Will Trump dump Vance or just keep cheating on him with his new jumpoff?

Me and RFK . . . we’ve got a thing . . . going on:

This right here is from a NYT story that described Friday as a “good day” for Trump because he managed to stay “on message” when talking to some restaurant workers in the afternoon (but not of course at the rally in the evening):

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who had suspended his own presidential campaign a few hours earlier, appeared onstage as pyrotechnics spurted into the air and the Foo Fighters’ song “Here Comes My Hero” blared.

“We don’t agree on everything,” Mr. Kennedy said, before telling the crowd how he had been won over. He described yet another version of Mr. Trump — one that seemed less familiar. He said Mr. Trump cared about getting “the chemicals out of our food” (McDonald’s factors heavily into Mr. Trump’s own nutritional pyramid) and that he would be a champion of free speech who would end “censorship” (Mr. Trump has proposed jailing journalists).

The former president implied that, given the attempt on his life, he could commiserate with the Kennedy family. “Bobby called me to express his best wishes” after the shooting in Butler, Pa., Mr. Trump said. He promised to appoint a commission on assassination attempts (like the one on him) and release any remaining secret records about the Kennedy assassination.

They made an odd pair, and it might have seemed like a strange sideshow, one that may end up helping Mr. Trump little in the end. But every little bit counts.

These are not serious people — and by that I mean Trump, Kennedy, and the elite national reporters who continue, nine years down this road, to treat it all as just another reality TV show with good ratings.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump continues to decompensate in public, two and a half months before a coalition of fascists, religious lunatics, money-mad plutocrats, old timey racists, 8chan incels, and the kind of swing voters who can’t name the two countries bordering the United States threaten to put him back in the White House:

It’s hard to wrap one’s mind around the fact that, in addition to the installation of an aspiring authoritarian ethno-nationalist dictator, the re-election of Trump would instantly put us into 25th amendment territory, except the 25th amendment can’t possibly help in these circumstances, because its authors and ratifiers didn’t have “one of the two major parties becomes a cult of personality” on their institutionalist bingo cards.

Alas, poor Merrick, I knew him. A fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy.