Donald Trump, the twice-impeached, quadruply indicted former president, is still figuring out who should come aboard his third presidential ticket. His last running mate, Mike Pence, helped create the permission structure that allowed evangelical Republicans to support a thrice-married adulterer. Pence was obsequiously loyal to Trump throughout his entire time in office. And, in the end, the former veep was “rewarded” for his sycophancy on January 6, 2021, when he was whisked away by the Secret Service—“Hang Mike Pence” chants and all—after refusing to help Trump overthrow democracy.
Since then, Pence has spent a lot of time occupying the wildly uncomfortable space of being neither a Trump supporter nor brave enough to strongly come out against him. “It should come as no surprise that I will not be endorsing Donald Trump this year,” Pence told Fox News in March.
But since no one ever learns anything in Trumpworld, what happened to Pence does not appear to have made Trump’s veep gig any less desirable. In fact, Republicans have kicked it into high gear trying to out-pander each other for the job, often debasing themselves on national television in the desperate hopes of getting a rose. Several have been eager to dismiss the criminal cases against Trump, from Marco Rubio claiming on ABC that Trump has a “legitimate” claim to presidential immunity to Doug Burgum downplaying the New York hush money case on CNN as simply about a “business filing error.”
J.D. Vance, meanwhile, is on track to destroy any residual credibility he has left from once being vehemently Never Trump. On Sunday, during the latest stop on his self-debasement tour, Vance told CNN’s Dana Bash, “I don’t think anybody could look at the presidency and the conduct of Donald Trump and say, this is a person who’s somehow antisemitic.” To which Bash rightly replied: “He had dinner with Nick Fuentes, who is an avowed antisemite.” Later, when asked why he deleted a tweet that was critical of Trump, Vance continued to dispense with any self-respect: “My view on Donald Trump—I have been very clear on this—is, look, I was wrong about him. I didn’t think he was going to be a good president, Dana, and I was very, very proud to be proven wrong. It’s one of the reasons why I’m working so hard to get him elected.
Vance, Rubio, and Burgum are hardly the only ones clamoring for a chance to be Trump’s No. 2. South Carolina senator Tim Scott answered a question from Meet the Press’s Kristen Welker (“Will you commit to accepting the 2024 election results?”) with the non-answer: “At the end of the day, the 47th president will be Donald Trump.” When Welker pressed him harder, Scott replied, “That is my statement.” Which makes sense, since saying that the 2020 election was rigged is the ultimate loyalty test for Trump. Think about that for a minute: Openly lying about an election, despite a mountain of evidence proving otherwise, is a way for these men to prove their fealty—as though they’re trapped in an Orwell novel, mindlessly repeating the party line logic of 2+2=5.
Other would-be veeps have done just the same: Representative Elise Stefanik said she’d only accept the results “if they’re constitutional,” whatever that means, while Representative Byron Donalds said vaguely: “As long as localities actually follow election laws passed by the legislature, yeah.” When you take a step back here, it’s easy to see how Trump’s veepstakes resemble a kind of extremist political audition, in which the most ass-kissing, reality-refuting contender has the best chance of becoming the former president’s second. “This is what I think Trump’s gonna do,” as Kevin McCarthy somewhat aptly explained: “He’s gonna play ‘Apprentice.’”
It’s worth noting that all of this GOP jockeying has been politically useful for Trump. That is, as the former president remains confined to a Manhattan courtroom—listening to people like Stormy Daniels and Michael Cohen resurface his sordid past—Trump’s aspiring running mates are acting as mouthpieces for his 2024 campaign where he himself cannot. Some of them—like Donalds, Vance, and Florida senator Rick Scott— are even playing the role of publicist, attacking the judge and witnesses in the hush money case to save Trump from any reputational damage. Scott spoke outside Trump’s Manhattan criminal trial last week, while Vance was on hand Monday.
Interestingly, this dynamic actually incentivizes Trump to keep the veepstakes going as long as possible. And while it’s certainly feasible that the former president will pick a second before the GOP’s July convention, the longer this contest goes on, the better it’ll be for Trump.
The great irony, of course, is that Trump seems to believe his VP pick is essentially a meaningless formality. “Well, it’s never really had that much of an effect on an election, which is an amazing thing, both election and primary,” he told Fox News’s Bret Baier back in January. “The person that I think I like is a very good person, a pretty standard. I think people won’t be that surprised.” And because we all know that a “very good person,” in Trump’s eyes, means someone who is very good to him, America’s next vice president could be far, far worse for the country than the likes of Mike Pence.
