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.
Americans across the political spectrum have continued to ask about the late financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s connections among the political elite. (Angela Weiss/AFP)
A view of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on June 25, 2026. President Donald Trump jolted Republicans during a fiery appearance at the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, scrapping a housing bill signing ceremony and clashing behind closed doors with a party rebel who challenged him over the Iran war. Trump had been expected to sign the bipartisan housing.
Only Trump doesn’t care about housing
It was August 15, 2024. Then candidate Donald Trump stepped out of his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club’s columned clubhouse to a gaggle of reporters. He was flanked by tables of groceries and signs showing the rising cost of food. Also on one of the tables was a dollhouse, meant to represent the equally alarming rise in housing prices.
It was a speech about the economy, the single most important issue of the 2024 election cycle, full of promises that went right to the heart of Americans’ anxieties. While former President Joe Biden and then Vice President Kamala Harris were contorting themselves to posture a good economy that just needed more time to recover from the pandemic, Trump was preying on voters’ very real fears of unaffordable gas, groceries, and homes. It was obviously a winning message.
In that speech, Trump promised, “We’re going to open up tracts of federal land for housing construction. We desperately need housing for people who can’t afford what’s going on now.”
As of mid-2023, there had been a housing shortage of nearly four million homes, according to the National Association of Realtors. Americans all over the country were either priced out of buying new homes due to low inventory, trapped in their existing homes by sky-high mortgage rates, or facing exorbitant rent hikes thanks to corporate investors buying up rental properties. Americans needed help, and Trump promised it.
Cut to March of 2026, when Trump reportedly told House Speaker Mike Johnson, “No one gives a sh*t about housing.”
That kind of thinking may explain why Trump this week suddenly announced he was canceling a signing ceremony for the bipartisan “21st Century ROAD to Housing Act,” a housing bill co-sponsored by Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Tim Scott that passed the House 358-32 and was approved in the Senate on Monday.
Trump instead demanded Congress pass the SAVE America Act, his controversial election grievance bill that doesn’t have enough Republican support to get passed in the Senate.
It’s just the latest in a line of policy self-owns where Trump has seemingly intentionally made life more difficult for Republicans hoping to keep their majority. Despite midterm elections occurring in the midst of a blistering economy and an unpopular war, they were surely hoping the housing bill would give them something — anything — to brag about when they returned home to their districts.
And very much to the contrary, Americans do give a sh*t about housing. According to a recent survey by the Bipartisan Policy Center, a whopping 79% say the cost of housing is extremely or very important to them. Eighty-three percent say Congress should take action on the issue — like it just did. Eighty-nine percent say the House and Senate need to work together to pass affordable housing legislation — like they just did. And 63% say they would be more likely to vote for a lawmaker if they helped pass legislation to build more affordable homes and lower housing costs — like they just did.
There aren’t many issues that unite Americans like housing does, and very few bipartisan policy wins Congress can point to, and yet, Trump is holding that bill hostage in order to get his pet project — which doesn’t even have the support of his own party — pushed through.
If you’re trying to make sense of something so nonsensical, as I’m sure many Republican lawmakers are, it’s certainly sad but not actually all that complicated. Trump said what he needed to get reelected and then promptly abandoned his promises in order to pursue his own self-interests, even if those interests are bad for Republicans and bad for voters.
That’s just the kind of guy he is.
S.E. Cupp is the host of "S.E. Cupp Unfiltered" on CNN.