And it isn’t even Halloween yet
Former President Donald Trump has “repeatedly” discussed choosing Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene as his 2024 running mate, The New York Times Magazine journalist Robert Draper told the Daily Beast.
Speaking on this week’s episode of the Daily Beast’s “The New Abnormal” podcast, Draper claimed the discussions have been ongoing for months.
Draper, the author of “Weapons of Mass Delusion: When the Republican Party Lost Its Mind,” told the podcast that Trump has toyed with the idea of selecting Greene to join his ticket since February of this year.
“It’s been discussed repeatedly,” he said, per the Daily Beast. “Now, to be fair, I mean, how many of these conversations has Trump had with other people?”
Draper said that Greene is being considered by Trump because she has been “unflaggingly loyal” to him throughout. “What is Trump concerned about most of all in a VP after the Mike Pence experience? Loyalty?” he added…
The former president needs somebody who will “fight for him to overturn a presidential election,” Draper continued. “He has every reason to expect that Greene would be by his side and would be his proximate warrior,” the journalist added.
Earlier this week, Greene told Draper that she’s discussed with Trump the possibility of serving as his running mate. She said she would be “honored” to serve, but added that the GOP establishment would not want it.
My instinct is to say that it would be great if he picked her as his running mate because she is so awful. But does that calculation make a lot of sense?I’m not sure anymore. Trump is completely normalized now, the undisputed head of the GOP so why shouldn’t we expect her to be too? Apparently, McCarthy plans to give her a big job in the congress if they win the majority:
Draper interviewed most major players, among them Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader with his eye on the speaker’s gavel after next month’s midterms. Asked if the man who courted Trump with red and pink Starbursts and genuflections at Mar-a-Lago is the leader Republicans deserve, Draper answers carefully.
“So two operative words there are ‘leader’ and ‘deserves’. It depends on how you define either. He would be the leader in the sense of that they’ll probably vote for him for speaker … but it’s an open question as to whether he really will lead or whether he really has ever led.
“The important word is ‘deserves’. And obviously, that requires a judgment on my part. But I do think that what Kevin McCarthy embodies to me is the human refutation to the argument that Donald Trump hijacked the Republican party, because to imagine that metaphor, you imagine the Republican party as an airplane seized by force, without any complicity, and that the plane was a perfectly well-functioning plane before then. McCarthy is here to disprove all of that.
“McCarthy has been an absolute enabler of Donald Trump. He has never refuted the kinds of lies his party has embraced. He has winked and nodded along. People have told me that he’s offered to create for Marjorie Taylor Greene a new leadership position. At minimum, she’s likely to get plum committee assignments.”
Greene, a far-right, conspiracy-spouting congresswoman from Georgia, was elected as Draper began work.
“I thought she would be just kind of marginalised, sitting at the Star Wars bar of Republican politics, kind of a member of Congress who would be ousted after one term. But in a lot of ways, tracing her trajectory was a way of tracing the trajectory of the post–Trump presidency Republican party after January 6. Now, Trump is without question the dominant party leader, and more to the point, Trumpism is the straw that stirs the drink.”
If Trumpism is the straw that stirs the drink, Greenism is the roofie.