Disturbing facts about Trump’s VP options

For the Republicans, it’s a race to the bottom of the ticket

Convicted felon Donald Trump is stringing out his vice presidential selection process so the news media will write incessantly about it. Today I’m writing about it too, but not in the way he’d like. That’s because the politicians mentioned in speculation about Trump’s running mate are all icky options. 

Who knows where Trump will land – he’s irrational and impulsive. But here’s an unsettling fact about each of a dozen-plus maybe-veeps:

Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio

In 2016, Vance wrote an article in the Atlantic in which he warned: “Trump is cultural heroin. ... His promises are the needle in America’s collective vein.” But when he ran for the Senate in 2022, he was a pusher on the street corner. At a campaign stop with Trump, he declared: “Ohio! Do we love this guy? … He’s the best president of my lifetime.” 

Rep. Byron Donalds of Florida

Donalds, who is Black, said the Jim Crow South was an example of the good old days.

North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum

Asked last year if he would ever do business with Trump, Burgum said, “I don’t think so. I just think it’s important that you’re judged by the company you keep.” Burgum later walked back that statement after getting to “meet the real person.” Yes, the real person who paid $25 million in the Trump University scam and was accused of cheating many business associates.

Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina

Scott gets a pass from most media. When he quit the GOP presidential race last November, the New York Times headline said his “sunny message fails to resonate.” The headline for Jim Geraghty’s op-ed in the Washington Post was: “Tim Scott ran a worthy experiment. Optimism isn’t selling.” Optimism? Scott was optimistic about taking away women’s control over their own bodies and about suppressing Black votes. Scott is so desperate to suck up to Trump that he actually said on TV that “violence in the streets [was] absent during the Trump years.” Tell that to George Floyd.

Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York

Some of us see Stefanik’s grandstanding about antisemitism on campus as a cynical political move. It’s certainly in sharp contrast with her baffling endorsement of Carl Paladino for Congress in 2022. Paladino said in 2021 that Adolf Hitler was “the kind of leader we need today.” Paladino also called for the execution of Attorney General Merrick Garland. Despite publicity over those comments, Stefanik held fast to her endorsement of Paladino, who lost.

South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem

She dragged her dog Cricket to a gravel pit and shot him in the head, then did the same thing with a goat. And bragged about it.

Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas

I wrote an entire installment of my newsletter about how awful Cotton is. An incident that wasn’t hugely important but was hugely revelatory of Cotton’s character came during the Obama administration. Cotton blocked the confirmation of Cassandra Butts as ambassador to the Bahamas because she was Barack Obama’s friend. Butts said Cotton told her he put a freeze on the nomination “to inflict special pain on the president.” Butts died of leukemia in 2016, still waiting for confirmation after the Bahamas had gone 1,647 days without a U.S. ambassador.

Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida

In 2016, Rubio said of Trump: "He runs on this idea that he is fighting for the little guy. But he has spent his entire career sticking it to the little guy. … If you all have friends who are thinking about voting for Donald Trump, friends do not let friends vote for con artists." Now, Rubio says it would be “an honor” to run with Trump. He wants in on the con.

Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders

She boldly tweeted in January 2023: “As long as I am your governor, the meddling hand of big government creeping down from Washington DC will be stopped cold at the Mississippi River.” But when tornadoes swept the state three months later, Sanders called for the meddling hand to fork over big bucks. She later complained that the feds were paying only 75% of recovery costs and demanded 100%.

Senate candidate Kari Lake of Arizona

Lake said a couple of months ago that the right-wing must be “ready for action” in an “intense” election year and added: “We are going to put on the armor of God. And maybe strap on a Glock on the side of us just in case.”

Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley

I seem to be in the minority in thinking Haley is a live option for VP. But both Haley and Trump are transactional people, so they’d bury the hatchet in order to bury our democracy. I’ve written in detail about how Haley is not a moderate. For example, she said that if a six-week abortion ban had reached her desk as governor, she would have signed it.

Ben Carson, former secretary of Housing and Urban Development

Trump supposedly likes Carson — or as the New York Times put it, Trump “genuinely” likes him, as if that’s possible for a narcissist. The Trump-Carson alliance makes my point about transactional hatchet-burying: There was testimony at Trump’s recent criminal trial that he praised the National Enquirer for a story claiming that Dr. Carson left a sponge in a patient’s brain. Yet Trump later named Carson to his Cabinet, and Carson happily accepted. Carson is known for crazy statements like saying the Affordable Care Act was “the worst thing that has happened in this nation since slavery.”    

Sen. Bill Hagerty of Tennessee

There was a lot of federal money flying around to combat the financial disruption from the Covid pandemic. Hagerty took advantage, leveraging his position on a White House economic recovery group to solicit campaign bucks for his 2020 Senate bid. A campaign email promoting a fundraising event noted that Haggerty was on “the recently appointed White House Economic Recovery Task Force and will offer an informative perspective on the recovery efforts.” Cha-ching.

Vivek Ramaswamy, businessman

He pledges that if he became president, he’d fire three-quarters of the federal workforce. Good luck visiting a national park or getting a timely tax refund.