According to Politico, former President Donald Trump is interviewing potential running mates for a 2024 run. Last time, he chose Mike Pence, then on Jan. 6, a mob of the former president’s supporters wanted to kill his vice president, so you would think there wouldn’t be many people that would want the job. However, according to what one adviser told the outlet, Trump said, “They’re all begging me. They all come here” to Mar-a-Lago.
According to the report, the twice-impeached one-term president is looking for someone with unquestioned loyalty and an embrace of Trump’s baseless claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him.
“A lot of times, a presidential candidate will pick a running mate to balance out wings of the party. But with Trump, that’s not the issue. He is the party, basically. It’s so united behind him,” said John McLaughlin, one of Trump’s campaign pollsters. “So his choice, if he runs, will come down to what he wants. It would be a much more personal decision this time.”
“The issue of a running mate, advisers and allies say, has taken on a new dimension in Trump’s mind as he stews over his decision to pick Pence in 2016, only to watch the vice president help certify the election of Joe Biden as president in January,” the report continues. ‘Though it was Pence’s legal responsibility, Trump considered him disloyal and recently went so far as to say it was “common sense” that the Jan. 6 Capitol rioters chanted “hang Mike Pence.”‘
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“He’s not necessarily looking to balance the ticket geographically, but what he can do is pick to balance gender, race, ethnicity — a lot of different lanes there,” said Fabrizio, a pollster for a Trump-affiliated super PAC. “It could be everything from a Tim Scott in South Carolina to an Asian American in California, somebody Hispanic in Texas. There are so many choices and paths. And there’s lots of time to go.”
Scott recently met with Trump in Palm Beach.
“It was a really warm interaction,” said one Republican observer that was in the room. “Scott was appropriately deferential without being gross like some people are. What he said was thoughtful, and it was appreciated by the president. There was definitely chemistry there.”
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has been thought of as a favorite of Trump’s for a running mate, but many in the former president’s orbit said he was putting the governor in his place and not seriously floating him as a name.
“Trump feels he made DeSantis. Trump sees him as a competitor. And he’s not going to have someone with better numbers,” one Trump adviser told the outlet.
Pence reportedly has plans for a 2024 presidential run, so that will be awkward.
You can read the full report here.
Featured image via Gage Skidmore/Flickr, under Creative Commons license 2.0
