Who wants to be Trump’s #2?

On July 15, 2016, Donald Trump tweeted that Indiana governor Mike Pence would be his running mate. Pence had a reputation as a deeply religious man and a fiscally conservative politician. Looking back on it now from the wild west of 2024, it’s easy to imagine that Trump could have selected anyone he wanted. Trump today is a convicted felon, an adjudicated sex pest, and barred from doing business in his home state of New York. His reward for that from the right wing has been not merely deification but, this week, a singer released a song called “The Chosen One” that paints Trump as an “imperfect” tool of God to carry out His will in the world.

But this is now how the evangelical right saw Trump in 2016, leading him to pick Mike Pence. After all, if a man like Mike Pence was willing to support Trump, why shouldn’t you support him, too? Beyond the optics, Trump also indicated he tapped Pence because Trump was an outsider and he needed someone familiar with politics.

Now, in 2024, Trump’s thought process is different. Reportedly, Trump offered his 2016 picks a virtually limitless portfolio, preferring to focus on campaigning and basking in the limelight of his supporters while the vice president ran the country. Pence would, among other things, helm the U.S. response to COVID-19 in 2020, which was essentially the only thing the White House was focusing on for much of that year.

In 2024, with Trump in the running to be the oldest president in U.S. history, his vice presidential pick has to be ready to take the reigns at a moment’s notice (as, it must be mentioned, Vice President Kamala Harris must be). Presumably, they also get free reign over the Trump administration’s policies, so long as they don’t upstage Donald J. Trump. They also must be aware that voters don’t think Trump will leave office peacefully in 2028 and expect Trump to rule as an autocratic dictator. If you’re willing to serve as vice president to Donald Trump, you’re not looking to be John Adams so much as Hermann Göring. Who would even want that job?

Welcome back to Who The Fuck Are All These Fucks?, the game show where the prize is knowledge and the curse is also knowledge. Today, we’re looking at the shortlist for the Republican vice presidential nomination. We’re going to need to get a few things straight. First, way back in 2008, Republican nominee John McCain was looking at Charlie Christ, Tim Pawlenty, Joe Lieberman, Mitt Romney, and Bobby Jindal. When Sarah Palin was announced as his running mate, news outlets were shocked. The campaign had kept analysis of Palin under wraps in part by not really doing any analysis of her and instead making some woefully inaccurate assumptions like “surely Governor Palin knows about major domestic policy issues.” Writing in The New Yorker, John Cassidy argued that Hillary Clinton picked Tim Kaine because he was a kind of goofy nice guy that Clinton knew and had worked with before, which made him an appealing choice in an election where the opposition candidate – Donald Trump – was running a very aggressive, macho campaign. Kaine was on some lists, but not expected to be the actual pick.

All that is to say: look, this is a list, but it’s not the list. Candidates more conventional than Trump have picked unexpected running mates before.

No need to beat around the bush: Marco Rubio is on the list, and he’s thought to be near the top. Rubio has public policy experience, government experience, he’s a mere 53 years old, and he’s Hispanic – which could help shore up Trump’s support with conservative Hispanics who have been wary about his promise to deport everyone he sees.

Rubio ran against Trump in 2016 but has since become a key ally, especially in Latin America. He called Hamas “savages” (or he called Palestinians “savages,” it’s genuinely hard to tell from context but we’ll give him the benefit of a doubt he has not necessarily earned), putting him in line with Trump’s views on the Israel-Hamas War, which can be summed up as hawkish. Politically, there’s not a lot of space between Trump and Rubio.

Rubio has a big obstacle: a Constitutional provision that says electors have to vote for a president and vice president “one of whom, at least, shall not be an inhabitant of the same state with themselves.” This would keep Florida’s electors from voting for a Trump/Rubio ticket, as both men claim Florida as their home. Trump could resolve this by reclaiming New York, where he was born and lived prior to the 2020 election. But the odds are better he would tell Rubio to take a hike – though Rubio has no connections to any state but Florida, and could potentially lose his senate seat if he leaves. Another option is that they could just not worry about it because Trump has so far rarely been challenged on anything.

Why would you want to be vice president to a man who has tried to overthrow the U.S. government and who is widely understood to be pursuing a dictatorship for life?

For each candidate, we’re going to try and figure out an answer to this question, and with Rubio it’s maybe the hardest. Rubio has claimed before that his family came to the U.S. fleeing Cuban communism when, in fact, they came during the right-wing dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista which preceded the communist revolution in Cuba (Rubio says that his family was prevented from returning to Cuba by the rise of Fidel Castro).

What seems to appeal to Rubio is that Trump’s vice president, as mentioned, has to be ready to pick up the top job if Trump dies or is incapacitated, and Trump is a 77-year-old man who eats mostly fast food, so Rubio might be hoping that Trump kicks the bucket before we get to 2028. That would make Marco Rubio the nation’s 48th president and the presumptive front-runner.

This is presumably the thing that appeals to most names on the short-list. It’s not fierce commitment to Trumpism, it’s the view that Trump won’t last forever, and if you’re in the right place at the right time you can pick up the paramount leadership of the Republican Party without a succession battle.

The flip-side, though, is that until then you are complicit in whatever Trump does. Ask Mike Pence what that’s like.

Born James Donald Bowman and later James Hamel before adopting the name James David Vance and eventually going by his current moniker, J.D. Vance is a man of near-constant reinvention.

When Vance was in law school, his professor told him to write a memoir (His professor was Amy Chua, author of the moderately controversial Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother). Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, was published in 2016. Hillbilly Elegy talks a lot about a fading blue collar America, where bustling workplaces have been replaced with desolate factories, abandoned downtowns, and a lot of drug use. The book was praised by a lot of folks, but The New Republic was critical: “Elegy is little more than a list of myths about welfare queens repackaged as a primer on the white working class.”

“We spend our way to the poorhouse. We buy giant TVs and iPads. Our children wear nice clothes thanks to high-interest credit cards and payday loans. We purchase homes we don’t need, refinance them for more spending money, and declare bankruptcy, often leaving them full of garbage in our wake. Thrift is inimical to our being.

J.D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy

Vance’s book is condescending, but praised as an “explainer” for rural America. The same year it came out, Vance was critical of Donald Trump’s bid for the White House. He moved to Ohio to start a nonprofit.

But then, six years later, Vance ran for the U.S. Senate on a pro-Trump line. He criticized abortion rights and transgender rights as conservatives usually do, but also took some very Trumpist stances: Ukraine should give Russia territory, he said in 2017. Women are harming families by leaving abusive husbands, he said in 2021.

Yet, in 2016, he called Trump, “America’s Hitler.”

Why would you want to be vice president to a man who has tried to overthrow the U.S. government and who is widely understood to be pursuing a dictatorship for life?

Vance’s closeness to discount James Bond villain Peter Thiel suggests he is a big fan of power and not concerned about how he gets it. His life of reinvention shows a remarkable ability to adapt to new circumstances, but also a lack of any real convictions. If Donald Trump offers J.D. Vance a road to power, Vance is going to take it, no matter what.

“Next to Trump, he’s the elected official who gets it the most—the economic nationalism. Cotton was the one most supportive of us, up front and behind the scenes, from the beginning,” explained Steve Bannon in 2017. Tom Cotton, whose name sounds like the name you would make up for someone who believed the kinds of things Tom Cotton believes in, is ready to Make America Great Again. If you asked Tom Cotton when America was last great, he would have a hard time deciding between 1950 and 1860.

Here’s a list of things Tom Cotton thinks:

• The problem with the Guantanamo Bay prison is that there aren’t enough prisoners in it
• Chinese students should be banned from American universities, because “we have trained so many of the Chinese Communist Party’s brightest minds.”
• Journalists who write critically about Israel’s conduct during the Israel-Hamas War should be charged with terrorism
• The United States has an “under-incarceration problem”
• Donald Trump didn’t refer to Haiti and African nations as “shithole countries,” he called them “shithouse countries.” Obviously.
• The United States should buy Greenland

Tom Cotton is the kind of person who looks at Donald Trump’s scandals and believes the scandal is that Donald Trump is being too nice to people.

Why would you want to be vice president to a man who has tried to overthrow the U.S. government and who is widely understood to be pursuing a dictatorship for life?

Why would this bother Tom Cotton?

Elise Stefanik is the politically smart choice, which is a sign that she’s the least likely to get the nomination. Don’t confuse “politically smart” with, say, “appealing to Democrats” or anything. She’s big on fracking and not big on the idea that the government should provide social services. She has repeatedly lied about the 2020 presidential election. She tried to get the House to toss out Trump’s two impeachments.

But the 39-year-old New Yorker would give a little comfort to white women – who still make up a sizeable portion of Trump’s base – that they might be setting up the nation’s first female president. Stefanik is a capable legislator who knows how to work the cameras. She’s a good pick if you’re looking for the best pick in a lineup of bad picks.

Why would you want to be vice president to a man who has tried to overthrow the U.S. government and who is widely understood to be pursuing a dictatorship for life?

After the Access Hollywood tape surfaced in 2016, Stefanik stuck by Trump – something a lot of Republicans didn’t do, remember – saying his actions were “wrong” but not so wrong that she wouldn’t support him. This echoes a running theme amongst Republicans, where they admit Trump did something bad but don’t think he should face consequences. This is partly, of course, because he’s very popular with Republican voters, and Republicans spent much of 2016 assuming Trump would lose. No risk in supporting the guy who loses and buying some favor with his base. There’s a chance to buy favor with Trump’s base as his vice presidential pick, too. If Trump wins, well, you’re the veep now, and the presumptive heir to the throne. If he loses, you stuck by him, and in 2028 you can run as his obvious hand-picked successor.

Stefanik is pretty on-board with the Big Lie, anyway, so she’s probably not too worried about what Trump would do in office. She’s not even too worried about what he tried to do on January 6.

Tim Scott’s girlfriend is real and they’re getting married. The thing about Tim Scott’s prospective vice presidential candidacy is that there’s no way to cover Scott without mentioning that he’s an unmarried 58-year-old man who suddenly, while running a presidential bid earlier this year, announced he had a girlfriend and later a fiancé.

That’s kind of a boon to Scott and Trump, though. After all, otherwise, we might be talking about how Tim Scott isn’t as race-blind as his colleagues might like. When Trump advanced Thomas Farr for a federal judgeship, Scott opposed it because of Farr’s history of trying to suppress Black voters. He said that Republicans were “not doing a very good job of avoiding the obvious potholes on race in America.” After Trump said there were “good people” at a pro-racism rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017, Scott called those comments “indefensible.”

In a normal world, that makes Scott a strong contender, someone who obviously isn’t afraid to be his own man separate from the presidential nominee, yet still willing to work with him (Scott has frequently pushed back at Trump for racist or racially insensitive comments, sometimes resulting in Trump making changes or deleting social media posts). But Trump doesn’t want to be challenged by his vice president, and there’s a difference between a senator calling on the president to do something and the vice president calling on him to do something.

This is to say nothing of Donald Trump’s long history of racism and a reported tape of Trump making racist comments on The Apprentice, factors which call into question whether he would ever pick Scott for the job.

Why would you want to be vice president to a man who has tried to overthrow the U.S. government and who is widely understood to be pursuing a dictatorship for life?

Scott is in an unusual position of power. Sure, it’s another reason Trump might bypass him, but Scott can tap into Black voters and into donors who dislike Trump, and Scott has demonstrated his willingness to stand apart from Trump in a way that suggests that he might be looking at the vice presidency knowing that he may well have to challenge his boss in some way. He may believe he can reign in Trump’s anti-democracy impulses, or that he could leverage his pull with folks outside Trump’s base as a way to keep him in check. It would be a possibly insane thing to think, but still.

Doug Burgum is a billionaire and an advisor to Donald Trump, putting him in a position to make the following arguments:

1. I am already advising you, and
2. I can bail you out of trouble

Burgum would want control over the federal government, which Trump would probably give him. He is in line with Trump’s views on LGBTQ+ rights, critical race theory, the U.S.-Mexico border, and abortion (at least, Trump’s stated view on abortion). Burgum is kind of a boring guy about which there’s not much to say.

That might make him the most likely candidate. Burgum doesn’t upstage Trump. At worst, he’s actually wealthy unlike Trump’s paper wealth, but Trump likes to surround himself with wealthy people because it makes him seem wealthy by association.

Why would you want to be vice president to a man who has tried to overthrow the U.S. government and who is widely understood to be pursuing a dictatorship for life?

The leopards never eat your face, do they, Doug? That’s kind of the motivation underlying every name on this list: I won’t be harmed by this. Again, ask Mike Pence about that – it’s one thing for the people who are willing to be vice president because they’re willing to be complicit in the destruction of American democracy, but it’s wild to see folks who apparently don’t share Trump’s anti-democracy views nonetheless getting into the idea of being his vice president. Burgum is a billionaire and billionaires are prone to the belief that they are infallible; Trump won’t be able to seize dictatorial power and if he did, someone would stop him before it harmed me.