Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.
Now that Donald Trump is officially the presumptive Republican nominee, he's getting ready for the general election. In just the last couple of weeks, he's scratched a lot off his to-do list.
He installed new leadership, including his daughter-in-law, at the Republican National Committee and negotiated a joint-fundraising agreement with the party. His campaign is in talks with his former campaign manager and pardon recipient Paul Manafort to run the GOP convention. And his lawyers have successfully delayed the most serious legal threats he faces while getting a nearly half-billion-dollar bond in his fraud case reduced to a more manageable $175 million.
Yep, everything is shaping up as well as can be expected for Trump's fourth run for president (including his widely forgotten and short-lived 2000 effort ). The last big thing on his list: Pick a running mate.
In case you hadn't heard, his former vice president, Mike Pence, is not available.
Picking a running mate is a lot like buying a car. The first question is, "What do you need it for?" If you need to haul around a bunch of kids, a minivan might be best. If you want to show off, a sports car makes more sense.
Veep picks are for shoring up weaknesses or reinforcing strengths. Trump picked Pence in 2016 because he needed to reassure social conservatives and evangelicals. Biden chose Kamala Harris because he believed (wrongly, in my opinion) that he needed a Black woman on the ticket.
Sometimes the weaknesses have less to do with particular constituencies than with the perceived deficiencies of the presidential nominee. George W. Bush and Barack Obama respectively tapped Dick Cheney and Joe Biden to add decades of political experience to tickets headed by relatively young and inexperienced nominees.
So what does Trump need in a running mate this time around? His claims of uniting the GOP notwithstanding, he needs to deal with the reality that a quarter to a third of the party backed Nikki Haley (and other alternatives) in the primaries.
One way to do that is to win those voters back. Another is to replace them with supporters who haven't traditionally voted Republican, including working-class Black and Latino voters. A third option: Cobble together chunks from columns A and B.
The question is, can a running mate help him do any of that? Trump is a known quantity, with 100% name identification. The idea that a sidekick could change voters' opinions about him seems implausible.
Unlike in 2016, Trump may not have reason to shore up portions of the base with this decision. The voters Pence helped bring into Trump's coalition are now for the most part fully loyal to him. Those who aren't won't change their minds based on a potential veep.
Hence my skepticism that picking a woman would shore up Trump's weaknesses with female voters. Women who don't like Trump, or who are highly motivated by the abortion issue, aren't likely to be swayed by a female running mate.
There's also the matter of Trump's personal preferences. He now values blind loyalty and even blinder sycophancy more than electoral appeal. He's convinced that he's popular, and he wants someone to hype his greatness, not highlight his weaknesses.
Fortunately for Trump, there's no shortage of candidates who meet those criteria. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who implored voters not to vote for a "con man" like Trump in 2016, now says he would be "honored" to be his No. 2.
Picking Rubio would make a lot of political sense. He's a gifted and extremely flexible politician who could appeal to both college-educated suburbanites and working-class and Latino voters.
But I think Trump and his advisers understand that if he is elected, he could very easily be impeached again. In that light, selecting a conventionally reassuring politician as his constitutional understudy is risky. If removing Trump from office would result in a President Rubio -- or even a President Tim Scott -- a lot of Republicans might take that bargain. Also, Trump doesn't want another Pence -- a politician who, when truly tested by a constitutional crisis, sided with the Constitution.
What I believe Trump wants is a Renfield to his Dracula -- a toady who is wholly subservient to his needs and desires. Such a creature -- like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, for example -- would not only campaign the way Trump wants but would also make the price of removing him from the White House too scary to contemplate.
Greene herself might be too much of a liability to make the cut, but I suspect he will be drawn to a pliant enabler who is frightening enough to backstop his presidency while not so outlandish as to cost him the election. Nancy Mace, stay near your phone.
First posted March 27, 2024. (C)2024 Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
Eric Trump, the newly appointed ALT5 board director of World Liberty Financial, walks outside of the NASDAQ in Times Square as they mark the $1.5- billion partnership between World Liberty Financial and ALT5 Sigma with the ringing of the NASDAQ opening bell, on Aug. 13, 2025, in New York City.
Why does the Trump family always get a pass?
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche joined ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday to defend or explain a lot of controversies for the Trump administration: the Epstein files release, the events in Minneapolis, etc. He was also asked about possible conflicts of interest between President Trump’s family business and his job. Specifically, Blanche was asked about a very sketchy deal Trump’s son Eric signed with the UAE’s national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon.
Shortly before Trump was inaugurated in early 2025, Tahnoon invested $500 million in the Trump-owned World Liberty, a then newly launched cryptocurrency outfit. A few months later, UAE was granted permission to purchase sensitive American AI chips. According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, “the deal marks something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president’s company.”
“How do you respond to those who say this is a serious conflict of interest?” ABC host George Stephanopoulos asked.
“I love it when these papers talk about something being unprecedented or never happening before,” Blanche replied, “as if the Biden family and the Biden administration didn’t do exactly the same thing, and they were just in office.”
Blanche went on to boast about how the president is utterly transparent regarding his questionable business practices: “I don’t have a comment on it beyond Trump has been completely transparent when his family travels for business reasons. They don’t do so in secret. We don’t learn about it when we find a laptop a few years later. We learn about it when it’s happening.”
Sadly, Stephanopoulos didn’t offer the obvious response, which may have gone something like this: “OK, but the president and countless leading Republicans insisted that President Biden was the head of what they dubbed ‘the Biden Crime family’ and insisted his business dealings were corrupt, and indeed that his corruption merited impeachment. So how is being ‘transparent’ about similar corruption a defense?”
Now, I should be clear that I do think the Biden family’s business dealings were corrupt, whether or not laws were broken. Others disagree. I also think Trump’s business dealings appear to be worse in many ways than even what Biden was alleged to have done. But none of that is relevant. The standard set by Trump and Republicans is the relevant political standard, and by the deputy attorney general’s own account, the Trump administration is doing “exactly the same thing,” just more openly.
Since when is being more transparent about wrongdoing a defense? Try telling a cop or judge, “Yes, I robbed that bank. I’ve been completely transparent about that. So, what’s the big deal?”
This is just a small example of the broader dysfunction in the way we talk about politics.
Americans have a special hatred for hypocrisy. I think it goes back to the founding era. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in “Democracy In America,” the old world had a different way of dealing with the moral shortcomings of leaders. Rank had its privileges. Nobles, never mind kings, were entitled to behave in ways that were forbidden to the little people.
In America, titles of nobility were banned in the Constitution and in our democratic culture. In a society built on notions of equality (the obvious exceptions of Black people, women, Native Americans notwithstanding) no one has access to special carve-outs or exemptions as to what is right and wrong. Claiming them, particularly in secret, feels like a betrayal against the whole idea of equality.
The problem in the modern era is that elites — of all ideological stripes — have violated that bargain. The result isn’t that we’ve abandoned any notion of right and wrong. Instead, by elevating hypocrisy to the greatest of sins, we end up weaponizing the principles, using them as a cudgel against the other side but not against our own.
Pick an issue: violent rhetoric by politicians, sexual misconduct, corruption and so on. With every revelation, almost immediately the debate becomes a riot of whataboutism. Team A says that Team B has no right to criticize because they did the same thing. Team B points out that Team A has switched positions. Everyone has a point. And everyone is missing the point.
Sure, hypocrisy is a moral failing, and partisan inconsistency is an intellectual one. But neither changes the objective facts. This is something you’re supposed to learn as a child: It doesn’t matter what everyone else is doing or saying, wrong is wrong. It’s also something lawyers like Mr. Blanche are supposed to know. Telling a judge that the hypocrisy of the prosecutor — or your client’s transparency — means your client did nothing wrong would earn you nothing but a laugh.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.