is up to in wanting to run, I think. He’s going to force the vice president to be the nationalist ideologue that he postures as by forcing him to keep pace with “fundamentalist MAGA.”

 

Next moves.

 

Although I might be overestimating him.

 

It’s possible that Bannon has become so radicalized by postliberalism that he takes Vance’s conversion to the cause at face value but still finds him too squishy as a potential leader. It’s not enough to be able to quote Curtis Yarvin and mean it, Bannon might believe; America needs a leader who will seize the means of production from woke corporations and redistribute Elon Musk’s fortune among underemployed red-state tweakers.

 

He wouldn’t be the first prominent broadcaster to lose his or her marbles under pressure to meet modern populism’s demand for insanity, and he won’t be the last.

 

Or perhaps Bannon is worried about something more prosaic—namely, Vance’s electability. J.D. may be a sincere revolutionary geek, but that won’t matter if he can’t get the freaks excited to turn out on Election Day for him. The sort of low-propensity voter who didn’t take much interest in politics until Trump turned it into pro wrestling might need more Hulk-Hogan-esque theatrics than a cerebral demagogue like Vance can comfortably provide. Bannon, a fire-and-brimstone MAGA media star, is better suited to the task.

 

But let’s give the vice president some credit: Whatever else he is, he’s a smart guy.

 

I know that he recognizes he might have a “freak problem” in 2028. And how do I know? Because he recognized it in 2022 and addressed it proactively.

 

The Ohio Senate primary field that year was crowded and J.D. had stiff competition from Josh Mandel to be the most boorishly “authentic” populist in the race. He did the basic stuff he needed to do to win, raking in ThielBucks and appearing a zillion times on Carlson’s Fox News show to get Trump’s attention, but he also had the good sense to seek out Marjorie Taylor Greene for an endorsement and to invite her to campaign for him there.

 

There’s no figure in the Republican Party, the president included, whose blessing more clearly signals to the GOP base, “This chud is completely unfit for office, which is exactly why we must elect him.” Just as the Grinch’s heart grew three sizes when he realized the true meaning of Christmas, Vance’s populist credibility grew three sizes when he began embracing the least respectable figures on the right.

 

He’ll be proactive again in that regard after the midterms as he looks to clear the 2028 primary field early by building up an insurmountable lead. We’ll see many more Vance photo ops with the likes of Greene and Laura Loomer, I’m sure. He’ll appear on a white nationalist podcast or two and then feign innocence afterward. (“I didn’t know. I’d never listened to it before.”) He’ll become the official ribbon-cutter whenever the administration opens a new “Alligator Alcatraz” somewhere. J.D. knows what the freaks like.

 

By the time he’s done, my guess is that the only faction that will find him unacceptable is the dregs who deem it disqualifying that his children are half-Indian. Sloppy Steve will have to learn to live with Vance-ism.