Trump opponents might cringe at thinking about Trump as a leader, but it is the origin of his success. The L word is generally over-used and over-ascribed. For example, leadership might correlate with being a "hero" or being moral/just/fair,etc however there's lots of proof they don't correlate. It's a fallacy to think that a leader is also a hero. But some people do (fallaciously) ascribe these positive traits to leadership.

That said, in his domain, Trump leads; he generates the headlines and everyone else follows them.

Is JD Vance generating headlines? Barely. Is anyone else generating headlines? Lets consider a few:

- Tim Walz: mainstream media tries to meme Walz into being a headline generator, but he isn't, and poses no serious contention

- Mumar Gaddafi, Sadam Hussein, Hitler, Mussolini, etc: i'm not sure there has been a dictator that did not generate headlines.

- Steve Jobs: strong headline generator, such that he could have run for president and likely won

- pewdiepie: for a spell he was generating headlines, but mainstream media had no solid editorial narrative for the guy (and his hundreds of millions of followers) which posed a social risk. The more they discussed him, the more risk of society penduluming in some unpredictable way either by martyring him or amplifying his politics, so they chose the "ignore him and let whither" as a strategy which seemed to work, as he has drifted into Japan and been off-the-radar

- Luigi Mangione: a nonzero number of liberal voters would decry Trump in one breath and cast a vote for Mangione to be a politician despite evidence he is a cold-blooded murderer. This probably won't change much after conviction.

In conclusion, intelligent people are forced to lament the state of humanity in which leadership is game-ified so easily and yet so difficult to achieve. "How does one consistently generate headlines" is a difficult question to answer and seems to be one of the core essence of humanity. And, as described above, the origin of people's feelings of why a given person is successful.