Although in past years handicapping the Veepstakes has been one of my favorite pastimes, I find that this year I don’t much care who Trump’s running mate might turn out to be. I suppose it’s because they vary from quite bad to horrible, or because I think that, barring one of the candidates having a medical crisis, the election will be decided either in court or via Trump’s self-destruction as he says increasingly bizarre things and people start to focus on them.
But that doesn’t stop other people, and Trump added fuel to the flames today by naming six people he thought might be potential running mates. The list included Sen. Tim Scott, who seems like the obvious choice to me, as it offers the tantalizing prospect of peeling off just enough Black votes to move a few swing states.
More bizarrely the list also included Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. That’s bizarre not only because Trump spent so much time belittling him, but because they’re both residents of the State of Florida, and the US Constitution prohibits electors from a state from choosing both a president and a vice president from that same state. (Art II, Cl. 3: “The Electors shall meet in their respective States, and vote by Ballot for two Persons, of whom one at least shall not be an Inhabitant of the same State with themselves”.) Weirdly, nobody writing about Trump’s statement seems to be mentioning this. But then I think the entire press has pretty much given up on fact checking him anyway.
DeSantis, who attended Harvard Law School and presumably knows much more about the Constitution than Trump does — although probably that’s true of almost everyone — was quick to say he would never be Trump’s Vice President. He made it sound as if this was something of a principled choice, but I think he just knows it could never be, as the risk of a squeaker in which Vice President Harris is reelected when you don’t count Florida’s electoral votes is just too great.
As an immunocompromised person, I thought that this was interesting: The standard line is that under 3% of the U.S. population is immunocompromised either due to disease, to antirejection drugs associated with transplants, or to (frequently cancer) medical treatment. But Melissa L. Martinson, Jessica Lapham, 
Inspired by the silly kerfuffle about President Biden’s supposed memory issues in his five-hour interview with a partisan special prosecutor, conducted while Biden also was involved in issues about the Middle East, and perhaps also inspired by the death of Toby Keith, I asked GPT-4 to take on the persona of an experienced writer of hit songs and write me a country music song on the theme “I’m voting for Grandpa (because the alternative is so much worse)”. The results were not half bad:
