There are few things I find as unenlightening as conjecture around a presumptive presidential nominee’s taste in potential vice-presidential picks. The wretchedly euphemized “veepstakes” is more a time filler than anything else — a way to lard up the hours of cable-news programming in between the primaries and the nominating conventions. But I’m going to violate my own rule against engaging in that sort of speculation just this once because this year’s selection process provides us with a rare window not into how Donald Trump plans to campaign for the presidency but how he would govern once he had reassumed it.
Conventionally, a vice presidential nominee serves a particular role beyond his or her constitutional obligations. The VP rounds out the ticket, compensating for a presidential nominee’s demographic, geographic, or ideological deficiencies. Once selected, the VP then serves as the attack dog on the trail, retailing criticisms of the opposing party that are too sordid or callous to come from the august mouth of a potential American president.
None of that much applies to Donald Trump this go around. He is his own attack dog, and he has few qualms about lowering himself at the risk of the stature of the office to which he aspires. Nor does the former president much need a vice president who helps reintroduce him to voters. We’ve rarely had a major party nominee who is as much of a known quantity as Donald Trump. So, what is the vice president for in Trump’s mind? Well, to survey how the aspirants seeking the job are conducting themselves, what Trump wants to see most from his next vice president is someone who will do what Mike Pence would not.
Trump recently dangled the vice presidency in front of North Dakota governor Doug Burgum, which prompted CNN’s Kaitlan Collins to ask the governor if he would have presided over the rote process of certifying presidential electoral votes as Pence did in January 2021. Burgum wouldn’t answer the question. “Do you think that Mike Pence did the right thing that day,” Collins pressed. Again, Burgum refused to even acknowledge the question he was asked.
Burgum’s behavior is revealing — not of his own predictions, but his insecurity. It’s not that he is unsure of what the correct answer is. It’s that he’s not sure what Donald Trump wants to hear. But if the vice-presidential beauty pageant comes down to which candidate would try to overturn an election with the most gusto, Burgum has competition.
“Would you have certified the 2020 election results,” CNN’s Jake Tapper asked Senator Tim Scott. The senator chuckled. “I’m not going to answer hypothetical questions,” he replied. When confronted with his own comments in support of the course Pence took on January 6, 2021, Scott declined to revise his remarks. “You’re asking a hypothetical question that you know can never happen again,” Scott insisted.
Neither Scott’s colleague, Senator J. D. Vance, nor House Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik are so certain that vice presidents are constrained to the point that they could not simply decree a legitimate election invalid.
“If I had been vice president, I would have told the states, like Pennsylvania, Georgia, and so many others, that we needed to have multiple slates of electors, and I think the U.S. Congress should have fought over it from there,” Vance said in a remarkably specific answer to what he called a “ridiculous question.” The lack of any constitutional mechanism to pursue that remedy didn’t seem to register with Vance. Indeed, the Constitution doesn’t seem to apply.
“We will see if this is a legal and valid election,” Stefanik replied curtly when pressed on the matter. “Just to be very clear, I don’t hear you committed to certifying the election results,” her interlocutor followed up. “Will you only commit to certifying the results if former president Trump wins?” Stefanik replied by repeating the claim that the 2020 race “was not a fair election” and that she would only preside over the certification of the states’ votes “if they are constitutional.”
Showing at least some of the courage of her stated convictions, Stefanik went further in a subsequent interview. “I don’t think that was the right approach,” she said of what Mike Pence did on January 6. “I think it is very important that we continue to stand up for the constitution and have legal and secure elections, which we did not have in 2020.”
If this tells us anything, it is that these vice-presidential aspirants know what Trump wants to hear. More importantly, they know what he doesn’t want to hear — namely, that his vice president would not attempt to rewrite the Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution on the fly to preserve their boss’s hold on political power.
We can only assume that, given their closeness to the process, these potential candidates for the job are fully appraised of the qualifications they must evince if they have any hope of getting Trump’s nod. Indeed, Donald Trump himself gives no indication that he has moved on from his humiliation in 2020. He and his running mate seem fully committed to relitigating the events that culminated in the January 6 riots, resurfacing painful memories from that day in the process and reminding voters of the Trump administration’s ignominious closing days. That might sound like political suicide. But, to hear the cast of vice-presidential aspirants tell it, that’s just how Donald Trump wants it.