The only thing Trump knows he wants in a running mate

donald trump He has yet to choose a running mate for his third attempt to win the White House.

But he appears to have at least one litmus test for anyone hoping to play the role of Mike Pence in a second Trump administration:

it cannot be said that he will accept the results of the 2024 elections.

Trump has not explicitly stated this, although he has already said that he will not commit to respecting the result in November.

“If everything is honest, I will gladly accept the results.

I don’t change that,” the former president said in a recent interview with The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

“If not, we must fight for the rights of the country.”

We know from the 2020 election that anything short of a Trump victory amounts, for Trump, to fraud.

He has also said he would not rule out the possibility of political violence.

“It always depends on the fairness of an election,” he told Time magazine in another recent interview.

Trump doesn’t need to say anything else; all the Republicans vying to side with him understand that they will lose their chance if they accept the basic democratic norm that a loss cannot be reversed after the fact.

Asked several times whether he would accept the results of the 2024 election, Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, a leading contender to be Trump’s running mate, repeated only a rehearsed statement.

“At the end of the day, the 47th president of the United States will be the president donald trump”.

(Watching Scott’s performance, one almost expects him to also tell his interlocutor: “Donald Trump is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I have ever met in my life.”)

Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota avoided a similar question, telling CNN that there were a “huge amount of irregularities” in the 2020 election and that he was “looking forward to next January, when Vice President Harris certify the election of Donald Trump.”

Other vice presidential candidates have not yet had a chance to show Trump their loyalty to his election denialism.

The assumption is that if given the chance, they will do it.

The obvious point to make here is that Scott and Burgum demonstrate the strength of Trump’s control over the Republican Party.

The less obvious point is that, by essentially demanding this particular ideological commitment from potential vice presidential candidates, Trump is actually breaking with political tradition.

First, let’s talk about the vice presidency.

The office itself is one of the clearest examples of a constitutional afterthought in the American political system.

Although the framers of the Constitution devoted considerable time and attention to the presidency (its role, its structure, its method of election), there is little evidence of any particular discussion related to the vice presidency.

“In short,” observed political scientist Jody C. Baumgartner in “The American Vicepresidency: From the Shadow to the Spotlight”, “it seems as if the drafters did not deliberately set out to create a vice presidency as part of the constitutional scheme.” of governance”.

Instead, the vice presidency emerged as the natural solution to a series of problems:

Who would take the reins of government if the president were sick?

Who would resolve a tie in the Senate?

And how can we force presidential electors to vote for a candidate who is not their state’s favorite son?

The vice presidency comes with a handful of enumerated responsibilities that reflect the extent to which it has been grafted into the constitutional system as a last-minute addition.

“The Vice President of the United States shall be President of the Senate,” the Constitution says, “but shall have no vote, unless they be equally divided.”

Likewise, “In the event of the removal of the president from office, or his death, resignation or incapacity to exercise the powers and duties of said position, they will fall to the vice president.”

There’s not much else on paper, even after later amendments to the Constitution clarified the vice president’s duties.

One consequence of this is that the power, prestige, and influence of the vice presidency have waxed and waned with the seasons of American politics.

Generally speaking, the vice president was a relatively minor figure in American politics during most of the 19th and early 20th centuries (there’s a reason why Harry Truman he described most vice presidents as “as useful as a cow’s fifth teat”) and one more influential in the postwar period, as the responsibility and influence of the office grew with that of the president.

But as much as the vice presidency has had a limited role in governing the nation (except on those occasions when the vice president ascends to the top job due to tragedy or misfortune), the vice president’s position on a presidential ticket often has been of sufficient electoral importance to give Actual weight to the election.

For political parties and their presidential candidates, the vice presidential nomination has traditionally been an opportunity to balance the candidacy, geographically, ideologically or in terms of experience.

There are some famous examples.

The Republican Party that nominated Abraham Lincolna moderate from Illinois, paired him with Hannibal Hamlin, a radical Republican from Maine.

The Democratic Party that nominated John F. Kennedythe young liberal senator from Massachusetts, paired him with Lyndon B. Johnsonthe “master of the Senate” of Texas.

More recently, Ronald Reagan’s election of George H.W. Bush was an effort to close the gap between conservative and moderate Republicans, and the election of Joe Biden by Barack Obama provided several contrasts: of age, experience and race.

Trump embraced the logic of balance in his first campaign, choosing Governor Mike Pence of Indiana as a sign of his commitment to the interests of conservative ideologues and the priorities of conservative evangelicals, especially on abortion and the federal judiciary.

If I embraced the logic of balance a second time, I would choose a running mate who had some distance from the MAGA movement, someone who could pass as a Republican.”normal”uninterested in the more extreme compromises associated with Trump.

That almost certainly won’t happen.

Whether it’s Scott or Burgum or Senator JD Vance of Ohio or even the notorious canine assassin Governor Kristi Noem of South Dakota, Trump will choose for his loyalty, not to one set of ideas or the Republican Party, but to his absolute right. to power, with or without the consent of the governed.

And this vice president is expected to do what Pence wouldn’t do:

keep Trump in office no matter what the Constitution says.

The vice presidency could have been an afterthought for the editors.

They didn’t think the role would be much.

The vice presidency is certainly not an afterthought for Trump; For him, it means everything.

c.2024 The New York Times Company