The search for Trump’s running mate: ‘like auditions for The Apprentice’
The last person who occupied the job of US vice-president ended up the target of a violent mob calling for him to be hanged. Even so, as Donald Trump closes in on the Republican nomination for 2024, there is no shortage of contenders eager to be his deputy.
It is safe to assume that Mike Pence, who was Trump’s running mate in 2016 and 2020, will not get the job this time. His refusal to comply with his boss’s demand to overturn the last election caused a permanent rift and made Pence a perceived traitor and target of the January 6 insurrectionists.
Undeterred, Trump’s campaign surrogates in the recent Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary, both of which he won handily, have been trying to outdo each other with extravagant displays of fealty. “It’s very clear he’s holding these open auditions like it’s The Apprentice,” said Kurt Bardella, a Democratic strategist. “He will flirt with everyone. He will make them dance. They will all debase themselves and humiliate themselves and jockey for that spot.”
When he first ran for president in 2016, Trump understood that he needed a vice-presidential pick who could help shore up support among Republican evangelicals and social conservatives, who were suspicious of the thrice-married reality TV star. Pence, the then Indiana governor and fierce social conservative, was from what Trump likes to call central casting.
This year Trump’s allies and Republican strategists believe that he needs help attracting suburban swing voters in a handful of battleground states, where November’s election will likely be decided. Many commentators therefore predict that he will choose a woman or a person of colour, especially since the demise of the constitutional right to abortion.
Michael Steele, a former chair of the Republican National Committee, said one of the factors important to Trump is “just how much of a sycophant they would be, not just in terms of ‘Oh, I love you, Donald Trump’, but do you love me enough when I tell you to violate your oath of office in the constitution that you’ll do it?’ And that person for me is Elise Stefanik.”
Stefanik, 39, the highest-ranking woman in the Republican conference in the House of Representatives and one of the first members of Congress to endorse Trump, appears to have timed her run perfectly.
She gained national prominence last month after embarrassing the heads of three top universities about antisemitism on their campuses during a congressional hearing, which prompted two of them to later resign. Stefanik claimed victory and declared: “I will always deliver results.” Trump reportedly described her as a “killer”.
Since then she has outdone even the notoriously obsequious Pence. Soon after Trump described those convicted of crimes in the insurrection as “hostages”, she parroted the same term on NBC television’s flagship Meet the Press programme. When Trump con
fused rival Nikki Haley with former House speaker Nancy Pelosi while discussing January 6, Stefanik brazenly denied what everyone had heard.
Larry Sabato, the director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, said: “She’s running flat out for it. That’s the only explanation for the things she says and does. I’m embarrassed for her but she’s not embarrassed because she only has one career goal.She says whatever she thinks he’ll like. He does like it.”
In what is currently Washington’s favourite parlour game, the smart money is currently on Stefanik. Bill Whalen, a former media consultant for politicians including the former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, said: “Just based on what she did at that congressional hearing, what could make Trump more pleased than watching her take apart the Ivy League presidents? That would be very appealing for him to put her on the ticket.”
Another contender is Kristi Noem, serving her second term as South Dakota’s governor after a landslide reelection victory in 2022. She gained national attention after refusing to impose a statewide mask mandate during the coronavirus pandemic. Noem campaigned for Trump at several events in Iowa earlier this month.
Then there is the South Carolina senator Tim Scott, who is African American and could help Trump make inroads among Black voters. Scott was a one-time Republican rival to Trump but dropped out of the race in November. He has since endorsed Trump and told him during his victory speech in New Hampshire: “I just love you!” He also just announced his engagement to be married.
Other potential running mates are Trump’s former White House press secretary and current Arkansas governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders; Ben Carson, who was Trump’s housing secretary; Kari Lake, who narrowly lost a gubernatorial bid in Arizona in 2022 and is now running for the Senate there; Florida congressman Byron Donalds; Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene; and Ohio senator JD Vance.
There appears to be broad resistance to picking Haley, Trump’s former UN ambassador and his last rival for the Republican nomination. On 19 January she said being a running mate was “off the table” while Trump said he would “probably” not pick her. Since then relations between the two have soured with Trump using insults such as “birdbrain” and Haley critiquing his age and mental acuity.
In addition, Haley’s hawkish views on foreign policy, including military aid for Ukraine, are anathema to Trump’s “America first” base. Rightwing broadcaster Tucker Carlson vowed recently: “I would not only not vote for that ticket, I would advocate against it as strongly as I could.”
Trump has publicly said he has already made up his mind, but he is reportedly still calling friends, supporters and donors for advice on whom he should pick. The stakes are unusually high this time and the oft-quoted old saw from Franklin Roosevelt’s deputy John Nance Garner – “The vice-presidency isn’t worth a pitcher of warm piss” – may not apply in 2024: Biden is 81 and Trump is 77, meaning that a vice-president’s ability to assume command has never been more pertinent.
Whalen, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution thinktank at Stanford University, said: “A wary, sceptical voter is going to be thinking: ‘OK, what happens if … ?’ It makes the choice of the running mate all the more important.
“We talk about this every election and we then dismiss it as voters don’t really think that way. But it’s on the table in this election in ways it hasn’t been in the past because you are focusing on the candidate’s health and their mental faculty, and the chance that one or both could not finish out a term.
“That does lead to a different calculation with Trump in this regard. It’s not so much about picking up some electoral votes or reaching out to a group. It is the question of picking somebody who credibly can say they’re ready to lead from day one.You would think their chops would be more important than just their demographic.”
Trump may not be in a hurry to make a final decision. The longer he dangles the prospect of the vice-presidency, the more that aspirants will genuflect and make elaborate attempts to get in his good graces.
Wendy Schiller, a political scientist at Brown University, agreed. She said: “He doesn’t think he needs anybody to win this election so my guess is he’ll require lots of prominent people to come and pay homage to him. Then he’ll wait for the convention [in July] to announce it because he wants to make clear that VP – that they’re irrelevant. Generally, we worry more who his VP will be than he does.”
[Trump] doesn’t think he needs anybody to win this election so my guess is he’ll require lots of prominent people to come and pay homage to him
Wendy Schiller of Brown University
even more physically imposing than her husband. She also testified that she implored her husband to remember their three children, who were being babysat at home, and said the violence “is not worth it”.
Then, she says, Hayes deliberately pumped two bullets into one of her legs and shot her husband dead – in cold blood, and without provocation, before he was taunted with the phrase: “Look at you now.”
“My worst nightmare happened for no reason,” Racquel Smith has said under oath.
Her account was twice bolstered with testimony from her husband’s former Saints teammate and fellow Super Bowl XLIV champion Pierre Thomas, who has described riding in a separate car ahead of the second collision and getting out to see Smith’s killing.
Hayes, when first tried, testified and suggested Smith actually got a gun other than the one found in his center console, fired at Hayes first and accidentally shot Racquel in the process. Hayes has testified it was only then that he fired at Smith, whose blood-alcohol level was later determined to be three times over the legal driving limit.
At one point, Hayes’s legal team publicly suggested that a retired police captain who was friends with Smith stormed on to the scene and – to burnish memories of the fallen ex-football pro – whisked that gun away before investigators could recover it.
Media briefly seized on the insinuation for a couple of reasons. That retired captain had dined with Smith shortly before the player’s death. And, in a chilling coincidence, Hayes’s father had tried to stab that policeman before being shot dead by other officers in the months after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans 11 years earlier, according to authorities. Police said the elder Hayes had a mental health emergency on the day officers shot him dead.
The Hayes legal team’s “corrupt cop” angle relied on the well-documented history of a New Orleans police department that had violated the public’s civil rights so many times that it entered into an agreement with the federal government in 2012 to implement what was then an unprecedented number of agency-wide reforms. But that theory suffered a blow after prosecutors established that the officer alleged to have engaged in a cover-up for the sake of Smith’s legacy was waiting for Smith miles away at the hotel bar where his group was headed before he was killed – though the defendant’s attorneys never ruled out that another officer who resembled the accused retired captain could have taken the gun fired at Hayes.
All told, what neutral bystanders saw and heard conflicted markedly with Racquel Smith’s testimony that her husband was calmly walking away from escalating violence when he was callously murdered and she was shot in the leg.
And Hayes’s version of events wasn’t supported either by those same recollections or ballistics evidence recovered from the scene, which showed only he shot a gun. Even testimony from Hayes’s friend and passenger – who drew his own gun but did not fire it the night of Smith’s death – failed to say that Smith had ever fired at Hayes.
Prosecutors always have the obligation to prove their assertions definitively while the defense can succeed simply by introducing reasonable doubt about the state’s case in jurors’ minds. Nonetheless, it’s likely that the gaps between the impartial observers and their partial counterparts explain the mixed outcome of Hayes’s first trial.
Some of the Saints’ most renowned figures at the time – whom New Orleanians treated like royalty – were in attendance throughout the trial to support Smith’s family. Yet jurors did not hand up the ideal outcome desired by those dignitaries, many of whom had won New Orleans’s only major professional sports championship alongside Smith.
Jurors acquitted Hayes of intentionally ramming Smith’s car in the moments before the shooting, which prosecutors had wanted to prove he had done to establish that he was the aggressor in the deadly showdown that ensued. Jurors also rejected that Hayes had willfully murdered Smith or attempted to murder Racquel, which would have landed him a mandatory sentence of life in prison.
The jury instead found Hayes guilty of manslaughter and attempted manslaughter, finding that he unintentionally but still illicitly killed Will Smith and wounded his wife in the heat of an argument.
Hayes – who has spoken about cheering Smith and his Saints compatriots as they pursued on-field glory as well as dreaming of being able to join them in the trenches – received a 25year prison sentence that would take him away from the son he was raising.
But only 10 of 12 jurors voted to convict Hayes of the lesser charges at the end of that week-long trial, arguably the highest profile case at New Orleans’s criminal courthouse since the 1969 acquittal of a local businessman charged with helping plot the assassination of President John F Kennedy.
And when the US supreme court later ruled that such non-unanimous jury verdicts were unconstitutional, the stage was set for Hayes to be released from prison in 2021 and retried on the reduced charges of which he had once been convicted.
Hayes did not testify at his second trial, where his courtroom supporters included renowned bounce musician Big Freedia, a relative. The second jury never heard Hayes’s unsubstantiated tale that he delivered from the witness box the first time around.
Yet Hayes’s choice against taking the witness stand in his retrial made little difference for him. Though jurors acquitted him of Racquel Smith’s attempted manslaughter, they found him guilty of manslaughter in Will Smith’s shooting death – unanimously this time.
That verdict, though puzzlingly split, once again leaves Hayes faced with serving a lengthy prison sentence.
Ultimately, nothing in the second trial – which ran for five days beginning on 22 January – substantially changed the picture that the first trial painted of Smith’s final night.
Three men in two separate cars that crashed had three pistols among them. With tempers flaring over what could have been handled with misdemeanor citations, insurance companies and civil litigation if necessary, two of the men declared to each other that they had guns with them.
One father was shot dead moments after that dual declaration. The other at least survived and, at 36, has lived longer than did the man whose life he ended. But he already spent some of his prime years in prison, is returning there for a long time, and will be best known to many in his city as simply a killer.
As Thomas reportedly put it while on the witness stand more recently: “This whole situation sucks … This whole situation is unfortunate. It could have played out different.”