Last Wednesday, one of the most pressing enigmas of the US elections in November was clarified: there will be debates between the candidates, Donald Trump and Joe Biden, but they will disobey the rules of previous campaigns. There will be two: the first will be held sooner than ever, in June, and the second, in September. The organization of both will be carried out by private television networks, CNN and ABC respectively. The candidates also picked up the gauntlet of Fox News; The most watched cable news station will have to settle for hosting the face-to-face meeting between vice presidents. So everything is in order, except for one small detail: who will face the Democratic candidate, Biden’s second in command, Kamala Harris, on the Republican side?
Trump, comfortable in the art of plucking the daisy, does not seem to be in a hurry to clear up the question of who will accompany him to the White House, and that has entertained analysts since it became clear that the former president would be his party’s candidate, back in February, after sweeping (once again) the South Carolina primary. No one won an election thanks to the name that appeared under theirs on the ballot, but a good decision always helps, and can serve, in the best of cases, to soften the reservations of certain voters with the headliner.
It is about opening the game by choosing, for example, a woman who attracts women’s suffrage; someone who seduces minorities (and the disputed vote of the African-American and Latino communities); or that the average tandem age will drop. The reasons may also be stylistic (someone, say, more groundbreaking who adds spice to the pack, or, in the case of Trump, quite the opposite) or purely geographical: taking into account that the system favors the elections being settled In a handful of States, betting on a well-known face in one of them can be decisive.
In the pools of the second on the Republican ballot there are many names, still too many, and of all stripes: from opponents who aspired to the party’s designation, such as Vivek Ramaswamy, the “anti-woke millennial millionaire”, to active governors and senators or stars in greater or lesser ascent of the magaverse (neologism coined from the acronym of the Trump slogan “Make America Great Again”). Will it be the extremists Elise Stefanik (Representative from New York) or Marjorie Taylor Greene (Georgia) or the repentant Democrat Tulsi Gabbard? Kari Lake, who failed in the last election in Arizona, Texas Governor Gregg Abbott, or ultra television personality Tucker Carlson? Among so many questions, there is one certainty (at least, at this point): the chosen one will not be Nikki Haley, Trump’s great rival in the primaries, who has denied time and time again that she would accept the invitation and it remains to be seen if He is going to give his public support to the Republican candidate.
Among that crowd of possible candidates, there are a couple of hidden ones who lately seem to be gaining ground in the race, while others hares, like South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, seem to have fallen by the wayside. (Although the animal simile may not be the luckiest with her: if her options have plummeted spectacularly, it has been after the publication of a memoir in which she confesses that morning in which she killed a dog and a “smelly” goat.) .
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The first of the last to stand out is an old acquaintance from the road to the White House: Marco Rubio, senator from Florida. This year it is not his turn to renew his position (he did so easily in 2022), and in 2016 he stayed on the path to being the one chosen by his party to aspire to the presidency (and thus becoming, perhaps, the first Latino in achieving it). According to reports financial times, This is an option valued by some of the richest donors to the Trump campaign. If he ends up anointed, he will have to move: US law does not allow the president and vice president to reside in the same State (Florida, in this case).
The second is businessman Doug Burgum, governor of North Dakota. He was among a dozen candidates who began the primary process. He never had any options, nor was he very well known outside his state, but his strategic positioning this past Tuesday in the photo that several prominent members of the Republican Party took several meters behind Trump during a recess in the trial being continued against him in New York for the black payment to porn actress Stormy Daniels has sparked speculation among trumpologists about your options.
The Wall Street Journal,with good sources in the party, dedicated a profile to him this weekend based on that image, his participation in a meeting with mega-donors at the former president’s residence in Mar-a-Lago and the fact that he accompanied him at a rally recent in New Jersey in which, in another bad omen for Biden, he was acclaimed by 80,000 supporters in a decidedly Democratic state. The article of Journal He attributes the reasons for Trump’s interest in Burgum to an anonymous collaborator: he is rich, loyal and good-looking.
A black senator and a ‘hilbilly’ from Ohio
Along with Burgum, Ramaswamy and Mike Johnson, president of the House of Representatives and third authority in the country, were supporting the magnate that day. The first criminal trial against an American president is not only attracting tourists, who queue as an audience since dawn so as not to miss a historic occasion, it has also provoked a parade of congressmen and senators, invited by the defense, to theatrically denounce a process that they consider “political persecution.” On that list, another name that sounds like a candidate stands out, the African-American congressman from Florida Byron Donalds, and two senators who have been in the vice presidential pools for some time: JD Vance (Ohio) and Tim Scott (Florida).
Vance rose to fame with his book, a best-seller international with autobiographical overtones about the discontent of the population of the rust belt that the millionaire Trump conquered. The success of Hilbilly. A rural elegy(Deusto) opened the doors of his political career to Vance. Along that path, he forgot his opinions about someone whom he defined in a message to a friend as “America’s Hitler” and ended up forging a close friendship with the former president’s first-born son, despite their very different personal stories (the rich kid of New York versus the poor, self-made young man from the Midwest). That relationship apparently gives him points in Trump’s eyes.
Scott, the only black Republican senator, also competed with the magnate for the Republican nomination and never had anything to do either. After throwing in the towel, he swallowed the insults and contempt, and became the biggest fan, who does not miss the opportunity to publicly show his support, who sometimes flirts with blushing.
Scott’s servility was one of the elements in the sketch of the episode with which the famous comedy show Saturday Night Live closed its season on Saturday. In it, James Austin Johnson, whose imitation of Trump does not pale next to that of Alec Baldwin, speaks from the other side of the fence of the Manhattan courthouse from which he appears every day in the distance before the media, and talks about who will choose as vice president. Noem comes out with a gun in one hand and a stuffed puppy (“don’t worry, the puppy is fake; not the gun,” she says), while Scott steps in to help the candidate with the black vote ( “specifically mine,” he clarifies, “because no other black man likes me.”) In the parody, Trump-Johnson finally chooses Haníbal Lecter, a fictional character that the magnate turned to in a somewhat surreal moment during the aforementioned rally in New Jersey: “I hope it scares everyone at the border,” says the comedian in the sketch.
Between massive electoral events and courts, the real Trump seems, meanwhile, to enjoy the suspense, and repeats in his interviews that he does not see the urgency to decide, while sending contradictory messages about what he is looking for. In 2016, he opted in July for Mike Pence, whose religious and old-fashioned conservative profile he deemed appropriate because of what he offered in contrast to his volcanic personality. He announced it on Twitter (today, X) a week before the Republican convention, as Biden did in 2020 with Harris (except for using the social network). The difference with those campaigns is that both candidates got there after a fight that took much longer to resolve than this year’s.
Finally, it is worth remembering how things ended with Pence: with the mob of supporters of the still president who stormed the Capitol on January 6 asking that he be hanged because he did not want to oppose certifying Biden’s legitimate electoral victory. These backgrounds do not seem to deter the list of candidates who are currently in the selection process for the position of Trump’s companion. In it magaverse It is not well seen to be disgusted with strong emotions.
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