In the long Kabuki dance that is the United States presidential election, there are only one or two moments that even come close to a decision worthy of the Oval Office. All the rest is commentary.
For Donald Trump, we are fast approaching one of those moments. In the next two weeks, the property developer will make his most fateful decision since he fired Meat Loaf from Celebrity Apprentice. Who deserves the peculiar honour of serving America just a heartbeat away from an orange-hued president? More importantly, who would accept a job that famously — even under sane and qualified presidents — isn’t worth much?
Trump’s vice-presidential (VP) pick may reassure some Republicans that there would be some adult supervision of a president who wants to launch a trade war with China, deport 11 million US residents and close the borders to a billion Muslims.
Then again, any voter who thinks that Trump will listen to wise vice-presidential counsel is in desperate need of some adult supervision of their own. First and foremost, this is a candidate — and possible president — who cannot keep secrets. The VP selection and vetting process is normally a confidential affair. Candidate Barack Obama smuggled his candidates into his hotel through the rear entrances located by the garbage trucks. The reasons for confidentiality are clear. You stand more chance of surprising voters — and dominating the news cycle — with a secret pick. You also avoid the risk of association with tarnished goods if news leaks before the vetting is complete. And finally you avoid the risk of looking impotent when your selections turn you down.
It’s a question of trust and discipline: If a candidate cannot keep a secret, how on earth can he or she protect national security secrets inside the West Wing? This ought to be an obvious point to a candidate obsessed with Hillary Clinton’s private email server. But it turns out that self-awareness and self-promotion do not go hand in hand. Instead of secrecy and self-discipline, Candidate Trump brags about meeting his VP candidates on Twitter. He has boasted of his time with Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa, Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee and Governor Mike Pence of Indiana. (For some reason, he hasn’t bragged about his body man and former presidential rival, Governor Chris Christie.) In between those meetings, the GOP’s standard-bearer had this to say: “The only people who are not interested in being the VP pick are the people who have not been asked!”
Well, it turns out that even some of those who have met with Trump are not interested in being his vice-president. Ernst ought to fit the bill as a solid pick: A Tea Party darling, she was one of the rising stars of the 2014 cycle, thanks to a TV ad that featured her boasting about her knife skills.
In fact, Ernst prefers a cleaver to a scalpel: She wants to abolish several US departments and agencies such as the Department of Education and the Internal Revenue Service. She is a rare female army veteran in the US Senate who was deployed to Kuwait during the Iraq war. And she believes that former Iraqi president Saddam Hussain really did possess weapons of mass destruction; we just couldn’t find them. Sadly, she isn’t available for the veep job, because she has to be somewhere else for the next few years. “I think that President Trump will need some great assistance in the United States Senate and I can provide that,” she told Politico last week. “I will probably participate more as an advocate.”
Bob Corker is a less-obvious choice for Trump, but he would have added some desperately needed foreign policy heft to a Trump White House. The chairman of the august Senate Foreign Relations Committee specialises in sounding reasonable while voting solidly along party lines. After meeting the entire Trump family, Corker ruled out running for veep because, well, it just doesn’t feel right. “I’ve always thought that I’m better suited for other kinds of things, and I think most people who know me agree with that,” he told reporters on Wednesday.
That leaves Pence: A former talk radio host who went on to become an arch conservative in the House, where he policed ideological purity at the Republican Study Committee. He was opposed to immigration reform, LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans-gender) rights and was a strong supporter of the war in Iraq. It’s not yet clear what Pence thinks of Trump’s position on Saddam. For some time, the GOP nominee has voiced his admiration for the man his own party only recently considered a vile dictator forming an axis of evil with Iran and North Korea.
But that was so post-9/11. Nowadays the Republican Party is led by a man who thinks Saddam — a designated state sponsor of terrorism — was in fact a great leader in the war on terror. To put it mildly, this is not the worldview of Pence, Ernst and Corker. Republicans used to campaign against Obama by saying that the troops would have no confidence in a commander-in-chief who opposed the war in Iraq. Now they are getting vetted by a man who thinks Saddam would have been a great ally. On that basis, it seems a shame to have destroyed him and his regime, destabilised the entire region — and killed almost 4,500 US servicemen and women, as well as tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians.
These are hard times for what passes for the Trump campaign and the Republican National Convention (RNC). Staffers are hired and depart a few days later. The RNC is supposedly professionalising a candidate who is pathologically determined to make things up as he goes along. Maintaining the facade of unity and popularity is a gold-plated exercise in hyperbole and question-dodging.
That leaves the small problem of who to put on stage at the Republican convention in Cleveland in less than three weeks’ time. Beyond his blood relatives, Trump has suggested he will give speaking slots to sports figures, like the boxing promoter Don King. This is not just a challenge for staging a convention. Without party support — and no, Ben Carson doesn’t count — there can be no legislative action to back up the over-inflated words that emerge from President Trump’s mouth. It’s all hat and no cattle; all Don King, no Muhammad Ali. For a candidate who admires dictators, this may not be a problem. For members of the Congress running for re-election, this is a catastrophe. Aesop wrote that a man is known by the company he keeps. By now, it’s painfully obvious that the Grand Old Party doesn’t want to keep Trump’s company.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
Richard Wolffe is a Guardian US columnist, as well as chief digital and marketing officer at Global Citizen, a non-profit organisation dedicated to ending extreme poverty. An MSNBC political analyst for a decade, Wolffe was most recently vice-president and executive editor of MSNBC.com and is the author of Renegade: The Making of a President, Revival: The Struggle for Survival Inside the Obama White House and The Message: The Re-Selling of President Obama. He previously spent several years in senior roles at Newsweek magazine and the Financial Times.
