“I’ve got 50 people calling me, begging me … ‘I’ll cut off my right arm, sir. Please, I want to be the vice president.’”
That’s insurrectionist Donald Trump bragging to donors about his many aspiring running mates over the weekend during a $40,000-a-plate campaign fundraiser at his garish evil headquarters in Mar-a-Lago. And in true Trump fashion, he publicly demeans those who brazenly court his favor. Ritualistic humiliation, after all, is as much a part of the Trump brand as vengeance, hubris, projection, and unfathomable stupidity.
So who to anoint as his vice presidential candidate against Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in the November election that may decide the fate of our democracy? It truly is a sorry group of Republican Lilliputians. Kristi Noem, J.D. Vance, Tim Scott, Little Marco, Elise Stefanik … they are enough to make you long for the heady days of giants such as Scott Walker and Bobby Jindal!
For Trump, there’s another dilemma. Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall writes:
To be Trump’s running mate you can’t have any dignity. It’s the most basic requirement. Whatever Trump wants, you give. Nothing is too much. But if you look closely he also doesn’t want his nominee to be pathetic.
Yet these needs cannot be reconciled because sacrificing your dignity to Trump is the very definition of pathetic. And Trump knows it. That’s why he delights in humiliating his most shameless sycophants. They deserve to be humiliated!
However, even if a vice presidential candidate could fulfill those wildly contradictory requirements, you can be sure Trump is concerned about the potential damage a D-list running mate could do to his “star” image. It’d be like playing in a celebrity golf tournament and being paired with Rob Schneider. There’s only downside.
I’m guessing that, in Trump’s view, not only will none of these fawning contenders enhance the ticket, they will detract from it. To be a very stable genius surrounded by mediocrity must be a hellish fate.
Trump was persuaded to pick Mike Pence as his vice president in 2016 because he needed the evangelical vote. He was never comfortable with Pence and undoubtedly saw Holy Mike as a minor-leaguer who Trump saved from the political scrapheap (he’s not wrong about that), only to be betrayed when Pence refused to stop certification of the election results on January 6 or surrender to the peaceful J6 choir for his rightful hanging.
Why make that mistake again? As soon as you have a successor in place, there’s a bull’s-eye on your back. You can’t trust anybody. Besides, if no one can possibly fill the shoes of Donald Trump, the greatest president in history, what’s the point of even choosing a successor? Also, it’s not as if the healthiest person to ever run for president or serve in the Oval Office is planning to go anywhere. We didn’t need a party platform in 2020, and we don’t need a vice presidential candidate in 2024!
Those are among the feverish thoughts I suspect are running through Donald Trump’s head these days as he closes his eyes in a Manhattan courtroom to escape the reality of his criminal trial. At least when he’s not thinking about going to prison or how he wishes he could get back the $60,000 bonus he gave that snake Michael Cohen in 2017.
During an academically rigorous 30-second Google search, I didn’t see anything suggesting that having a candidate for vice president on the ticket is mandatory. And if it is a requirement, that’s just another example of how unfairly Donald Trump is being treated by the Deep State.
(From Project Orange: Saving Democracy From the Trump-MAGA Cult)