Who should be Trump’s No. 2?

As we get ready to cover the New Hampshire primaries tomorrow (Ed and I will be live blogging along with colleagues), it’s clear that the betting is no longer on Trump winning the Republican presidential nomination (he will) but rather on who his veep should be. Ron DeSantis has taken himself out of the primary, but I don’t see him as a veep contender: he has said in the past that he’s “not a number 2” and would rather remain a governor than be vice-president. But there are a number of names being bandied about, from Nikki Haley to Vivek Ramaswamy, as well as non-primary candidates such as Ohio Senator JD Vance, South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, and New York congresswoman Elise Stefanik.

Let’s pretend we are Republican political strategists, and start with who the next vice-president shouldn’t be if Trump wants to best Biden. I’d put JD Vance at the top of that list, only marginally ahead of Ramaswamy (who, as Ed has pointed out in previous Notes, has no saving graces). Trump loves JD, apparently, but a Trump-Vance ticket is too much like-with-like. They have similar demeanours and the same views on trade, immigration, borders, China, and so on. Together they have no hope of swinging anybody who isn’t already with them. 

Kristi Noem is also your basic Trump proxy, but has the advantage of being a woman, which makes a big difference given who Trump is. She’s pro-Muslim ban, anti-abortion, and on MAGA brand in most other areas. She’s an election denier, of course, and has the rural chops that will help balance out Trump’s New York ooze. She dropped out of college to look after the family farm — and has the hyper-conservative stance on taxes, Obamacare, etc, that plays well in rural America. Also, she’s very much got that Trump Girl look: jewel toned sheath dress, Kardashian hair, and a former South Dakota snow queen to boot. I could see them on stage together quite easily. In fact she looks just like any number of women the former president has already had in his employ.  

Some people think that Trump is more likely to go for Elise Stefanik, who had that pit bull quality he seems to like when going after Harvard’s Claudine Gay and other university presidents during their damning congressional testimony. But again, I don’t know that doubling down on anger actually helps Trump in a general election. He’s already shown that the Republican nomination is his, and now he needs to work on cultivating that more calm, “Why can’t we all just get along?” vibe that he showed after winning the Iowa caucus. That speech was effective because Trump felt confident enough, given his massive win, to be gracious and acknowledge the efforts of those around him. He was also funny, which he can be when not on the defensive, joking about Barron’s athletic choices and how tall he’d gotten eating grandma’s food and so on. Funny will, I suspect, serve him better than angry, at least in the general.

For all these reasons, I would argue that Trump would be best off choosing Haley as a running mate. If we assume that we aren’t getting a paranoid, unstable Trump who can’t work with anyone except those who agree with him at all times (which is still possible, as I’ve argued in a past column), then Haley is the right choice because she would pull in some Never Trump Republicans and business-friendly Democrats that might otherwise have been forced to vote for Biden. I guess the question is, could Haley stomach the job, and could Trump stomach her? Ed, what are your thoughts on that, and on who Trump’s running mate should be? 

Recommended reading

• This wonderful Atlantic piece by Kurt Andersen, which absolutely skewers Bill Ackman, makes me miss the late, great golden days of magazine feature writing. There used to be so many terrific features like this, by people like Andersen who define the genre. Anyway, I’m glad he’s still around and writing great stuff. And that good editing still lives at The Atlantic.

• The Washington Monthly did a lengthy but fascinating examination of why it’s so incredibly hard to do clean, politically acceptable mining of critical minerals in the US. Put this in the “legislation that desperately needs updating” category.

• David Brooks was at his best on the rise of bureaucratic America, not just in government but education, business and everywhere else, and how it has resulted in “death by a thousand paper cuts.” Couldn’t agree more. Healthcare is the perfect storm for all of it — could there be an industry with more opportunities for waste and rent-seeking?

• Finally, I thought our colleague Janan Ganesh made some clever points in his op-ed about why America won’t retreat from the world, even under Trump.

Edward Luce responds

Rana, let me pick up on your assumption that we will not be getting a paranoid, unstable Trump who can’t work with anyone except those who agree with him. That is the definition of Trump. He was like that in his first term and is even more so now. In the last note we discussed Project 2025’s blueprint for the next Republican administration and pointed out that there was no such plan in 2017 because Trump’s victory caught movement conservatives by surprise. In 2016, Trump did campaign on a fairly coherent plan — building a wall, ending the alleged worldwide rip-off of America via trade, targeting Muslims and protecting Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. This time he is campaigning on being the American people’s retribution against the system that is persecuting them. That is about it. For sure, there is the usual Islamophobia and invective about illegal immigrants. But the bulk of his message is personal. Since he is a victim of the US justice system, he will personify everyone else’s victimhood. So 2025 is the mirror image of 2017. There is a larger plan but Trump has shrunk into a wildly rambling caricature of himself. 

He is undoubtedly suffering from cognitive decline. Oddly enough, I don’t think Biden’s mental slide has been that dramatic. He mangles sentences and issues malapropisms but these tendencies have always been part of his character. It is Biden’s physical decline that is most clearly noticeable. Trump, on the other hand, seems physically robust. People are reacting therefore to Biden’s physical frailty. If they were to judge by cognition, I don’t think Trump would be mentally fit to be president. Last week, he repeatedly confused Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi, alleging Haley was in “in charge of security” during the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol. Barely a speech goes by when Trump doesn’t make similarly gargantuan mistakes. Imagine the field day we would have if Biden erred that wildly. So, to cut a long story short, I don’t think it matters at all who Trump picks. It will probably be a woman; Noem or Stefanik seem like reasonable bets. Whoever it is will be an echo of him. But Trump is so overbearing and wild that his number two will be almost irrelevant — at least by electoral calculations. 

Your feedback

And now a word from our Swampians . . .

In response to “The US right’s underestimated brain”:
“Donald Trump is fixated on winning, not on governing. After victory he will make Ronald Reagan look like a policy wonk. But this does not mean that the Heritage Foundation will rule. Rather, it will be a court clique of lickspittles, each with his or her agenda, picked for loyalty rather than competence.” — Brantly Womack