Finally Vance has the charm of a dirty hotel towel and would not get away with half of what Trump does....Actually I doubt very few of the Trump circle today would have what it takes to replace him. Trump is a one in a billion combo of ruthlessness, narcissism and charisma.

Vance definitely doesn't have the popularity that Trump does, that's true.

As to Trump and charisma...this isn't really an area where I've read much material on. I have read a number of assertions (both on the right, from think tanks hoping that Republican voters who came out to vote for Trump can be siphoned off to more-generally-vote-Republican even after Trump is gone, and on the left) that Trump in particular is charismatic. I...have a hard time seeing it myself. I don't really like the guy, and I'm not his target audience, and that might color my position. But I think that it is fair to say that Trump is not personally loved by many. I went through Pew and similar polls back during Trump 1, because I wanted to understand why people would vote for him, and Trump had a lot of quite negative ratings from people who did come out to vote for him---like, there was a not-terribly-high level of trust in him. However, they actively disliked Hillary Clinton, and for many, a Trump that maybe wasn't very trustworthy was someone that they deeply disliked.

I tend to fall into the "what's special about Trump is mostly that he's been willing to really flagrantly lie to a much greater degree than most other candidates". Like, I don't think that the political benefits of doing so are sustainable---Trump was able to do what he could do because prior presidents had built up credibility, so when Trump says something, he was able to benefit from that credibility. Trump was willing to state major, bold-faced lies, even statements that were at odds with his own past statements. And there have also been plenty of Republicans who have commented on that as well...like, I remember Ted Cruz saying something about how incredibly dishonest Trump was.

I'm not saying that politicians are, as a group, beacons of honesty and forthrightness, but the US convention was more "you need to look at the fine print on what someone's saying, which might be misleading". It wasn't "politician will just say whatever he happens to think will be useful at the moment, without concern for whether his own statements are even self-consistent".

Trump himself has approval ratings now that are about as low as US presidents have ever had them. I'm skeptical that even if the US had a three-term limit, that Trump would have been able to win a third term. Some of that is probably because he's not in a position to try for a third term, so he isn't bothering to try to position himself for such, but I also don't think that part of his strategy was long-term sustainable.

That being said, I do think that there are things that Trump did that subsequent politicians might pick up. Like, US politicians haven't tried to really do hard plays to nativism for quite a while. But...they have happened in the past.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_Nothing

The American Party, known as the Native American Party before 1855[a] and colloquially referred to as the Know Nothing, Know-Nothings, or the Know Nothing Party, was an Old Stock nativist political movement in the United States from the 1840s through the 1850s. Members of the movement were required to say "I know nothing" whenever they were asked about its specifics by outsiders, providing the group with its colloquial name.[4]

Supporters of the Know Nothing movement believed that an alleged "Romanist" conspiracy to subvert civil and religious liberty in the U.S. was being hatched by Catholics. Therefore, they sought to politically organize native-born Protestants in defense of their traditional religious and political values. The Know Nothing movement is remembered for this theme because Protestants feared that Catholic priests and bishops would control a large bloc of voters. In most places, the ideology and influence of the Know Nothing movement lasted only one or two years before it disintegrated due to weak and inexperienced local leaders, a lack of publicly proclaimed national leaders, and a deep split over the issue of slavery. In parts of the South, the party did not emphasize anti-Catholicism as frequently as it emphasized it in the North and it stressed a neutral position on slavery,[5] but it became the main alternative to the dominant Democratic Party.[4]

The Know Nothings supplemented their xenophobic nativist views with populist appeals. At the state level, the party was, in some cases, progressive in its stances on "issues of labor rights and the need for more government spending"[6] and furnished "support for an expansion of the rights of women, the regulation of industry, and support of measures which were designed to improve the status of working people".[7][attribution needed] It was a forerunner of the temperance movement in the U.S.[4]

I could very much believe that post-Trump Republican politicians are going to be playing more to anti-immigrant voters in the future, for example. I don't think that Trump is unique there.

We haven't heard much about it recently, but Trump's own major thing during Trump 1 was "The Wall", where he gave the impression that there was going to be a wall built spanning the southern border and which would end illegal immigration to the US. That itself is just a rehashed "The Fence", from Bush Jr. (where Bush did build some fencing around crossings, but certainly nothing like what was envisioned by the anti-immigrant crowd that was supporting him). Bush was a lot less outrageous about it, but the story there ain't new.

I'm really skeptical that Big Lie-type stuff is going to persist. I don't think that it's so much that Donald Trump can uniquely do it, but that it relies on expending accrued credibility, and Trump is going to have eaten up a lot of that. Like, I think that if you had a new politician who was very, very much like Trump in all ways running for President in 2030, that it would be difficult for him to repeat Trump's path.

Trump managed to sell himself as something new, an agent of change, because he sounded so different from prior politicians. If the guy broke with social norms, maybe he'd implement changes that a bunch of people wanted. I don't think that it's possible for him or someone else to get "credibility as an agent of change" from doing a repeat of that.

The article on Russia misses out that there will be plenty of power struggle after Putin, unless somebody snags the reins pretty much instantaneously. There is so much money and power and influence to be made immediately after he is gone that the layer he controls today will be frothing mad to secure their shares before any of the others do.

I dunno, man. I think that many people surrounding Putin don't want to be President of Russia so much as they want to stay exactly where they are. That is, they've got an interest in the structure that lets them retain their position stay the same. Dropping some new guy in that does more-or-less the same thing lets them do that, regardless of the specifics of who that is. Conflict risks that going away. There may very well be multiple people who would like to be New Putin, but I think that the problem is that the people who control the existing structures of power have an interest in there not being conflict over the matter. Like, they might prefer Person A or Person B, but none of them want things to radically change.

If someone who wants to run Russia doesn't have that backing, then they won't be subject to those incentives. But without that backing, I think that it'd be hard for them to be able to come to power (and that's basically what the FPRI article is saying). Like, the people who are most-likely to be viable candidates are going to rely on the support of people who may have different preferences as to New Putin, but have a lot at stake in there not being a conflict, in having the status quo maintained. Like, I don't think that any of those people want, say, a Navalny to come to power.