The Drudge siren is blaring that Mike Pence is Trump’s VP pick. I’m not sure I believe it, though, for a couple reasons.
First, if you’re a master showman looking to make as big a splash as possible, at least one head fake is required. In illusionist terms, the head fake is the turn, then bringing out the real VP is the prestige. Just picking a guy, leaking the word 24 hours early, and then rolling him out is the least-showy process imaginable.
Second, Pence is probably the second-worst available pick on the board. Here’s how the veep possibilities should have been ranked:
(1) Newt Gingrich: Trump needs both an attack dog and a capable defender. Every time his running mate steps outside, he’s going to have to mount a defense of whatever new idiocy Trump has just said. And while there are few people as capable in attacking Clinton, there’s probably no one in America who’d be able to defend and contextualize Trump the way Gingrich can.
As Rich Lowry put it, “You could shake Gingrich awake at 3 a.m., tell him Trump just came out for nationalizing the banks, and he would rattle off a five-minute riff on how it has always been the policy of the future and the country is lucky to have such a radical agent of change.”
Does Gingrich have problems? Sure. But from an electoral standpoint, all of his problems are dwarfed by Trump’s problems. Gingrich isn’t popular, but is more popular than Trump. His personal problems are nothing compared with Trump’s history. Four years ago, Gingrich was viewed as too out there to be president. Next to Trump, he’s Lincoln, Adams, and FDR all rolled into one.
If the Pence leaks are real, I suspect the problem with Gingrich, from Trump’s perspective, was just that: Who wouldn’t prefer President Gingrich to President Trump? Love him or hate him, Gingrich is one of the towering figures of the last 50 years of American politics. He’s smarter and more accomplished than Trump and has a political identity and legacy that are independent of Trump, and likely to be much more significant than Trump’s. (Imagine just how ridiculous it would have been to have Gingrich walking around genuflecting before “Mr. Trump” for four months.)
I doubt that Trump could abide that in his running mate, no matter what the benefits to his cause might be.
(2) Chris Christie: In many ways, Christie would have been like a JV-level Gingrich. He’s a smart and capable pol. He would have dogged Clinton everywhere she went. And worse, Christie might have gotten into Clinton’s OODA loop as she tries to make her own VP selection. Christie is such a good debater that Clinton would have had to think long and hard about how her second would have handled Christie, and that might have taken some possibilities (Julián Castro certainly, Elizabeth Warren possibly) off the board for her.
Why not pick Christie? I wonder if Trump couldn’t bring himself to do it because he just doesn’t respect the New Jersey governor. It’s hard to believe Trump really respects any of the people he beat during the primaries. And the way Christie jumped to get his shine box was…really something.
(3) Joni Ernst: The Iowa senator spent 23 years in the military, served in Iraq, has legislative experience, and yet isn’t tied to the old-guard Bushian GOP. She’d appeal to some of the college-educated Republican women who are running away from Trump in droves and might even make some of them pause for a second look. She’s from a state that, in theory, only leans Democratic. Think of her as Palin XL.
Too bad she had the sense to take herself out of the running publicly.
(4) Ivanka Trump: Preposterous? Only sort of. She’ll be 35 in October. She is, by all accounts, smarter and more stable than her father. Of course, she’s a center-left Democrat. But then, so is her dad.
The big up-sides for Ivanka are that she would have been the only running mate with the ability to actually influence the candidate’s thinking. And that she’s obviously the person Trump would want running with him. As history has taught us, the most workable succession plans for a strongman always involve a family dynasty. They’re the only people you can really trust.
(5) Mike Pence: On paper, Pence seems like a do-no-harm pick. He has a reputation for being socially conservative, but isn’t a scary, Rick Santorum-style, true believer. He’s from a swing state. He’s basically bland and inoffensive. You can see why he would have been the campaign consultant’s pick.
But in his one moment in the national spotlight, Pence blinked, hard. Remember back to the RFRA fight—it wasn’t that Pence rabbited on his base and sold them out. Pols do that all the time. It’s that he wasn’t even minimally competent, or prepared, for the fight. Go back and read the transcript of his big interview with George Stephanopoulos. It’s scary how bad he was.
Pence also has years of legislative record to pick through, much of which is going to run directly counter to the Trump program. This isn’t a substantive problem—Pence will jettison his prior views on immigration, Iraq, free trade, and everything else as quickly as he did his support of religious freedom. But it is one more thing that he’s going to have to talk about, constantly.
And then there’s his talk radio record. Who knows what Pence said during the hundreds of hours he was on the air as a radio host in the ’90s. Do you think the Trump campaign has listened to all of that tape? Maybe.
By Monday, I bet the Clinton campaign will have. And three weeks from now, Pence may well look like Palin Lite.
In the end, the only real reason for Trump to have picked Pence was that he wanted the guy who ran the lowest risk of distracting anyone from Trump.
(6) Mike Flynn: I’ll be honest—he would have been even worse than Pence. You can understand the attraction for Trump: Getting to order around a lieutenant general before you’re even the CiC must sound pretty sweet to an aspiring strongman.
But, like most military men, Flynn is clearly not cut out for modern (civilian) politics. And might have even been to Trump’s left, ideologically. Which would have really been something.
I still don’t discount the possibility that at some point between now and Friday morning—or even before the VP nomination is official in Cleveland—Trump makes a switch.
