The conventional wisdom has long been that a presidential candidate should pick a running mate who provides some extra vitamins or different flavors. If you’re a rib-eye, you do broccoli. If you’re pralines and cream, you choose cookie dough.
But if you’re Donald Trump, that makes no sense whatsoever. You double down, which means you double Donald.
Because if you’re Trump, your whole brand — your whole point — is to defy norms and break rules. Everyone else calls Putin a snake in the grass? You declare him the bee’s knees. Everyone else says tomato? You say ketchup.
And if you’re Trump, you think — no, you know — that your greatest asset is your supreme, inimitable, undiluted Trumpness, so you want a second serving of that, a force multiplier of it, a walking, talking tribute to, emulation of and genuflection before it.
You want Vivek Ramaswamy.
After all, you tried the whole rounding-yourself-out thing the first time around, and look what that got you: a white-haired wimp who babbled about the Constitution when his marching orders were a coup. You don’t make the Mike Pence mistake twice.
You look for extreme unscrupulousness, peak opportunism. And while the pickings are plentiful in the MAGAverse, where Kari Lake looms and J.D. Vance vamps and Marjorie Taylor God-Help-Us turns paranoia into performance art, not all moral contortionists have the same limberness and not all suck-ups are created equal. Ramaswamy takes the cake. Then he feeds it to Trump baby-bird-style and wipes the glistening corners of the orange emperor’s mouth with a fine linen napkin.
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