Meet President Sarah Huckabee Sanders

Or President Marjorie Taylor Greene. Or President Ben Carson. Any of them is much more possible than you think. And we should be screaming it from the rafters.

We’ve heard over and over the claim, reeking of racism, that was made by Nikki Haley: A vote for President Biden “is a vote for President Kamala Harris.”

It’s become a rallying cry of much of the far-right, conjuring up bigoted visions of a Black woman running the country. The morbid presumption, of course, is that Biden, 81, could die while in office.

Anything can happen, of course, but who do you actually think is more likely to die while in office? Lean, healthy, fit, bike-riding Biden, or Donald Trump, just three years younger and morbidly obese?

According to demographers, there’s actually little difference between their ages, and, as white males, they each have well over a 60% probability of living out their time in office if either is elected. But that’s just demography based on race and gender. Add in weight, exercise, eating habits, arteries, brain function, and lots of other factors, and you can make a good guess about which one would be more likely to die in office.

And that leads us to President Marjorie Taylor Greene. The crazed MAGA extremist and QAnon conspiracy theorist is vying to be Trump's VP running mate, as are a lot of MAGA sycophants. Some of them are people who’ve been mentioned or implied by Trump himself or those around him as potential picks. The political press has no shortage of lists.

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Every one of them is a nightmare. Some people might think it’s better to wait until Trump picks someone to focus on the issue. But why not raise the alarm now?

The latest name that’s popped up is Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, the petulant far-right fraud who sold his soul to Trump and would do anything for power—someone exceedingly dangerous. But I don’t think we should take the floating of his name too seriously. First off, having a presidential candidate and a vice presidential candidate from the same state runs into constitutional problems. Per USA Today:

The U.S. Constitution and the rules of the Electoral College discourage running mates from the same state. That's actually why Dick Cheney changed his residency from Texas back to Wyoming in 2000 as George W. Bush made him the vice-presidential nominee.

I think Rubio’s name was purposely floated by Trump aides, just as Trump's campaign, like the RNC, is cash-strapped, drained from paying his massive legal bills, as President Biden and Democrats are taking in record amounts of money. Trump is suddenly courting billionaires at sit-down dinners—something he never did—rather than relying solely on many small-dollar donations from his conspiracy-mongering cult followers.

Those billionaires do not want to hear about the possibility of a lunatic like Marjorie Taylor Greene as vice president, but they very much want to hear about a sitting Republican senator like Rubio, who’s been a reliable promoter of the tax-cuts-for-the-wealthy agenda.

Once the courting of big money is done, however, Rubio will be kicked to the curb, having been trolled by Trump—who’s had Rubio saying it would be an “honor” to serve—just like Mitt Romney was trolled when Trump baited him and the public with the idea of making him secretary of state in his first term.

Jonah Goldberg, a conservative, never-Trump pundit, believes for a few reasons that it’s much more likely that Greene gets chosen than Rubio. It’s probable that Trump would be impeached again in another term, he surmises, and if the vice president were someone more normal—to Republican senators—than scary, they might go along with convicting Trump this time. Hence, putting someone more extreme in place as VP would be insurance against impeachment.

But another reason is that Trump wouldn’t trust anyone who’s ever been disloyal—Rubio once called him a “con-artist”—and wants undying devotion from true believers:

[Trump] values blind loyalty and even blinder sycophancy more than electoral appeal. He’s convinced that he’s popular, and he wants someone to hype his greatness, not highlight his weaknesses.

Fortunately for Trump, there’s no shortage of candidates who meet those criteria.

Those two criteria—impeachment concerns and Trump’s narcissism and long-time loyalty demands—would seem to put people like Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York, North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum, Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina and others, whose devotion is more recently opportunistic and who might be acceptable to the GOP if Trump were impeached, further down on the list.

And it brings to the top of the list quite a few hard-core extremists.

There’s Governor Kristi Noem of South Dakota, a creepy quasi-COVID denialist whose state suffered terribly during the pandemic as she fought shut-downs and mask and vaccine mandates. She’s bowed at Trump’s feet and told Newsmax she’d be his running mate "in a heartbeat.”

There’s Ben Carson, Trump’s former Housing and Urban Development secretary, a nutty neurosurgeon who’s promoted Christian nationalist ideologies, and is a walking advertisement for Project 2025. He's one of the few Cabinet secretaries who stuck with Trump after January 6th. His name has been floated as VP running mate, and he’s refused to confirm that he’s spoken with Trump about the possibility.

There’s also Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Trump’s former press secretary, who defended him fiercely and parlayed her MAGA credentials into becoming Arkansas governor, where she’s passed horrendous anti-LGBTQ laws, signed a bill to create a “monument to the unborn” and signed an executive order to “eliminate woke, anti-women words from state government.”

Sanders has downplayed any ambitions to be Trump’s running mate—which could actually be a strategy—saying she likes being governor. But Trump couldn’t ask for someone more loyal and with experience in the White House. (Extreme as she is, however, Sanders may actually be too acceptable to Republicans should Trump be impeached, since she was, after all, chosen to give the response to the State of the Union in 2022, in which she said Biden is “the first man to surrender his presidency to a woke mob that can’t even tell you what a woman is.”)

There are many others—a plethora of nutbags, or, as Hillary Clinton said, a basket of deplorables—for Trump to choose from. Trump’s been somewhat dismissive of Greene, using her for his own purposes yet pushing her off to the side at public events. Even he might think she’s too toxic for a general election campaign, no matter the insurance she may give him against an impeachment conviction.

So I’m not going to take a guess as to who it would be, except to say that it will be someone horrifying and completely unfit for office who would immediately take up the mantle of Trump’s agenda and the GOP’s Project 2025. And we should be stoking that.

I get that simply the danger of Trump as president is itself a lot for Democrats to run on, and some might believe it’s better to wait for Trump to name a running mate before going on the attack.

But I also don’t think anyone should be letting the right push the idea of Biden dying in office while not vividly reminding people that Trump, the more likely one to die in office, would hand the presidency to a Ben Carson or a Sarah Huckabee Sanders, people down with the plan to usher in authoritarian theocracy.