The makeup of the 2024 presidential race has felt inevitable from the start — with one notable exception: Donald J. Trump’s choice of a running mate. Michael Bender, a political correspondent for The Times, explains why Mr. Trump’s requirements in a No. 2 are very different this time round than they were eight years ago.
From the New York Times, I'm Michael Bavaro.
This is the daily.
The makeup of the 2024 presidential race has felt inevitable from the start, with one notable exception, Donald Trump's choice of a running mate.
Today, my colleague Mike Bender examines the top contenders for the job and what choosing them would tell us about Trump himself in this campaign.
It's Thursday, June 13.
Mike, somehow this is your first appearance on the show.
So welcome at long last to the daily.
Thank you for having me.
It's my pleasure.
You have spent the past few weeks trying to get inside Donald Trump's search for a vice president.
And what is so unusual about this search is that we already know what Trump wanted in a vice president from his 2016 campaign when he picked Mike Pence.
And we know how badly that all ended with Trump openly denouncing Pence for not helping him overturn his 2020 election loss and reportedly endorsing calls for Pence's death, his hanging at the Capitol on January 6.
So with all of that behind us, what is Trump looking for this time around?
Yeah, I mean, the search is very different from where he was at this time eight years ago.
Eight years ago, he was a first time candidate and he needed credibility with the evangelical community.
I mean, remember, Donald Trump is a thrice married playboy from New York whose sex life was splashed across the New York tabloids.
Adding Mike Pence to the ticket gave him a lot of credibility with evangelicals and with establishment republicans.
Pence was a governor of Indiana and had been a former congressman.
He provided a sort of port of entry for these folks into Trump world and settled a lot of them down.
It's a very different calculus this time around.