Former president Donald Trump called Melania ‘Mercedes’ as he praised his wife during a speech in Washington DC. The crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) gave the former First Lady a standing ovation as Mr Trump described how “people love her”. “Oh look at that Mercedes, that’s pretty good” he said as the audience stood and applauded. The GOP presidential hopeful was making the keynote speech on 24 February on the same day as voters head to the polls in the South Carolina primary.
Dying in office won’t produce mayhem. We have a well established process for that. The VP takes over and fights with Congress over who gets appointed as the next VP. The only drama will be who fills that role.
Dying just before the election? Now that will be a clown show. If the vacancy happens after the party convention the ballots likely wouldn’t be able to be changed. However, as you likely know we are not voting for President and VP directly, we are voting for a slate of Electors pledged to the candidates. Many states bind those electors to vote according to the popular vote, and those states would need to pass quick laws changing that process.
If it’s the winning side whose candidate bites it, there needs to be a ton of coordination to all this. Because there is still a process to counting those EC votes. If some votes come in for the deceased candidate at the top of the ticket and some don’t, they will likely be counted separately and as a result no one would technically have the majority.
We do have a weird way to resolve that, though: if the EC has no majority, the House votes on the President and the Senate votes on the VP. But the House vote has an additional wrinkle, in that each State’s delegation gets one vote. So, all 50+ of California’s members get 1 vote, and Wyoming’s Lone member also gets a vote. The math there favors the Republican candidate, even if Democrats control the House.
It could also result in the Republican choice being President while the Democrat becomes VP, which would make for the world’s most awkward Peformance Reviews.
If you don’t think that the US president dying in office will lead to global upheaval, you’re crazy. The stock market went nuts when the defense Secretary was hospitalized. There’s global responses to tweets FFS.
The stock market fluctuating is not mayhem. It’s designed to go nuts. Traders make money on volatility. I bet there is some high frequency trader who makes millions of dollars in trades every time Elon takes a shit.
Global upheaval is some country deciding to invade a US ally because we had an election and the fascist lost, even within our EC guidelines, but might take office anyway.
It’s a reflection of sentiment, when it’s going haywire that means the decision makers are nervous.
The US is clearly in a weaker position in terms of global influence than it’s been in the past 30 to 50 years. Any and every opportunity that they offer Iran, Russia, China etc. Is obviously going to further destabilize in unstable situation. The US can’t even get its budgets in order and face shutdowns on a quarterly basis. Throw a backup president into that situation and you don’t think there’s going to be major problems? That’s beyond wishful thinking and firmly in the fantasy land.
Sentiment is not reality. The stock market is a voting machine in the short term, but a weighing machine in the long term. This means yearly financials are the only thing that really matter for investing. Do not worry about a 20-50% drop in prices. That appears to happen every decade or so.
Just because it “goes crazy”, I guarantee you US Treasury Bonds will not go down in price. In fact, I bet they go up in price. Whenever there’s large issues in the world there’s a “flight to safety”. US Treasuries are the safest assets around.
I’m fascinated by the ability to see how completely fucked up American politics has been for the past decade+, and honestly believe that a president dying in office wouldn’t throw the government completely off the rails. It’s barely on the rails right now.
But at least there is a clear sucession if a President dies in office. Yes, they are the backup, but continuity is not in question. Its happened before, the Republic survived. We haven’t had any candidate die right before an election.
Well, there was RFK, he was killed before the convention and he wasn’t the front-runner at the time anyway. But that 1968 Democratic Convention could be rightfully described as “upheaval”.
Wall Street historically closes when a President dies.