Should Trump Follow the WSJ’s Vice-Presidential Advice?

A couple weeks ago, a media narrative — which I’ll admit I agreed with at the time — making the rounds claimed that because of the lawfare-generated indictments and court cases that Donald Trump is having to wade through, it’s...

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A couple weeks ago, a media narrative — which I’ll admit I agreed with at the time — making the rounds claimed that because of the lawfare-generated indictments and court cases that Donald Trump is having to wade through, it’s crucial that he name a vice-presidential nominee soon so that he’ll have a surrogate to take to the road as spring turns to summer.

After all, the ridiculous New York “hush-money” trial that local Soros District Attorney Alvin Bragg and left-wing activist Judge Juan Merchan are orchestrating, complete with practically daily nuggets of prosecutorial malfeasance and judicial error, will likely go on for at least another six weeks. And Merchan seems determined to keep Trump off the campaign trail.

Normally, you’d see a situation like that, and you’d say it puts Trump at a real disadvantage. If he can’t make regular campaign appearances because he’s tied to New York, a state he’s unlikely to make competitive, then how is he going to drum up the kind of support without which a presidential campaign can’t survive?

But, of course, nothing is normal anymore.

And the VP narrative that seemed eminently rational two weeks ago right now doesn’t hold as much water as you’d think.

After all, CNN’s Harry Enten is in a panic over a poll that shows Trump has taken commanding leads in Nevada, Arizona, and Georgia, putting him on the cusp of locking up 270 electoral votes if things continue to go as they’re going:

"AN ABSOLUTE DISASTER": President Trump post MASSIVE leads in battleground states over Crooked Joe Biden in New York Times poll.

NEVADA: Trump +13
GEORGIA: Trump +9
ARIZONA: Trump +6
PENNSYLVANIA: Trump +3
WISCONSIN: Trump +1 pic.twitter.com/f92WSa7i4l

— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) May 13, 2024

RedState’s Nick Arama interprets Enten’s analysis accurately, explaining that these poll numbers demonstrate why Team Biden is so busy with otherwise inexplicable foreign-policy moves:

Enten then looks at the Electoral College numbers and declares it “Advantage: Donald Trump.” And you can see why Biden is in so much trouble. If you accord Trump the Sun Belt states, Enten puts Trump at 268 to Biden at 225. That would mean if Trump wins any of the other three states where it’s too close to call, he would reach 270.

That’s why Biden has been freaking out over Michigan and his position on Israel — because that could be the race right there. If I’m reading Enten’s numbers right and looking at what Biden needs to have, he would also need to pull down all of those in question: Wisconsin 10, Michigan 15, and Pennsylvania 19, plus Nebraska’s Second Congressional district to get to 270. So he would have to pull off the hat trick, while Trump would only need one.

With those trends, not to mention this:

You start to realize that traditional political analysis doesn’t work anymore.

The purveyors of that analysis are now comically out of touch with the realities of 2024. You’ve probably seen this hilarious, not-safe-for-work meltdown by James Carville over the inability to sell Joe Biden to the American people despite tens of millions of dollars’ worth of messaging about, for example, how fabulous the economy is:

James Carville having a nervous breakdown pic.twitter.com/BqmKO45EeL

— Monica Crowley (@MonicaCrowley) May 10, 2024

But back to the underlying question: Does it matter who Trump’s vice-presidential nominee is?

Of course it does. Actually, it’s colossally important.

It’s important because while Trump is nowhere near as decrepit as is the mentally invalid and physically incontinent Joe Biden, he’s still in his mid-70s, and that’s old for a politician.

It’s also important because the Left wants him dead, and there is a very real risk one of its crazies will make him that way.

Oh, you think I’m out of line with that statement? Fine. Explain this:

JEN PSAKI: “Maybe Donald Trump will go away. Maybe he'll go to jail. Maybe he will die. Not to be too morbid. But maybe. He's not a young man.”

pic.twitter.com/DR3yMp2Y5b

— ALX (@alx) May 7, 2024

Jen Psaki isn’t just a bad MSNBC host with an underwhelming audience — she’s literally a mouthpiece for the Democrat Party. She was the official mouthpiece for Joe Biden before the current tag-team combination of laughable spokeslesbian Karine Jean-Pierre and Baghdad Bob–style prevaricator John Kirby.

So when she throws out a “maybe Trump might die” drive-by wish cast, it isn’t nothing.

What also isn’t nothing is that the Biden Secret Service, having already denied coverage to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is actively seeking to drain Biden voters with his radical leftist position on abortion, is now allowing protesters to force Republican convention attendees to walk a gauntlet into the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee despite multiple demands by the RNC for at least the same security perimeter that the Democrats’ convention is getting.

And Team Biden is now floating the idea of a virtual convention to protect its delegates from protesters sure to descend on Chicago for its convention.

Trump needs a VP nominee because there is a real not-zero possibility of a James Hodgkinson lunatic’s being ginned up enough by Team Biden’s rhetoric about how Trump’s a “dictator” and how his winning would make 2024 the “last election” and what a threat he is to “our democracy” to act on that incitement.

What’s becoming clear is that Trump doesn’t need is a VP nominee who would add votes to his ticket.

The votes are there. Or, better put, the votes for Team Biden are increasingly not there. Biden is failing to hold the Democrats’ core coalition together as black, Hispanic, and Asian voters fall off and as even groups like single women begin to bleed.

And if Trump can draw 100,000 rallygoers in New Jersey, a number that proves it isn’t impossible he could expand the map and put that state in play (and clearly Team Biden is worried about Minnesota, which it absolutely ought to have been long ago given the mess Democrats like Ilhan Omar, Keith Ellison, and Tim Walz have made of that state) — and let’s not count out New Mexico, either, given how atrocious Biden’s approval numbers are in that state — then it’s very clear that these lawfare cases aren’t having the effect on Biden’s electability that Democrats hoped for and Trump’s supporters feared.

So long as the GOP isn’t slaughtered when it comes to getting out the vote — something the Trump campaign and the Republican Party are honor-bound to get right this fall after several cycles of abysmal performance in that regard — he’s going to win.

So his vice-presidential nominee doesn’t have to win it for him. What’s important is that Trump’s VP is someone to whom he can entrust the movement propelling his candidacy.

This is something the Wall Street Journal got completely wrong in an editorial on Sunday. In a piece that extolled the virtues of Mike Pence as a “steady hand” — yes, it actually said that — the WSJ’s editors claimed that Nikki Haley was Trump’s best possible vice-presidential pick. It also named a pair of not-altogether-horrible possibilities, Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin and Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, as alternatives.

The idea is that Trump should moderate himself and his agenda by selecting a George H.W. Bush as Ronald Reagan did.

No, no, and absolutely not.

I would argue that Reynolds, who was a key Ron DeSantis surrogate, would actually make a very good VP pick. As Iowa’s governor, she has implemented a great deal of the MAGA agenda at the state level, has very much changed the Republican Party in Iowa into more of an offensive force and has done in Iowa something of what DeSantis has done in Florida in terms of crushing the Democrats’ ability to successfully compete statewide. Iowa has thus gone from purple to fairly red, based on Reynolds successfully governing as an unapologetic conservative, and there is currency in that.

She would govern as an effective implementer of Trump’s agenda.

Would Youngkin? In some respects, possibly. In others, maybe not so much. As for Haley, the idea that she would bring her voters over to Trump isn’t supported by much evidence.

And we know that Nikki Haley wouldn’t govern according to the MAGA (or revivalist, if I can put a plug in for my own term) philosophy. We know that because she wasted an awful lot of time and Democrat donor money telling us that during her failed primary campaign.

Are there others worth examining? Certainly. Vivek Ramaswamy might be more Trumpian than even Trump is, though there are some who question his sincerity. DeSantis would be a viable choice but for the complicated nature of a president and VP nominee both coming from the same state and what implication that has in the case of a close Electoral College vote. That’s the same problem Marco Rubio would bring to the table, though Rubio, especially given his recently discovered populist and anti-globalist streak, would be an otherwise credible choice.

What’s important is that Trump honor the movement that puts 100,000 in a rally for him in New Jersey. He’s the face of that movement, but it’s what he represents, which is more important.

Americans want the Swamp drained. We want our sovereignty back from a federal government and a globalist/socialist elite that actively despises us. We want an end to DEI and ESG madness. We want something done about widespread corruption in the administrative state and judicial system. We want a market economy back, rather than the corporate oligopoly we’re given. And we want escape valves from woke hegemony in education and culture.

Those things are attainable, but it takes a level of courage and pluck that your average Republican — the “steady hand” Mike Pence–type that the corporate media organists at the WSJ likes so much — can’t summon up.

So, no. Let’s not squander the moment by finding a modern-day George H.W. Bush who’ll plunge the GOP back into the stupid-party doldrums after Trump is gone. He needs a vice president who the Left is even more afraid of than it is of Trump.

And Nikki Haley is not it. It’s ridiculous even to suggest her for that job.

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