Why Trump's running mate could be the most important VP pick of our time

In a normal presidential campaign, the announcement of a running mate gets a lot of media attention — but has little immediate importance. 

But Donald Trump’s campaign this year is not normal. And his veep pick this year could well be the most important such choice of our time – with major implications for the future of both the Republican Party and American democracy as a whole.

The vice presidency of the United States is an odd office. Its main function is to simply have someone on deck if the president dies or resigns. But the office has very few formal powers. Modern presidents sometimes delegate tasks for their vice president to do, but veeps mostly just hang around waiting for their chance at the big job. “I am nothing, but I may be everything,” the country’s first vice president, John Adams, famously said.

Veeps matter because they have a decent chance of later becoming president, even though most don’t: 15 of our 49 veeps so far have later gotten the big job. The more common way to do that is the abrupt one — nine ascended because the president died or resigned. But six others later got elected in their own right, including, of course, the current president.

So usually, the veep is the (possible) future of the party, but a new veep typically has to wait eight years (through a presidential reelection campaign) to get to that future, and his or her nearer-term importance in governing is less clear. But there are three unusual features about Trump’s situation that mean his veep pick will be more immediately important than usual.

1) Trump is term-limited, and there’s much uncertainty about the post-Trump GOP: Let’s start with the obvious: If Trump wins in November, the Constitution is clear that he can’t be elected for another term in 2028. So unless there’s a total collapse in constitutional government and the rule of law — fingers crossed there’s not! — he starts as a lame duck. Enter his vice president.

Modern veeps are nationally known figures who have at least a good shot at winning their party’s presidential nomination in the future. There have been 20 presidential elections since World War II, and 12 have featured a veep — current or former — on the ballot. So Trump’s VP will be widely interpreted as his possible successor.

On top of that, Trump’s persona has loomed so large over GOP politics for the past decade that it’s hard to imagine what the post-Trump Republican Party will look like. His choice could well determine whether the party gets even more extreme, or whether there’s a relative return to normalcy.

2) Trump poses threats to democracy — would his VP stand up to him? Typically, the veep’s only formal power of note (besides being the successor-in-waiting) is being the tie-breaking Senate vote, as the president of the Senate. But on January 6, 2021, another VP duty — presiding over Congress’s counting of the presidential electoral votes — became hugely important as Trump tried to steal the election from Joe Biden.

The count is usually a formality, but Trump pressured Vice President Mike Pence to effectively seize control of the vote count, tossing out swing state results where Biden won. Had Pence actually done that, it would have thrown the process into chaos. But, relying on legal advice that he had no such authority — and, perhaps, on his own conscience — Pence refused. What if someone more unscrupulous had been in the VP job on that day? 

The exact circumstances of the 2020 election crisis are unlikely to repeat. But a second-term Trump may well try to degrade democracy in other ways that are difficult to precisely foresee. Which raises the question: Will Trump’s future veep stand up and defend democracy, or not?

The early signs aren’t great. Last week, we saw the spectacle of various veep hopefuls trekking to New York City to spin for Trump outside of his criminal trial, competing over who could come up with the most fulsome protest of how unfairly Trump was being treated by the legal system.

With 2028 coming around so soon, the incentives for the VP to remain in Trump’s good graces will be strong, since falling out of his favor could sink any chance of becoming president. That may mean turning a blind eye to Trump’s abuses of power. Or the veep could end up doing the right thing; anything’s possible.

3) Trump’s age and corruption make it more likely he’d leave office involuntarily ahead of schedule: Finally, though veeps have often gone on to be elected president, the more common way they’ve ended up in the job is through its sudden vacancy, due to health or scandal reasons. Both are a bit more likely to befall Trump than the average president.

Trump is about to turn 78, and his advanced age makes it somewhat more likely that health reasons would prevent him from making it all the way through another four-year term. The odds of that are probably still low — Trump isn’t known to have serious health problems and would benefit from top-notch care. Still, sometimes old people decline quickly. (All this applies to Biden as well, of course.)

Apart from death, the only other reason the presidency has been vacated early is a corruption scandal, when Nixon resigned to avert certain impeachment and removal from office. Trump is famously corrupt and is already the only president to be impeached twice. So it isn’t much of a stretch to suspect that there might be some corruption or abuse of power scandals leading to another Trump impeachment effort in his next term.

Conviction seems less plausible: It’s possible that, no matter what Trump ended up doing, there wouldn’t be enough Senate Republicans willing to remove him from power. 

Still, it is at least theoretically possible that there is a line he could cross that would finally lead to Congress booting him. If so, the vice president would be there to take his job.

This story originally appeared in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions.