The Perils of Picking the Wrong Running Mate

As Donald Trump is now the presumptive nominee for president by the Republican Party, more focus is being placed on who will be — and who should be — his running mate.

One of those who has been mentioned as a possibility is Senator Katie Britt of Alabama, a former congressional staffer who delivered the official Republican response to President Joe Biden’s highly partisan State of the Union speech Thursday night. Many Republicans were not impressed by Senator Britt’s delivery.

Charlie Kirk, CEO of the Trump-affiliated group Turning Point USA, summed up the disappointment among many Republicans. “Joe Biden just declared war on the American right and Katie Britt is talking like she’s hosting a cooking show.” Britt gave her response to Biden from her kitchen table.

Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the Senate, picked Britt to give the official response. Britt was endorsed by Trump when she was elected to the Senate in 2022.

The 42-year-old senator has a score of 70 on the Freedom Index — which rates members of Congress according to their fidelity to the U.S. Constitution — and while she certainly votes correctly more often than not, we must look at significant votes. For example, she voted “no” on Senator Rand Paul’s resolution “to express the sense of Congress that Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty does not supersede the constitutional requirement that Congress declare war before the United States engages in war.” Article 5 of the treaty requires member nations to go to war if one of them is attacked. Entangling alliances such as this — opposed by Presidents George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson — were a large reason that a local dispute between Serbia and Austria in 1914 led to a world war, eventually involving the United States.

Many have considered Senator Britt as a good running mate for Trump because she is a woman. Presidential candidates often select running mates to help with a perceived weakness. Pundits have asserted that Trump needs to increase his support with women in general, and suburban women in particular.

Perhaps Senator Britt could do that, and it is possible she could make a fine vice president. Other women might do the same for Trump. Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina has been mentioned as someone who could help Trump among black voters.

But the importance of the selection of a vice president is really underrated, and the long-term consequences are often not considered enough when the selection is made. Trump certainly needs a running mate who will help his chances of getting elected, but what about beyond his term?

Trump is mortal, as have been all other U.S. presidents before him. Assassins’ bullets have transferred power from the president to the vice president four times, and four other presidents have died in office, elevating the vice president into the White House.

Most relevant to Trump’s selection is the decision of Ronald Reagan to make George Bush his running mate in 1980. It was considered at the time a masterstroke because it “united the Republican Party,” and contributed to Reagan’s 44-state landslide victory over President Jimmy Carter.

How much Bush actually helped Reagan electorally is debatable, but one can say with some assurance that had Reagan not picked Bush, Bush would have never been president of the United States. Bush’s election in 1988 is largely credited with the voters believing it was “Reagan’s third term.”

Whatever one thinks of Reagan, Bush’s presidency was a disaster in many ways. Bush was an Establishment Republican, supported by globalists like David Rockefeller, and he launched the war against Iraq in 1991, calling for a “New World Order.” In a speech commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Bush chose not to blame the Japanese for the attack, but rather said the blame was on the “isolationists” in the United States, such as the America First Committee, who had opposed American entry into the war in Europe.

When running in 1988, Bush called for a “kinder, gentler America,” which President Reagan’s wife, Nancy, understandably took as a coded attack upon her husband’s presidency.

In short, Bush was no conservative. His lackluster presidency led to the election of Bill Clinton in 1992. A different Republican president not picked from the Rockefeller wing of the party would have likely defeated Clinton, or some other Democratic nominee, in 1992. Bush’s presidency led to Clinton’s presidency.

And after eight years of Clinton, it led to the presidency of his son, George W. Bush. After all of the foreign interventions of the Clinton years, the younger Bush — the governor of Texas — called for a “more humble foreign policy,” and said that the U.S. had no business being the world’s policeman.

It was all rhetoric, of course, as Bush the Younger simply continued the globalist policies of Bush the Elder. After eight years of the younger Bush, disgusted voters picked a Democrat, Barack Obama — and his running mate, Joe Biden.

In other words, the choice that Reagan made in 1980 has contributed greatly to our present problems, 44 years later.

Ominously, the wrong Trump pick this time could have more immediate negative consequences. Reagan had been president less than three months when a bullet fired from the .22 revolver of John Hinckley almost made Bush president in 1981, rather than 1989, as it came within one inch of Reagan’s heart.

It would be a terrible thing if the American people elected Trump in November, and an assassin made the wrong running mate president instead. With the intense hatred for Trump, stirred up by the globalists and their allies in the media, that is something that must be considered when a running mate is chosen.