Rich and Co., on today’s edition of The Editors, discuss a (nearly) comprehensive list of potential Trump VP picks and consider the pros and cons of each. They also touch on what Trump might be looking for in a VP.
Maddy thinks he’ll be focused on loyalty. “If you look at his logic in 2016,” she says, “. . . I think Trump obviously was trying to do the typical thing that you do, which is you find a candidate who can balance you in some way. So Mike Pence is steady, he’s religious, he’s Midwestern. And that was very appealing for pro-lifers for whom Trump was an unknown quantity.
“I don’t think that’s where he’s thinking, though. I think now the real thing that matters to him most is loyalty.”
Michael wonders whether Trump is looking for a VP who “could handle a serious policy portfolio for him . . . and would be a good potential successor,” but Michael is also “not entirely convinced [Trump] wouldn’t go with a kind of insurance-policy choice, a choice where it would be insurance against impeachment and removal.”
Looking at the question from a different angle, Charlie believes Trump’s VP pick will be an important factor in gaining votes. “The operative question remains the same as it was in 2016. It’s just that the answer is different. The operative question is, ‘Who do I need to shore up? Who do I need to convince?’ . . . The question now is what Donald Trump is going to do to shore up the suburbs.”
“If he loses,” Charlie says, “it is going to be because the calculation that Chuck Schumer was so thrilled about in 2016, that for every new Trump voter, two suburban voters go away, actually came to fruition. It didn’t happen in 2016, but it started to by ’18 and it did in ’20 and it did in ’22 in some states as well. I think Trump has to think very carefully about what he’s going to do to win enough of those people to make his candidacy viable.”
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