Why be Trump’s running mate?

Over the last year, stories have run about how Gov. Doug Burgum, Sen. Tim Scott, Sen. JD Vance, former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard and Sen. Tom Cotton, among others, “leads the pack for Trump veep pick.” A recent headline declared the likeliest candidate now is Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida.

No one knows for sure, of course; Donald Trump said Saturday that he has made his mind up, but he says a lot of things. The presumptive Republican nominee has said repeatedly that the identity of his running mate will be revealed at the party’s convention in Milwaukee next month. In the meantime, every breath of speculation simply points the media spotlight where Trump most likes it to be — on himself.

In the postmodern, posttruth world of the contemporary GOP, Rubio — whom Trump memorably branded “Little Marco” during the 2016 Republican primary — is not an absurd candidate. He has been in the Senate for 13 years and has chaired the Intelligence Committee. He has broadly conservative credentials: skeptical of anthropogenic climate change, strongly supportive of Second Amendment rights, opposed to ObamaCare, stringently against abortion.

Under the terms of the Habitation Clause of the 12th Amendment, which requires the candidates for president and vice president to come from different states, either Trump or Rubio would have to formally register somewhere other than Florida. This is a technicality — Dick Cheney saw off legal challenges to his eligibility in 2000 by arguing that he was an “inhabitant” of Wyoming rather than Texas — but it would probably become an ego contest in which Rubio would be forced to concede.

The lure of the vice presidency is obvious. Trump has already served four years as president, so if he wins in November he cannot be a candidate in 2028, thanks to the 22nd Amendment. His vice president would under normal circumstances be the favorite to take the GOP nomination. Besides, Trump recently turned 78 and has an unhealthy, sedentary lifestyle; a sudden vacancy in the Oval Office would hardly shock an actuary.

Trump won’t use a presidential candidate’s conventional criteria when assessing running mates. He will certainly not look for a candidate who addresses any supposed gaps in his own appeal: a woman, or someone from an ethnic minority or a candidate with different policy priorities. To do that would require honest and accurate self-analysis, and the identification of weaknesses. Such a process would not interest him.

In any event, he does not believe that his running mate is an important factor. “VPs have never really helped in the election process. It’s a one-day story, it’s a big story, and then it’s back to work. They want to really know who’s No. 1 on the ticket.” It is all about him, and in this particular case he may be correct.

Nevertheless, we have not looked carefully enough at the position of running mate from the perspective of those seeking to occupy it. What’s in it for them?

One certainty is that Trump will require public displays of absolute loyalty to himself personally. In May, he brought no fewer than 15 leading Republicans to Mar-a-Lago to appear at a fundraiser and effectively perform a public audition for his approbation. He has let it be known that he has been impressed by those who have taken to the airwaves in his defense, like Sen. JD Vance of Ohio and Rubio himself.

A winning contender will also have to sign on to the articles of faith in Trump’s public narrative: that the 2020 election was stolen; that the current president is head of a “Biden crime family” and must be subject to the full weight of the justice system; and that the same justice system is being used to persecute Trump in spite of his complete innocence. The running mate will also be expected to follow the lead of Lara Trump, the candidate’s daughter-in-law and co-chair of the Republican National Committee, to start laying the groundwork for doubts about the fairness of November’s election, just in case Trump should lose.

After all that, it is not even a foregone conclusion that a reelected President Trump would anoint his vice president as the 2028 nominee and leader of the MAGA movement. This is not so much about outcome as process. Assuming Trump abides by the term limits in the Constitution, presiding over the selection of his successor would surely look like nothing more than a supercharged, political adaptation of “The Apprentice” — a long, drawn-out, unpredictable process focused primarily on him as ringmaster would be a dream come true.

Certainly, Trump’s vice president could expect no automatic support from the president. He regards loyalty as a one-way street, and was content to stand back on Jan. 6 as a mob stormed the Capitol and literally threatened to hang Vice President Mike Pence. If that can happen, then anything is possible.

There are logical and understandable reasons why ambitious Republicans would want to be Donald Trump’s running mate. It could be a path to the top of the GOP, to the Oval Office and to leadership of the Western world. It is also, however, an opportunity that needs to be subjected to a rigorous cost-benefit analysis.

For the prospect of power, how much slavish public devotion, how much humiliation and how many enforced professions of falsehood are you prepared to endure? Rubio, like every other aspirant, should think carefully.

Eliot Wilson is a freelance writer on politics and international affairs and the co-founder of Pivot Point Group. He was senior official in the U.K. House of Commons from 2005-16, including serving as a clerk of the Defence Committee and secretary of the UK delegation to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly.