Trump Picks His Running Mate — and Political Heir

From the New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is the Daily. Today, on the first day of the Republican National Convention, Donald Trump makes his choice of a running mate. We watched it unfold, in real time, from Milwaukee.

Thank you so much. Okay, thank you.

Secret Service.

Open the trunk. Turn the engine off. Pop the hood. for me, please. Oh, the front hood, how do I do that?

She's got it, look at her.

And also, don't run into my barricade. People keep doing that, even though it says stop on it, you know? Keep your eyes open, alrighty? Be safe, everybody.

Thank you so much.

So we're headed in for people security. Can you back up for me real quick? Yep. Michael? Yeah.

Good to go.

Carlos? Good to go. And... You too. Rachel?

Hi, I can take whoever's next. Hi.

Once we made it through all that security, we walked into the first official event of the day, a briefing for reporters from the Trump campaign about what this first day of the convention would look like.

Hello.

To get inside Trump's decision-making, we turn to our colleague Mike Bender, a politics reporter at the Times, who's been on the VP beat for the past few months. Okay, we just want to bug you for a minute about what is the status of the VP choice. Last time we talked to you, you told us that there were three top contenders. Doug Burgum, governor of North Dakota, Florida Senator Marco Rubio, and Ohio Senator J.D. Vance.

Just hours before he's actually supposed to make the announcement and nominate the running mate. I mean, I literally ran into a couple of sources who are with other VP contenders who are telling me that they haven't received word one way or the other yet. I don't think he's told the person yet. I mean, we're three hours from a nomination. I seriously do not think that Trump has actually made the formal offer yet.

I think we have to just, like, explain that to people. We're three hours from the necessary public disclosure of this information, and it's not clear that the decision has been made.

Yeah, no, it's amazing. I mean, Trump is known to vacillate over big decisions. He did almost the same thing back in 2016 when he picked Mike Pence. He decided to pick Mike Pence and then spent the night before their first news conference together complaining to aides that he had made the wrong choice, wondering if he could pick someone differently. My reporting over the last week has been that he's been going through similar iterations on this decision.

So we're going to lightly stalk you until we get the news, and hopefully, when we get the news, you can break it to us, or it will be broken over our heads, and then we'll talk about it, and we'll make sense of it.

Yeah, definitely. I am also hoping to be the first to know, and if I'm the first to know, you guys will be the second to know.

Okay, thank you, Michael. Yeah.

Hey, why don't you think it's Marco? He called? Like, just now?

So can you just tell us about that phone call you had?

Yeah, yeah, definitely. This was someone who is very close with one of the VP contenders, one of the final three. This contender just received a call from Trump's team saying he's not the pick.

Soon enough, Mike confirmed that Marco Rubio had been crossed off the VP list, and that Marco Rubio wasn't the only VP contender to receive that call. So, it's 1.30 p.m., and this is a little unorthodox, but I'm peeking over the shoulder of my colleague, Mike Bender, and I can see that he's writing the following.

Ladies and gentlemen, we are about to begin a very important part of our program. I would like to ask that the aisles be cleared and the delegates please take their seats. Thank you.

In the meantime, the official business of this convention began, the nomination of Trump as the Republican nominee.

And to cast those 32 votes for our former and future president, Donald J. Trump.

We are pledging our 32 delegates to Donald Trump. And on and on and on it will go. And so this is a formality, adding up all the delegates from all the states, but it's actually a technically required component of Donald Trump becoming and accepting his party's nomination. And Trump will become the official nominee when 1,215 delegates in this room have pledged their support to him, which will probably be in about like 30 minutes. I stand before you today on behalf of the great state of New Hampshire.

OK.

Daily editor Rachel Quester, breaking the news that it's Vance, which we kind of thought it would be.

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Where are y'all trying to get?

To the floor.

Okay, just right out there, and then somebody will direct you.

Okay.

Around 3.

U.

The question is on the motion that Senator J.

This room is about to complete the nomination of Vance as VP.

In the opinion of the chair, the ayes have it, and the motion is adopted.

Without objection, the motion to reconsider is laid upon the table.

And just to give you a little bit of a sense of the feel of the room, J.

has the overwhelming support of this convention.

to be the next vice president of the United States. And that's that. J.D. Vance, the vice presidential nominee. We've got to get out of here.

Awesome. Can we close this door?

You can shut it. shut, yeah.

I think Trump is making this pick on who he thinks gives him the best chance to win. in November. He announced this decision in a Truth Social post and mentioned a couple of key states in that statement, essentially saying that he thinks Vance can help him win in Pennsylvania, in Michigan, Wisconsin. These are essential states for victory in November, both for Trump and President Biden. Trump won them in 2016, but lost to Biden in those same states in 2020..

Hmm. He's very openly saying, I have made a strategic choice. What's interesting about that, Mike, is that in our conversation a couple weeks ago, when we talked about who Trump was looking at closely, you had said that he wasn't thinking about these traditional questions of does my VP win me, X state, Y state? You know, he was engaging in questions of personal rapport and he got along really well with Doug Burgum. So clearly the strategic question became front of mind for Trump.

Well, well, well, look at The Daily fact-checking its reporters here on air. Well, you're not wrong either, Michael. There has been a shift in the last few weeks with Trump. He's gone from talking about finding a running mate who could help him govern to finding a running mate who can help him govern and someone who can help him win. And when he ran the analysis here, when he looked at the different set of candidates he has, his ultimate decision was that J.D.

Explain exactly why he thinks J.

The answer is both biographical and rooted in policy. Vance is a child of Appalachia. He grew up in a poor working-class neighborhood in Ohio. He served in the military. And when he decided to run for his first elected office in 2022, he was very far right on a lot of issues.

Got it. So we should see this decision as Trump picking someone who is ideologically extremely aligned with him, perhaps even a little further to the right than Trump, an issue like abortion, and from and of the place in the country that Trump needs to win, the Midwest, Appalachia, and that combination means, for Trump, Vance.

Yeah, exactly. I think it's also helpful to kind of put this in the context of the other contenders. Vance is not bringing a new piece of the puzzle to Trumpism. Marco Rubio, the senator from Florida, would have been a Spanish-speaking advocate who may appeal more to Latinos. Governor Doug Burgum from North Dakota could have helped settle down the pro-business Republicans who are nervous about Trump's unpredictability.

Of all the candidates Trump was thinking about for VP, and we've talked about this with you, they went on a journey, right, from Trump skeptic to Trump supporter. But J.D. Vance's journey stood out because he was so unstinting in his criticism of Trump. When Trump first entered the political scene back in 2016,. I remember interviewing Vance and talking to him about this stuff.

But he did. I mean, this is the most stunning, 180-degree political flip-flop of our time. To go from saying the sort of things that you just brought up to now being chosen as his most trusted advisor, a running mate, a number two, who will serve as president if something should happen to him, is extraordinary. I mean, you may have to go back to post-revolutionary times, when we used to pick vice presidents by who came in second place to find a vice president. who has said such searing criticisms of a president.

Fascinating. And ultimately, what's your understanding of why Trump could get past that? Somebody who's not very good at accepting criticism.

No, that's true. But as much as Trump hates criticism for his own actions and deeds, he loves the redemption narrative and he loves being asked for forgiveness. And J.D. Vance has spent several years seeking Trump's approval by going on television, making nice with all of the right-wing websites and media in order to show how much he has changed his mind on Trump and maybe most effectively blame the media. That point has been proven by Vance himself, who has explained his new thinking, his evolution on Trump, by saying he was lied to by a media narrative about Trump.

And it sounds like he never really needed to change his mind about some of the fundamental ideas of Trumpism. He had to change his mind about Trump. He seems always to have been fundamentally aligned with the ideas that Trump embraces, economic populism, some pretty far-right social positions. He needed to change his mind on the man, not the message.

Yeah, it was very personal, I think, for both Trump and Vance. in this instance. Again, Vance is someone who grew up in rural Ohio, whose family is from Appalachia, saw some of the things that Trump has railed against when it comes to manufacturing jobs that are being shipped overseas, these sort of pillars and institutions of society that have failed to uphold their end of the bargain when it comes to working-class, blue-collar, small-town Americans like Vance's.

If you are the Democrats right now, Mike, and you're absorbing this news, where do you see the greatest vulnerabilities are going to lie for Trump now picking Vance?

Democrats are definitely going to use Vance's old words against him, this sort of library of video clips and audio interviews of Vance going after Trump. But Democrats will also seize on Vance as an extremist, whether that's his ardent abortion view and support for a national ban and his willingness to do what his predecessor, Mike Pence, wouldn't. Vance has been on record already, saying that he would have blocked the certification of the 2020 results and that would have helped overturn that election.

Right, so you're saying. one simple way that the Biden ticket can go after Vance is by saying that you will enable Trump to break the law, overturn the election. We should expect that.

Yeah, I think so. I mean, looking back on what happened after 2020, the system worked because there was a lot of people around Trump who maybe they weren't guardrails, but maybe more speed bumps. And there's no indication that Vance has any willingness to play that role in the next Trump administration.

In that vein, it was pretty widely noted that in the hours after the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, we saw J.

I think Vance, in a lot of ways, kind of embodies the id of Trump and that instinct to fight. And even though the sort of manufactured statements from the campaign are calling for unity and calling for peace, what Trump really wants—.

Since the attempted assassination, right.

That's right. What Trump really wants is someone who is going to keep fighting. Factual or not, I think this shows the passion and the energy Trump was looking in running mate, valuing that interest in fighting more than—.

Interest in unity and peace.

Yeah, or facts on the ground.

Right. I want to end, Mike, with something you hinted at earlier, which is when you said that Trump is looking to Vance to set a path for the future of the Republican Party. What is that path, with Vance as number two?

Vance is only 39 years old. He's barely old enough to be president.

Right. 35 is the requirement.

Exactly. So. he's obviously going to be viewed very much as the heir apparent for Trumpism. Trump knows this. And the signal it's sending to everyone, not just in the party, but the rest of the country, is that any remnants of a debate about whether this party snaps back to its sort of pro-business establishment culture pre-Trump— The pre-Trump era is exactly that.

Right. In other words, Trumpism is here to stay. It is the Republican Party now that I've chosen J.D. Vance.

There's no going back anymore, Michael.

Thank you, Mike. This is really helpful. I really appreciate it.

Thank you for having me.

We make The Daily Podcast. Back at the convention hall. We wanted to ask folks from all the big swing states about the selection of J.D. Vance about an hour ago, and what you make of that decision, and if you think it's going to help Trump win this state. Absolutely.