Plus: Explaining wet-bulb temperatures. Cannon bends over backward.

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In today’s edition:

• Vance is just Trump with even more zeal. The GOP needs to brace for a new future.
• Wet-bulb temperatures are the best measure of dangerous heat
• A Trump judge throws out precedent and the hope for accountability

MAGA’s Mini-Me

Well, you can’t fault Donald Trump for lack of confidence.

There’s no other explanation for the former president’s pick of J.D. Vance as his running mate. As Jim Geraghty writes, choosing the Ohio senator “is as close as Trump can get to doubling down on himself.”

No attempt to budge up his ceiling of support with a more temperate choice. No olive branch to the old-school Republicans so repulsed by Trumpian bombast. “No broadening of appeal,” Jim writes. “Trump is rejecting the idea that it’s needed.”

The only thing Trump seems interested in expanding, George Will writes, is his own movement; Vance is the very embodiment of “the serrated edge of MAGA politics.” And if there is none pious like the new convert, expect exceptional zeal from the man who once said Trump could be “America’s Hitler.”

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(A counterpoint from Hugh Hewitt: Vance, who credits the Marine Corps with shaping his character, could win over enough veterans to deliver swing states to Trump.)

Beyond self-regard, what else does Trump’s selection signal? For the latest Prompt 2024 newsletter, Megan McArdle convened conservatives Jason Willick and Ramesh Ponnuru to discuss the future of a Trump-Vance GOP. The takeaway is that a clear MAGA heir (at 39, no less) locks the Republican Party into its “trajectory toward populism and noninterventionism,” as Jason says.

The Editorial Board pronounces pretty much dead the orthodoxy of Ronald Reagan and the two Bush presidencies, by which the United States held itself to responsible global leadership. The board also worries over Vance’s antidemocratic instincts and threats to weaponize political power.

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But “just as many Americans hold out hope that Mr. Trump, in the wake of the assassination attempt, will look toward the country’s better angels,” the board writes, “it’s possible that Mr. Vance will evolve with him, and chart a constructive path.”

Possible, sure. But I tend to agree with Jason, who says Vance’s path leads only to more aggression and confrontation.

A chilling illustration comes in the form of the platform adopted at this week’s GOP convention. Four years ago, you got the sense that Republicans chose not to adopt a platform at all partly because doing so would be a final capitulation.

This year, though, they’re all in, producing a document economics writer Brian Riedl calls “economically incoherent and not remotely conservative.” I’ll let you go through his analysis and match up the GOP’s policies to the other adjectives he uses to describe them. They are variously chaotic, cruel, “poisonous,” “totally infeasible,” “wildly unconstitutional.”

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And remember — confidently so.

Chaser: Jen Rubin says that post-assassination attempt, coverage of political violence and threats thereof — including........

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