If we can trust the hints that reporters have received from within Donald Trump’s camp, the former president has narrowed his choices for a running mate to three people: Sens. Marco Rubio of Florida and JD Vance of Ohio and North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum. Over the next three weeks until the Republican convention — when Trump has said he will announce his pick — the coverage will center on two pieces of speculative analysis: which of these men will be chosen and how they might affect Trump’s chances in November.
These questions are par for the course in a normal presidential election. But this year, they risk obscuring more important issues around these potential running mates: Would they help Trump impose his authoritarian vision? How much enthusiasm do they have for the project of dismantling democracy? At a moment of crisis like the one we faced in January 2021, would they stand up for their country? That’s what really matters, not whether Rubio could woo Latino voters or how much Trump likes Burgum’s hair.
All three men’s views of Trump have flipped from contempt to flattery.
For years, journalism scholars have decried the media’s unhealthy obsession with campaign strategy and tactics to the exclusion of policy substance; in the pithy formulation of professor Jay Rosen, what’s most important is “not the odds, but the stakes.” And the stakes — even for the vice presidency — are unusually high in 2024.
When it comes to the remaining contenders, here’s what’s clear. Like most aspiring Trump running mates, Rubio and Burgum have beclowned themselves with their displays of fealty toward Trump. In a better world they’d never live down their bowing and scraping. But JD Vance would be the truly dangerous choice.
All three men’s views of Trump have flipped from contempt to flattery. Rubio, who called Trump a “con artist” in 2016, now helps spread falsehoods about the 2020 election. Burgum said last year that he wouldn’t do business with Trump because “it’s important that you’re judged by the company you keep.” Not only did he walk back that assessment earlier this month, but he said every American “should be grateful” that someone of Trump’s greatness is “willing to put himself back into the presidential race again.”
Nevertheless, there’s little evidence that Rubio or Burgum have grand plans to unmake the American system of government. They’re standard-issue Republicans who would have been at home in the party at almost any time in the postwar era, with Rubio an anti-communist foreign policy hawk and Burgum an ally (and representative) of big business. Their willingness to say almost anything in order to get it is embarrassingly straightforward.
But Trump may want someone more loyal than an ambitious toady. That’s what he had in Mike Pence, whose sudden attack of conscience helped doom Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election. The most dangerous vice president is not the one who goes along with authoritarianism for fear of Trump’s rage but the one who wants authoritarianism for reasons of his own.
Vance has developed his own ideas about the kind of revolution he’d like to see, and Trump is clearly his vehicle to achieve it.
Which brings us to Vance. Like Rubio and Burgum, he has repented for his former criticisms of his party’s leader; back in 2016 he called Trump an “idiot,” “noxious” and “reprehensible” and said he wasn’t sure whether Trump would turn out to be “a cynical a—- like Nixon” or “America’s Hitler.”
But in the years since, Vance has developed his own ideas about the kind of revolution he’d like to see, and Trump is clearly his vehicle to achieve it. Two years ago, Vance said in an interview that if Trump wins he should “fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people” and defy the courts if they try to stop him. To change government in the way he wants, Vance said, “we’re going to have to get pretty wild and pretty far out there and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.” Vance is the Senate’s representative of a group of radical thinkers, sometimes going by the moniker the “New Right,” who want to see a government that intervenes not only in the economy but in the culture wars, as well, as long as it’s pursuing a right-wing agenda. As Vance told Politico, he and other members of the New Right talk about destroying “The Regime” — the web of societal institutions they see as inimical to the kind of country they want to create. He has proposed that the government “seize the assets” of foundations whose agendas he objects to. Vance also has praised Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, not despite the latter’s authoritarian tendencies but because of them. Among other things, Orbán has moved to assert control over media outlets and universities when he found them too critical of him; Vance sees the latter step as a model of what the American government should do to educational institutions that get out of line. In other words, Donald Trump wouldn’t have to cajole or beg or threaten JD Vance to subvert democracy. He’d eagerly say yes, in pursuit of his own authoritarian dreams. That’s what makes him the most dangerous of potential vice presidents. And it may make him Trump’s most likely pick.
Paul Waldman is a journalist and author focused on politics and culture. 
