Donald Trump’s vice-presidential choice takes on added significance

A defiant Donald Trump, having just survived an attempted assassination, enters the Republican National Convention having not yet announced his vice presidential choice, but he said he would do so on Monday.

It remains unclear whether the shooting on Saturday at his Pennsylvania rally has changed the former president’s thinking about his potential second-in-command.

He told Fox News Channel host Bret Baier that he planned to make his pick on Monday.

After the shooting, Mr Trump’s choice carries considerably more gravity. If a bullet had struck just a little bit to the right, Mr Trump would probably have been killed or seriously injured.

The close call puts in stark relief the significance of a position that is a heartbeat away from the presidency.

Mr Trump has repeatedly said that choosing someone who was qualified to take over as commander in chief was his top consideration for the role.

“You need somebody that can be good just in case, that horrible just in case,” he said in May.

Hours before the shooting, in an interview before he boarded his plane from Florida, he told Fox News Channel’s Harris Faulkner: “It’s a very important position, especially if something bad should happen – that’s the most important.”

Those on Mr Trump’s shortlist have differing levels of governing experience.

Ohio senator JD Vance, for instance, has been in office less than two years, while North Dakota governor Doug Burgum runs a state with a population (780,000 people) smaller than Columbus, Ohio (908,000).

Florida senator Marco Rubio has been in politics for decades and is in his third term in the Senate.

Before the shooting, Mr Trump had made clear that he wanted to dramatically reveal his choice at the convention, which he said would make it more “interesting” and “exciting”.

“It’s like a highly sophisticated version of The Apprentice,” he quipped in a radio interview last week, referring to the show he once hosted that featured him firing contestants on camera.

Mr Trump and convention organisers have said the convention schedule will go on as planned despite the shooting, with Mr Trump writing on his social media site that he could not “allow a ‘shooter,’ or potential assassin, to force change to scheduling, or anything else”.

“In this moment, it is more important than ever that we stand United, and show our True Character as Americans, remaining Strong and Determined, and not allowing Evil to Win,” he wrote.

He held meetings in the days before the shooting with the top contenders.

All have submitted material to convention organisers that can be used to prepare content if they are picked.

Mr Trump waiting until the convention to choose a running mate is later than usual for recent cycles but is hardly unprecedented.

In 1980, Ronald Reagan negotiated with former president Gerald Ford for hours during the Republican convention in Detroit but settled on his former primary rival George HW Bush when those discussions collapsed.

Mr Reagan cut it so close that his decision came less than 24 hours before he formally accepted the party’s nomination.

Mr Bush himself waited until the 1988 Republican convention in New Orleans before shocking many, as well as some of the then-vice president’s own top advisers, by picking little-known Indiana senator Dan Quayle rather than a more established running mate.

Since then, though, the tradition has been to pick a running mate shortly before the candidate’s party’s convention opens.

In 2008, Arizona senator John McCain, looking for a way to reset his race against Democrat Barack Obama, picked little-known Alaska governor Sarah Palin shortly before the Republican convention opened in Minnesota.

He got a bump in the polls that did not last.

Democrat Joe Biden tapped then-California senator Kamala Harris as his running mate six days before his party opened its convention, which was held mostly virtually because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Mr Trump chose Indiana governor Mike Pence in the days before the 2016 Republican convention opened in Cleveland.