Just like General George Armstrong Custer, known as Yellow Hair to the Cheyenne, led his 7th Calvary to defeat, the Republican’s orange-haired leader ignores all the signs he needs to change his plan. The rash, self-promoting Custer refused to believe his Crow Indian scouts when they told him he was riding into a trap. The overconfident General even divided his forces. The outcome was one of the worst defeats in U.S. military history.

Since April of last year, I’ve been sounding the alarm about a carefully laid election trap for the GOP. The Democrats, through lawfare, managed to secure Trump’s nomination. The weak cases against him garnered sympathy for him and diverted attention from the more viable younger contenders. Lawfare was the Democrats’ tool to handpick their weakest opponent, Trump. Their goal was never to halt him, but quite the opposite.

Now that they secured the feeblest Republican ticket most Democrats could beat, dumping their losers in favor of younger winners is happening. Even with the near miss on Trump’s life holding back calls for Joe to go for a couple of days, the last two weeks have gone as I forecast. The Biden-Harris ticket is now history. As soon as the Republican V.P. nominee was announced, it was just a matter of days.

Somewhere, the trap planners were cheering when Trump selected J.D. Vance. With only a few percentage points apart, the one who can add even a little to the total will win.

J.D. Vance adds absolutely nothing to the ticket’s appeal. In fact, I’ll make the case that he will subtract. If Trump hasn’t garnered the blue-collar voters feeling left behind by a changing world by now, they aren’t any more getable. Where the Republicans have come up short in the last three elections is in the suburbs, mainly suburban women. Nikki Haley and Glen Youngkin showed their ability to attract these voters. Vance likely will repel them.

The only issue consistently favoring the Democrats is abortion. Vance is on record with extreme anti-abortion positions. Further, traditional free-market Republicans abhor his protectionist industrial policy leanings. George Will characterizes these as “progressiveism-lite.” Many Reagan Republicans have always been leary of Trunmp’s attraction to big government. With the Vance selection, he may be showing his true colors.

If this selection makes me pause about voting for Trump, it could affect others similarly. It doesn’t mean they’ll vote for the Democrat. Still, they could skip Trump on the ballot, figuring his loss might lead to having real Republican-winning candidates in the future. In an election where Trump needs every vote he can get, any number thinking as I do will weaken him further.

Who will prevail at the open Democratic convention? It won’t be Kamala Harris. She does worse in the tossup states than others and polls no better than Joe. As an administration member, she can’t avoid its abysmal record. Worse, she lied to the public about the President’s condition. Why go through all the effort to dump one loser for another?

Still, to appease crucial voting groups, a black and a woman must be on the ticket. Someone from a needed rustbelt state could only help. That leaves only two possible tickets, Michelle Obama and Josh Shapiro or Gretchen Witmaer and Wes Moore. If Michelle makes herself available, the former is the strongest, but the latter also will top Trump-Vance.

But won’t even a new ticket have to defend the terrible Biden-Harris record? Not so much. The Obama-Clinton regular party stalwarts will pick the ticket, and they can claim they were never on board with all the administration’s programs.

Inflation is the single biggest election issue, and looking back, key economic representatives of both the Clinton and Obama administrations did sound the alarm that Biden’s wild spending would cause high inflation. Larry Summers and Jason Furman weren’t bashful in their destain for Biden’s reckless policies. The Obamas and Clintons couldn’t be seen undercutting the President they recently put in office. Still, these well-known surrogates indicated where they stood. Joe was veering off to the far left when he was only supposed to be a middle-of-the-road placeholder. They couldn’t control him. After all, the stubborn old guy was the President. They can blame it all on Joe.

With a much younger ticket, the age issue gets turned on its head. With the heightened awareness of the ravages of time, everyone will now be looking for slippage in everything Trump does. His acceptance speech could have been more reassuring. The first half hour hit all the right notes about the assassination attempt and unity in the forefront. However, the rest was a boring mess. Some of it is weird. Would he really have stayed in Afghanistan after he had negotiated the withdrawal? Meandering isn’t a good look for either Biden or Trump.

The fact that so many find Kamala Harris unacceptable as a presidential replacement for an old guy now casts the same light on Vance. A senator with less than two years of experience and no government executive experience doesn’t come close to the reassuring presence of Doug Burgum or Glenn Youngin. Most people would’ve voted for Nikki Haley.

I know Barrack Obama had a similar lack of experience. Still, we’ve all seen Obama and would say, J.D., you’re no Barrack Obama.

It amazes me that even now, Republicans and the media on the right seem unaware of how things have changed. I can’t believe how many anti-Biden-Hrris commercials I’ve seen today. Can’t they save some money and stop them? These are the two you can win against. Trump’s top confidant, Jason Miller, appeared on Fox News after the convention and expressed nothing about adjustments in light of the changed circumstances.

With all the media now focused on the possible Democratic ticket, Trump-Vance will lose oxygen. With overwhelming enthusiasm for their young, attractive ticket coming out of their convention, the Democrats will have the momentum to carry the election only a month later. I might’ve been early, but others like Nikki Haley and Texas Senator Ted Cruz have since voiced the same warnings. As Nikki Haley said, “The first one to retire their 80-year-old candidate is the one who wins this election”. Even the assassination attempt on Trump only serves to remind people how ugly things became between too nasty old men.

If you look, you can see the Little Bighorn. With an impending sense of doom, the Crow scout Half Yellow Face prophetically warned Custer, “You and I are going home today by a road we do not know.”