In the GOP veepstakes, Trump again sidelines men of color

It’s “always the bridesmaid, never the bride” for some aspiring Republican lawmakers.

Former President Donald Trump on Monday selected Ohio Sen. JD Vance as his running mate, forming one of the most extreme — and as my colleague Steve Benen noted, most inexperienced — tickets in modern American history. But let’s consider some of the people Trump didn’t pick, in particular the Black and the Latino men who happily mortgaged their dignity and laundered Trump’s racism to remain in consideration as potential VP picks, only to be passed over in favor of a rich, white Yale Law School graduate with significantly less political experience than they have.

I’m talking about Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott and Florida Rep. Byron Donalds, who’ve been reduced effectively to token minorities through the process of Trump’s running mate selection. 

Rubio, of course, had an acrimonious relationship with Trump during the GOP presidential primary in 2016 — one that got so petty that he resorted to mocking Trump’s, uh, hand size. Arguably, that was the moment that Rubio’s political career peaked. “Little Marco,” as Trump once called him, has since joined the ranks of the former president’s unwavering supporters, recently defending Trump’s comments about immigrants “poisoning the blood” of the United States as “nothing to do with race” during a Spanish-language interview.  

Despite being passed over Monday, Rubio wasted no time in declaring his loyalty to the MAGA cause.

Scott and Donalds didn’t fare any better. Donalds, who some pundits had suggested could have appealed to Black voters, was willing to distort history for the former president with his claim at a pro-Trump event that Black families were more “together” during the Jim Crow era than in the years that followed. (He later told MSNBC’s Joy Reid that “I never said that it was better for Black people in Jim Crow.”) His ahistorical nonsense wasn’t enough to earn a spot on the ticket, but Donalds nonetheless threw his support behind Trump-Vance on the opening night of the RNC. 

Scott, for his part, was criticized for the moment when he embraced Trump in the middle of a speech to tell him how much he loved him. And you can read here about the misguided podcast that Scott launched with other Black Republicans earlier this year in an attempt to sway Black voters in Trump’s favor (despite not mentioning Trump in the first five episodes). 

Like Rubio and Donalds, Scott got little to nothing in return for that effort but still stuck to the party’s script, assuring the mostly white crowd of Republican convention attendees that “America is not a racist country.”

One wonders if the three lawmakers have learned their roles in Trump’s Republican Party. Perhaps they can hang their hopes on cabinet positions in a possible future Trump administration. But for the time being, it seems clear Trump doesn’t want them as the face of his movement.