RADIO: Talking Trump VP Picks With Dan Proft And Amy Jacobson

This was yesterday morning – early – and it was a radio appearance on the Morning Answer Show in Chicago. The topic was the GOP veepstakes, which appear to be playing out at least in part on the steps of the courthouse in New York where Donald Trump is being tried for…something.

Mercifully, we didn’t talk too much about the kangaroo court Trump is being subjected to, a topic too depressing for those who value an impartial judiciary. Of note, however, is that the lawfare prosecutions of the former president in New York and elsewhere are not having their intended effect on his electability.

Trump is leading Joe Biden in the polls. This is not what was supposed to happen. What was supposed to happen was that indicting him on spurious, bad-faith charges based on “novel legal theories” as all four sets of indictments are shown to be would fill Trump like a balloon where it came to the Republican primaries, and then the actual trials would destroy his ability to campaign and drain him of air just in time for the general election.

A pump-and-dump scheme, if you will.

The problem is that the Democrats’ candidate is proving to be measurably worse than Trump even with these criminal trials baked into his candidacy. Joe Biden is the single weakest incumbent president to run for re-election in the modern age. There is nothing, other than perhaps abortion, which about 90 percent of the American population rejects as the most important issue facing the country, where Biden has a perceived advantage over Trump.

They haven’t even shut Trump down on the campaign trail. Over the weekend he spoke in front of nearly 100,000 people in Wildwood, New Jersey, demonstrating that trying to capture him in the New York area, thought to be a lost cause for the GOP, might be a fatal mistake allowing Trump to expand the swing-state map into Biden territory.

Because of those factors, I’m arguing that Trump doesn’t need to follow traditional political analysis when picking a VP. He doesn’t need to balance his ticket geographically, or nominate a woman or a member of a racial minority, or “moderate” his campaign by going with some ideological centrist.

The Wall Street Journal offered that old advice to Trump in an editorial over the weekend. I shot it down in my American Spectator column Tuesday. Instead, I argued, and repeated the case with Dan and Amy on the radio, that what Trump needs in a VP is someone who can be reliably identified as an implementer of the MAGA/America First/revivalist agenda.

Drain the swamp. Send the illegal aliens home. Deregulate our economy and let it grow. Break up the woke corporate oligopoly. Shut down the DEI and ESG nonsense infecting our politics, economics and culture. Restore some honor and intelligence to our foreign policy and get us out of the perpetual war business. Strike a blow, or several, against the politicization and corruption of our legal system.

The items on the agenda are not a secret. The trick is finding Republican politicians with the spine to press that agenda. Trump’s last VP pick, Mike Pence, failed in that regard. And there cannot be a repeat of that mistake, which was the same mistake Ronald Reagan made with George H. W. Bush.

Anyway, that’s the subject of the segment, which I think you’ll find was informative as well as entertaining.