Don Trump was so enthusiastic about the idea of Mike Pence as his running mate, that he couldn’t stop phoning people.
NBC News reports that Trump continued to deliberate late into the evening, waffling over his running mate selection up until midnight and asking aides if he could change his pick.
Apparently, what all those people told him was “no taksies backsies.”
So after pausing for a day, Donald Trump finally appeared on stage Saturday morning to talk for thirty minutes about … Donald Trump. And how bad Hillary is. And how heroic it was for Trump to beat out the GOP horde. And what a bunch of losers the stop Trump movement is. And how smart that Trump guy was about Brexit. Oh, and he did mention Pence. Mostly how Pence endorsed Cruz in the primary.
When Trump finally got around to waving Pence on stage, he gave his new partner a shoulder clap in passing … and hustled off the stage, leaving Pence to deliver his biography on his own. Apparently, Donald Trump is not interested in the standing on stage unless he’s the one who is talking.
All of this makes Trump’s introduction of his would-be vice-president sound like the sort of shambling, rambling, disorganized, pulled out of his whatever event as the rest of the Trump campaign. Yup. It was. Absolute train-wreck by almost any standard.
But there was one section of Trump’s talk that’s moving more and more front and center, and it should be concerning to everyone.
Trump said, speaking from Manhattan, that Pence was his "first choice" before going on to repeat his line that he was the, "law and order candidate."
"We are the law and order candidates," Trump declared, adding that they were the "law and order party."
Trump also contrasted his “strength” with Hillary Clinton, who he called “a weak person.”
Like the half-stika Trump-Pence logo that’s now gone missing from Trump’s web site, all those phrases are big dog whistles. And not just for racism.