Trump May Avoid Clinton's Mistake And Appoint Haley As VP
Whereas Hillary Clinton eschewed an opportunity to unify the party by making Bernie Sanders her VP, Donald Trump might be considering primary rival Nikki Haley for the nom.
Hello, friends,
Last week we talked about, well, the death - or at least serious recession - of the optimism that accompanied my top-selling book, Protostar: Memoirs Of The Messenger.
This week is gonna be a short one centered around this Reuters reporting that, uhh, copies its homework from an Axios article Alex Thompson. Thompson cites two unnamed sources as saying that Donald Trump is considering doing what many think is unthinkable - burying his ego - and asking his top primary rival Nikki Haley to be his Vice Presidential candidate.
Bear in mind that in Indiana, Haley won over 20% of the vote despite being off the campaign trail for quite a long time.
Also, bear in mind that for ‘some reason,’ one I’m having a hard time pinning down, Joe Biden was the only candidate on the ballot in the Democratic primary, since write-ins had to be pre-approved. So we don’t know if he’d have gotten 98% of the vote, or if maybe an Uncommitted vote might have risen up to take 10%-20% of his own results.
Either way: It establishes that Haley is a political force worth considering if you’re a Republican strategist, and what better way to fix that problem than to elevate her, right?
Let’s Tie This In To 2016.
In 2016, when I accurately predicted Donald Trump’s victory if Hillary Clinton were indeed nominated, I pointed out that she had chosen for her Vice President a guy who was pretty much the polar opposite of the Berniecrat.
Tim Kaine is your run-of-the-mill conservative Democrat who Hillary wanted to appoint because…Well, in deference to someone who skipped campaigning in Michigan, there might have been a strategy there. Tim Kaine was from Virginia, and sure enough the state carried for Clinton, getting her 13 electoral votes. Virginia is a purple state, so I can see why targeting it was a good idea.
But given how polarized things were even in 2016, the 4.9% margin suggests she would have won it without the “Favorite Son” theory in play.
In the meantime, she lost a significant portion of Democrats and non-Democrats who supported Bernie Sanders by appointing someone who was, as I noted at the time, arguing that the biggest banks in the nation weren’t “too big to fail” after all. So there’s that.
I maintain that if she was going to be the nominee, she should have honored her primary opponent by nominating him as her VP, an act which would have unified the party.
So is Donald Trump about to out-play Hillary Clinton again?
I have no idea, but it’s something to note that Trump might just be willing to do - if he can swallow his ego about embracing someone he’d essentially blacklisted from the party.
In Other News…
- Israel appears to be gearing up for a full-blown assault into Gaza, specifically Rafah, the last ‘safe’ (It isn’t) zone for civilians in Gaza. This comes after a ‘limited’ incursion of some kind, and the enhancement of its air campaign. President Joe Biden claims he’ll stop sending certain offensive weapons if Israel does make a major push into Rafah, but we’ll see. Hopefully, he’ll follow through.
- Trump is on trial. His lawyers tried to slut-shame Stormy Daniels and only succeeded in embarrassing Donald Trump by denying his affair with her, thus opening up the question of who is telling the truth - and earning some details, like how “brief” the encounter was. No notes, Trump’s defense team. Keep it up. OH! And I just found this: There may be more.
- Close to home: A ban on Transgender athletes at Nassau County facilities was struck down following a roller derby league’s lawsuit. That’s frikkin’ awesome!
- The last glacier in Venezuela is, well, on its way into the extinction books. This is a bad harbinger for our future.
- Here’s a bit of uplifting news: The world’s largest carbon removal facility has opened up in Iceland. It’s a nice thought, and it’s a start on a technology we will ultimately need if we eventually plan to cool the planet back down. That said, the greater need is still on carbon output reduction, rather than just taking it out of the air after we’ve burned it. I’ve talked about Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors here, before, and they could eventually replace most of the carbon being emitted and thus power facilities like these to pull carbon out of the air. Forget net-zero, let’s be net-negative.
Thank you for reading The Progressive Cafe. If this article has helped you, please consider signing up for our mailing list. This article is by Jesse Pohlman, a sci-fi/fantasy author from Long Island, New York, whose website you can check out here.