Who will be Donald Trump's vice president?

It's rankings time!

(New York Rep. Elise Stefanik)

With his back-to-back wins in Iowa and New Hampshire over the last two weeks, Donald Trump has all-but-sealed the Republican presidential nomination.

Which means that the general election starts now. And with it, the speculation about who Trump might pick as vice president.

In the days before Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary, a slew of aspiring number twos campaigned for Trump — from New York Rep. Elise Stefanik to South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott to Arizona Senate candidate Kari Lake.

(Why would someone want the number two job under Trump given, well, “Hang Mike Pence”? Good question! I am going to address that in a future post.)

Trump, for his part, is already talking openly about his VP pick — and claimed recently he’s already made up his mind.

“I know who it’s going to be,” Trump said at a Fox News town hall earlier this month. Pressed on the identity of the pick, he added: “I can’t tell you that really.”

At another Fox event over the weekend in New Hampshire, Trump added this:

“I may or may not really [decide] something over the next couple of months. There’s no rush to that. It won’t have any impact at all. The person that I think I like is a very good person, a pretty standard. I think people won’t be that surprised, but I would say there’s probably a 25 percent chance that would be that person.”

Ok, so:

1. Trump already knows who he is going to pick

2. He is going to decide in the next few months (or he won’t)

3. Who he picks won’t matter

4. That person will be “pretty standard.”

5. There is a 25% chance he will pick that “standard” person.

As always, what Trump says is, um, sort of hard to follow.

Here is my MAIN assumption about who Trump will pick as VP: It will NOT be someone in the mold of Mike Pence.

This may seem obvious — Trump believes Pence cost him the election after all — but I mean it more broadly too: Pence was chosen as a sop to both the establishment wing of the party (he had been a governor and in House leadership) and to social conservatives.

Trump was seen as trying to balance the ticket. If he was the populist outsider, Pence was the inside player who could calm feathers that Trump ruffled.

I DO NOT think Trump is interested in appeasing any particular wing of the party this time around. I think he wants a MAGA true believer. An attack dog. Someone good on TV. Someone who is loyal to him first and to everything else — including the Constitution — second.

So, my rankings tilt heavily toward MAGA warriors.

I am going to try to update these rankings every Friday until we have a VP pick. Peoples’ slots can and will change. The rankings are based on my reporting, my observations of Trump and my years of covering politics. Right now I am doing a top 5 but may expand to a top 10 as the field of potential picks grow.

Enjoy!